Comment by ActorNightly
4 days ago
Starship is just obscene. The thing is never going to work for its designed purpose once you understand what the mission looks like (basically insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit)
4 days ago
Starship is just obscene. The thing is never going to work for its designed purpose once you understand what the mission looks like (basically insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit)
> insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit
What's wrong with this? Lots of launches is fine until we build the scale required to make a proper depot worthwhile. (Which, by the way, is part of Artemis's plans. Though currently it looks like a bunch of glued-together Starship tankers.)
People act like with Falcon, they basically just get it off the drone ship, fill er up, and she is good to go again. There is a shitload of repairs/maintenance that has to be done to Falcon vehicles after every launch.
In space, you can't do that kind of repair/maintenance, you have to make sure the refueling is PERFECT. And this is with deep cryogenic propellants that very much like to boil off and cause pressure increases in the tanks they are contained.
That problem hasn't even been touched yet. In order to make Spaceship X happen, they need to figure one refueling out, which is difficult given the fact that Raptors run on cryogenic propellant that likes to boil off, then they need to figure out how to do 10 in a row without any issues, which is exponentially difficult.
And then there is the whole thing about everything working well for trip to Mars, and back.
And if there is a configuration that exists that can do all of that, its very unlikely that a company under the leadership of someone as Musk can ever figure this out.
For interplanetary travel, things need to start from either orbit or the moon. This has been known for quite some time.
Also all those missions can be unmanned. If you want to get good at something then you do it a lot.
The only question is whether the cost of flying all those missions would be prohibitive: by the stated goals, starship should be able to do the refueling missions cheaper then an SLS launch.
Obviously if it can't then it's failed, but the point of it is cheap heavy lift to LEO which is very obviously quite valuable.
Building a big specialty rocket to get to the moon is waste.
What makes you think so?
Going to the Moon or Mars is a trojan horse.
Starship's true purpose is to compete with airlines in trans oceanic flights.
Musk has said so many times but then he intentionally obfuscates it with all the Mars and Moon talk.
But remember that you heard this before it was widely realized to be true; Starship isn't about going to Mars. Starship is about going to China.
Far too dangerous and noisy for that to ever happen, surely.
And too fragile/explodey for niche military uses (long range troop drops?)
If you're thinking of passenger service, perhaps it is a bit unattractive in the short term. No good launching and landing spots.
But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places. This applies to civilian purposes as well. All kinds of use-cases for speeding up cargo.
The entire economics of Starship and rapid reusability was presented at the beginning of the Starbase work, way back when Hoppy was a thing. He's been sticking to the plan since then. You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.
10 replies →
> Far too dangerous
Falcon 9 is clearly proving that doesn’t have to be the case.
That sounds even stupider than using it to go to mars. I really hope it stays a fantasy like most musk projects.
None of that makes sense.
Transportships even reduce speed to reduce costs.
If the payload doesn't pay for all of this, it was a huge R&D investmen from the american people to Musks scifi ideas
The American people didn’t pay for the R&D if SpaceX, Musk did and then customers did. Customers (including the federal government) that saved millions on every purchase.
2 replies →