For Mars and Moon missions multiple Starships have to launch to refuel the Starship that will actually take the trip. Like, a dozen or more. Again, rapid reusability of the booster is appealing in this situation.
Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.
ICBMs are weapons, and are dangerous because you target them at specific targets and they explode.
How is starship coming down significantly more dangerous than a plane? If they can demonstrate similar levels or reliability (a huge ask), then I don't see a problem.
If you don’t see how earth to earth starship use couldn’t be construed as a type of ICBM, I suspect you’re thinking branding means a lot more than capability.
Same as trucks/cars and carbombs.
For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.
Yet we still have airplanes, boats, cars, sports equipment, lawn tools, and kitchen utensils. Nothing about Starship makes it more likely to be weaponized than anything else we already account for in our daily lives.
> For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.
Is “potential weapon” really the way countries view vehicles crossing borders? I have never gotten that impression. Border crossings maintain some healthy skepticism but not because a Camry is similar to an M1 Abrams if you squint really hard.
ICBMs and M1 Abrams also exist? They also are used carefully and heavily regulated.
Heavy aircraft are also heavily regulated, and their presence near occupied areas is heavily controlled - including with fighter jets and AA installations on standby in many areas.
Car bombs are a huge issue in many parts of the world, and approaching some facilities in a car in those places without going through exactly the right procedures will get you shot before you can get too close.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be built, rather that if you expect it to be able to be allowed to go anywhere and do anything without significant security measures and/or even bans, that isn’t how this works. Because it wouldn’t be hard for it to be defacto a ICBM, just like it wasn’t hard to turn those planes on 9/11 into massive cruise missiles.
You can’t really turn a car into an ICBM the same way, correct?
Why would I expect this? Did I say something to make you think I believe this? Clearly rocket travel would be regulated, is that not obvious?
ICBMs are scary because of their payloads. A weaponized Starship wouldn’t do anywhere near the damage of an ICBM’s nuclear payload.
Then later I pointed out that 747’s literally had already been used as weapons to commit one of the most notorious crimes in modern history.
Then later you said “Nothing about Starship makes it more likely to be weaponized than anything else we already account for in our daily lives”.
Except it does - because it literally can be trivially turned into an ICBM way easier that anything in our normal daily lives. Just like an airliner being hijacked can give a terrorist a huge cruise missile they otherwise would not.
And ICBMs are not just dangerous because of nukes. But would also allow a non-state actor who somehow gets ahold of a nuke, or dirty bomb, or anthrax, or whatever to potentially deliver it in an ICBM way.
But they could also be targeted at someone with actual nukes to force them into a response which could potentially kick off an actual nuclear war, yes?
None of which is feasible with what anyone normally experiences in their daily lives.
I see, you aren’t differentiating between something created as a weapon and weaponizing otherwise peaceful objects.
> Except it does - because it literally can be trivially turned into an ICBM way easier that anything in our normal daily lives. Just like an airliner being hijacked can give a terrorist a huge cruise missile they otherwise would not.
I don’t think a Starship could be turned into an ICBM at all. Anyone who tried to replicate that trajectory in a Starship would be turned into jelly by G forces shortly before being incinerated by atmospheric drag.
> And ICBMs are not just dangerous because of nukes. But would also allow a non-state actor who somehow gets ahold of a nuke, or dirty bomb, or anthrax, or whatever to potentially deliver it in an ICBM way.
This is already possible with existing rockets. Is your concern that a terrorist would sneak a WMD onto a rocket? Because if they can do that they can also sneak it onto an airliner and do the same damage.
> But they could also be targeted at someone with actual nukes to force them into a response which could potentially kick off an actual nuclear war, yes?
How does Starship uniquely make this a possibility? Like someone hijacks a Starship in Texas and then suicide bombs Beijing in some kind of false flag operation? Starship is clearly not an ICBM. It doesn’t have the same flight characteristics and doesn’t originate at an ICBM site. China can see that.
Given the proposed capabilities of Starship I don’t see a novel threat. Our existing defense mechanisms remain effective.
Trucks have blown up buildings. Anything is a weapon if you arm it.
Conversely...
A fully fueled 747 only carries about 190 tons of fuel and 140 tons of cargo. How do electronics turn that into kilotons of explosives?
Kerosene can be used to make a thermobaric bomb in the right conditions. It’s just just trickier to actually do than detonating TNT. Notably, TNT can certainly help accomplish making a thermobaric bomb.
Either way, the cargo capacity by weight for a 747 is still the same.
I didn’t propose the initial idea, but it actually could probably work if the plane was flying [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001021802...], and [https://tetrazolelover.at.ua/WpnryInTheWoods/Zhang2015_Artic...]. You’d want to run some significant calculations first to get the airspeed/timing just right, but yeah.
It would be one hell of a show. Like a tactical nuke, probably.
Edit: did the math because I was curious. A fully fueled 747 contains approximately 9 trillion joules of energy worth of fuel (not counting any payload, or the energy in its aluminum fuselage - which would be significant). A ton of TNT equivalent is 4.181 gigajoules. So the fuel load of a 747, if properly detonated, would be “equivalent” to a 2KT nuclear bomb.
A 747 has a maximum payload capacity of an additional 100-120 tons.
The US military actually has a contract with SpaceX to develop this to enable cargo drops, and in a later stadium even personnel, in 1 hour anywhere on the planet.
I suspect that if you're at the point where the US military intents to drop cargo or soldiers into your country within an hour, they're not going to be too concerned with asking for permission.
He's already landing Starships in oceans.
People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.
Especially given that the total trip time will likely be much longer than the flight itself. Consider that you can't take off or land Starship anywhere near a densely populated area, it has to be at least a few hours away by car from anywhere that people actually live.
So you can take a chauffeur to the airport, go trough priority and special luxuries as a first class passenger until your flight for say 1h total, board your 15h flight spent in luxury, and then a limo waits to take you to your destination 30m away from the landing airport.
Or, you can get driven for 3 hours out to the Starship launch site, board the rocket, probably in a special life support suit, wait some hours on the ship for it to be filled (humans are never allowed to approach an already full rocket), fly for one hour in an extremely bare bones flight that literally feels like a roller-coaster (so forget any kind of phone access, you'll be lucky not to puke while just holding on). Then you'll arrive at your destination landing area, ready for some limo to take you on another three hour trip back to civilization.
So you've saved maybe 8-10 hours, being extremely generous and only for the longest haul flights possible, but got none of the luxuries you'd expect. And you get to pay much more for the whole deal.
Remember that the Concorde halved or less the Paris-New York trip, and gave all the luxury you could want, and still went out of business.
I don't know if rocket passenger service will ever happen or become routine, but there's just so much to the Concorde story that simplifying it like that isn't a good case study that does the program justice.
https://preview.redd.it/b9f14da6y0ac1.png?width=1105&format=...
You only experience anything over 1.5 Gs for 180 seconds.
Please stop making stuff up and look at the data.
[0] https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf
Noise is a major concern for sure. But when the competition takes 18 hours you can put the launch and landing sites in very remote places where that’s less of a concern then feed them with planes or trains.
Regardless of how practical you think this is it is the reason SpaceX is pushing rapid reusability.
The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.
Then you'd need the infrastructure to actually operate the rockets. That includes refurbishment, grounds crews, basically a whole Kennedy Space Center operating to launch these things.
And on top of that, you'd need an urban area willing to deal with constant sonic booms. Even one launch/landing cycle from these rockets is multiple sonic booms. The noise would be unbelievable. No urban center is going to allow regular starship launches out of it, so you'd have to go a loooong ways out. Which then means either a long boat ride or a short flight back to the city center. Which entails baggage transfer and potentially significant delays.
On top of that, space flight is not easy on the body. You can't just put grandma on a rocket and trust that it'd be a comfortable experience. Both the exit, zero-g, and re-entry portions of spaceflight are significant w.r.t. the forces they exert on the body.
It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.
That’s the case today but they’re essentially all disposable so far. If it meets expectations the cost will be much lower, approaching the cost of fuel.
According to Quora (yuck, I know) fully fueling a Starship snd Super Heavy costs about $1m [1] and a 747 is about $200k [2]. If Starship can carry 1,000 people that’s $1,000 per passenger in fuel. A 747-8 can carry up to about 600 people for $333.00 per passenger.
3x the price in fuel is something but Starship can get to orbit on that fuel load which means anywhere on earth. The 747-8 can “only” go about a third of the way around the earth on a full tank. So it’s within the realm of economic possibility especially considering the enormous time savings.
If all we cared about was fuel efficiency we’d use trains and boats for long distance travel. Time is money.
> It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.
Correct. The difference is more like an airplane vs an ocean liner or train.
I agree it is impractical but it is a reason for rapid reusability.
A smaller version of something like Starship could be more practical for earth-to-earth service.
It’s already the case that some people can’t fly for health reasons. Space travel won’t be for everyone but the fact is availability will continue to expand.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-cost-to-fully-fuel-a-Spac...
[2]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fill-a-747-je...
I don’t think anyone is suggesting operating Starship anywhere near populated areas so hearing loss also isn’t a concern.