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Comment by a34729t | Hacker News Reader

China has missed their window of opportunity, sadly.

For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles.

For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.

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I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there. especially since rocket launches tend to be extremely static.

More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.

> I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there.

Starship's in theory targeting something like a million bucks in fuel for a launch. For a military that spends more than that on individual missiles, that's peanuts.

Starship is also in theory targetting to reach Mars in 2022.

There's an unavoidable physical cap here.

It's fueled with methane and oxygen, and its size is known.

It can't be, say, $50m/flight in fuel for the same reason a 747's flight can't be; there's not enough space for that much fuel.

Sure, but that's true of Saturn V as well, and of Falcon 9, and Soyuz and any other rocket you want. That didn't make space deployment a viable military strategy so far, and I think we should be skeptical of any such claim about Starship.

Also, fuel is just part of the cost of a rocket.

> Also, fuel is just part of the cost of a rocket.

Sure. But if you blew up a 747 at the end of every trip, it'd be a small part of the total cost, not a major part.

Starship's reusability makes it very clearly not like the other examples you cite, yeah? There are lots of scenarios where the US government would pay, say, $10M to deliver a payload somewhere fast, but not $250M.

Co-development of the SpaceX Tardis makes deadlines irrelevant.

The prospect of cleanup duty has never stopped anyone at war. Fields of landmines maiming children for decades, unexploded ordinance in cities, etc etc.

Near earth orbit will be a field of debris until gravity takes over.

Unclear how China will react to orbital/near-orbital launches that track near/over China in a hot war situation.

If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.

China could also prove to the world their ASAT capabilities by shooting down military orbital payloads which overfly their territory.

I'd bet China would like nothing more than the USA basing its future war strategy on Starship, with its long history of fictional timelines and capacities.

Have you considered the cost difference of drone re-entry vs commercial container logistics?

There are many options to deliver drones to a location and i dont think from orbit is the most viable one, let alone moving any production there.

Opportunity for what?

The next war is going to need the US to do something pretty spectacular if it’s going to reclaim the ground it’s lost in the Iran war.

The situation there is an utter joke, and shows no sign of wrapping up any time soon.

That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war. If there was political will, then the area around the Hormuz strait would’ve been seized, as well as the nuclear sites secured. Carpet bombing, too, not just surgical strikes.

Most analysts doubt the US, on its present phase, has the capabilities of doing so.

> That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war.

It’s all very well claiming you can win, but when you don’t that’s the result you’re stuck with.

It's not merely that the US has not, will not, and/or can not put boots on the ground.

It's that regional bases and sea-based platforms from which the US has operated with impunity in previous conflicts, as recently as a decade ago, are no longer safe from retaliation. This puts the US, its forces, and perhaps more significantly its friends and allies in the region at risk in both the present and any future conflict(s).

Not sure if you've noticed, but none of that SpaceX stuff is going to happen

L̶a̶u̶n̶c̶h̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶v̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶d̶e̶d̶

̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶.̶ ̶

̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶a̶l̶.̶ ̶

̶M̶e̶g̶a̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶E̶O̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶m̶.̶ ̶

̶S̶t̶a̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶

Starfall will never happen!

No serious really argued that; what they argued is that a Mars colony is impractical, interplanetary travel as a fantasy, and data centers in space as delusional.

Having followed SpaceX since the beginning, this is not true at all. People doubted every single step. Industry experts did.

People doubt the timelines, not the claims. The timelines are pure fantasy and have been since the start.

> People doubt the timelines, not the claims.

People doubted the claims, too. Particularly landing and re-use.

Concrete example: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/13/ula-plans-to-introduce...

>“When you talk about conventional technologies on a booster like you see other people doing, and being able to recover and reuse that booster 15 times with relatively minimial refurbishmoent costs, that’s pretty darn challenging, and maybe not the right place, in our view, to start on that problem,” Bruno said.

This doesn't really sound like doubting any claim; he's talking about how his organization was approaching it given their limited resources.

ULA was openly skeptical about the viability of landing at all. Then reuse. Then the goalposts moved to this, repeated reuse.

I think that misremembers or misrepresents history.

The DC-X was program developed in the early 1990s expressly to prove the feasibility of orbital rocket vertical landings and rapid turn-around/reuse. It never made it to the full orbital regime because it was scrapped early, but it was considered successful in proving the proof-of-concept. It was also managed by the predecessors of ULA (McDonnel Douglas, which later merged with Boeing).

https://x.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1251155738421899273

Tory Bruno saying "no one has come anywhere near close to demonstrating these economic sustainability goals".

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-critic-ula-ceo-reusable-roc...

> “We have not really changed our assessment over the last couple of years because we have yet to see the other forms of reusability—flyback or propulsive return to Earth—demonstrate economic sustainability on a recurring basis. It’s pretty darn hard to make that actually save money… We’ve seen nothing yet that changes our analysis on that,” the ULA CEO said.

> The ULA CEO’s points about the possible lack of savings on reusable rockets put him in stark contrast with other noteworthy leaders in the space industry. Apart from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin is also intently focused on using reusable rockets. Even Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, whose company designs and launches small rockets, has embraced the idea of reusing previously-flown boosters.

Economic viability is not the same goal. One is a business goal, one is a scientific/technological one. The goal from the DC-X 35+ years ago was the latter. Certainly, we'd expect the economics to improve since then.

The technological viability was shown with the proof of concept. If you meant strictly economic viability was unknown, I agree with you. This isn't meant to disparage SpaceX. They're doing great. I would say there is a risk that isn't often talked about which is the quality risk. Early on, SpaceX disregarded well-known quality control checks, presumably because they didn't think they were worth the time/cost. When that burned them, they integrated those checks. Do that enough times, the economic viability erodes.

> Economic viability is not the same goal.

They're close enough, functionally.

Not in scientific edge domains. Eg: quantum computing is shown to be scientifically feasible right now, but nowhere close to having economic viability in a business sense. Same with fusion etc etc

> Not in scientific edge domains.

That's JWST-style stuff, not SpaceX at this point.

That’s kinda the point.

40 years ago it was questionable whether it was technically possible. It was “JWST-stuff”. The forerunners of ULA showed it was feasible.

20 years ago it was questionable whether it was economically viable. SpaceX changed that.

Your previous statement was too vague to make the distinction and implied Spacex did both, while ignoring the contributions of the previous group.

Engineers became really jaded by Shuttle and the failure o X-33. Many of them, inappropriately, started claiming it was impossible. You still hear people claiming things are impossible today that are “merely” very hard, like full reuse, getting launch costs same order of magnitude as transpacific air freight, orbital datacenters, terraforming Mars, space settlement in general, travel to other star systems, etc.

>”claiming it was impossible”

Again, what do you mean by “it”? Economic viability? I already stated I agree with that. Technologically viable? I disagree, since the proof of concept was shown decades earlier. We don’t need to to keep going around and around this point.

Nope. Technological possibility of landing on a droneship was claimed to be impossible. And yes, of course it was never actually impossible. The technical expert was obviously wrong even at the time, kind of shockingly so, but you see similar kinds of claims of impossibility today by so-called experts.

Annnd…we’re full circle. Again, DC-X was considered a successful proof of concept. Almost 40 years ago. Musk himself said SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project."

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3556/1

Nah, it was everything. Everyone expects aerospace timelines to slip. That wasn’t the issue. I had an aerospace greybeard (guidance and navigation expert… nice guy, btw) from a civilian space agency that you would recognize tell me that booster landing on a droneship was “impossible.”

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