Comment by bdamm
4 days ago
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.
> But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places.
Surely it's too fragile/explodey for military use - the whole thing's a very volatile fuel tank - could it survive being shot at, even a single high-powered rifle bullet (during landing, or even post-landing) without going boom?
It doesn’t have to be able to deliver in a combat zone to be able to deliver halfway around the world close to a combat zone. Or do you think the Hercules is worthless because it isn’t armored and doesn’t have weapons?
>You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.
Not very good on delivering tech though, which is what makes it more fiction than not.
Who makes the bar for "good at delivering tech" if the guy pushing spacex, starlink and tesla simultaneously doesn't reach it?
Many promises that never materialized or resulted in mediocre or bad products, from the Mars mission to the Hyperloop, and from Teslas dismal software and often promised, never materializing fully autonomous drive to the Cybertruck. Let's not go into the robot vapourware either...
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