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Merged SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Explodes After Launch/Starship hop

Roboramma responds:



Again, this entire response is misdirected because AUP wasn't talking about a rocket failing, he was talking about the colony failing.

Thanks for bringing this up again, I should have responded to your post.

You are right that my response was incomplete. Yes, I only mentioned the ways that the rocket to Mars could be iterated upon before putting humans at risk, hopefully giving us a reasonably safe and reliable means of getting humans from here to there.

But you are right that the success of a colony is contingent upon much more than a safe and efficient (and cheap enough) means of transport.

So, is it possible to use the "iterative method" to build a safe colony? I think so. Obviously this takes time, but what it looks like is first building a small outpost with adequate life support systems where people can live (and probably do research) for brief periods. You first build and test the necessary systems on earth, then probably on the Moon or somewhere where failure doesn't mean death but just an early return. Once you've got confidence in the reliability of your systems you can use them on Mars in a small research facility. Over time this can expand in size and complexity. Every time that expansion requires a stepwise change, something completely new rather than just a new module duplicating what has already been working, you do some testing first before putting the safety of what has already been established at risk.

The point is that the iterative method doesn't mean "build a whole colony and see if it fails and everyone dies or not, and if they do make some changes an try again". Instead you can iterate on much smaller steps in that process. I actually thought the point was clear in my original response, but its fair if it wasn't.

Visiting Mars has been SpaceX's long-term goal since very early on. Indeed, landing on Mars isn't just one thing it is assumed Starship might be able to do once it's fully developed, it is the foundational mission of the vehicle. Starship's original name was "Mars Colonial Transporter". Musk talks about how important colonizing Mars is a lot, and to my knowledge SpaceX has not indicated anywhere that this eventuality is no longer its overarching mission.
I think this is true, but not that important. If it turns out that Starship can't fulfill that purpose or that SpaceX never sends people to Mars, let alone start a colony, but instead just revolutionizes the launch industry, that will still have been a huge success.

With that in mind, it's natural to be curious about how seriously the company is taking this goal in terms of R&D. The rocket itself is important of course, but it seems to be rapidly approaching completion, so...what's being done, developed, announced? Or are we going to wait until the rocket's finished and then let Starship languish for twenty years while we start planning, developing and prototyping for what we're supposed to actually be doing once the rocket gets us to Mars?

Here, I think Zig is right and the rocket is really the most important thing to focus on at this point in time, so even if your only goal (rather than just a goal) was go to Mars, it would still make sense to put the vast majority of your effort into developing that rocket first, especially when its success is the thing that will give you funds to put into the next stage of the process.
 
That's your answer? We shouldn't talk about it because it's too far in the future to worry about right now, despite it being such a crucial question that it could render all the preparatory work moot?
I don't think the failure of the Mars colony idea would make "all the preparatory work moot". Even the most pro-Mars colony person would still think that getting a cheaper heavy lift vehicle is a good thing in its own right. Cheaper space telescopes, cheaper space probes, more robotic missions, cheaper earth orbit satellites (including Starlink), are all good things in themselves, even if your primary goal were the hope to colonize Mars.

For what it's worth, we already have rockets that can take things to Mars and leave them there.
But not cheaply. And the economics of it are essential to any attempt to actually have people live on Mars. You don't disagree with that, do you? The cost of getting mass from earth to Mars changes everything about what you can do there.
 
...

Here, I think Zig is right and the rocket is really the most important thing to focus on at this point in time, so even if your only goal (rather than just a goal) was go to Mars, it would still make sense to put the vast majority of your effort into developing that rocket first, especially when its success is the thing that will give you funds to put into the next stage of the process.

Except - what's being constantly being overlooked is "how do you get the rocket (and people) back from Mars?". Refuelling in Earth orbit might allow a safe Mars landing but then it has to take off again and eventually land on Earth. The Mars landing is the limit of its fuel capacity, which is why the earliest 'plan' was to start with robotic missions that would produce liquid methand and oxygen that would be the fuel store for later manned landings. That's the part I have trouble with - the amount and range of robotically-operated gear to produce the fuel is vast.

Some years ago here, discussing this very subject, I commented that one very early step would be for SpaceX to develop a solar-powered rover that could trundle around a patch of desert here on Earth, collect useful amounts of sand and rock (to mimic collecting icy Martian regolith) and transport it back to base. And that's just one very small bit of tech that resembles what will need to perform reliably before we could think of sending people. Are they doing anything along those lines?
 
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Thanks for bringing this up again, I should have responded to your post.

You are right that my response was incomplete. Yes, I only mentioned the ways that the rocket to Mars could be iterated upon before putting humans at risk, hopefully giving us a reasonably safe and reliable means of getting humans from here to there.

But you are right that the success of a colony is contingent upon much more than a safe and efficient (and cheap enough) means of transport.

So, is it possible to use the "iterative method" to build a safe colony? I think so. Obviously this takes time, but what it looks like is first building a small outpost with adequate life support systems where people can live (and probably do research) for brief periods. You first build and test the necessary systems on earth, then probably on the Moon or somewhere where failure doesn't mean death but just an early return. Once you've got confidence in the reliability of your systems you can use them on Mars in a small research facility. Over time this can expand in size and complexity. Every time that expansion requires a stepwise change, something completely new rather than just a new module duplicating what has already been working, you do some testing first before putting the safety of what has already been established at risk.

The point is that the iterative method doesn't mean "build a whole colony and see if it fails and everyone dies or not, and if they do make some changes an try again". Instead you can iterate on much smaller steps in that process. I actually thought the point was clear in my original response, but its fair if it wasn't.


I think this is true, but not that important. If it turns out that Starship can't fulfill that purpose or that SpaceX never sends people to Mars, let alone start a colony, but instead just revolutionizes the launch industry, that will still have been a huge success.



Here, I think Zig is right and the rocket is really the most important thing to focus on at this point in time, so even if your only goal (rather than just a goal) was go to Mars, it would still make sense to put the vast majority of your effort into developing that rocket first, especially when its success is the thing that will give you funds to put into the next stage of the process.


I was just as much pointing out that "agile" can only get you so far. SpaceX is going to have to have a big cultural change to cope with a vastly expanded and interconnected scope. That's difficult and it's going to be something Musk won't ever accept.
 
Except - what's being constantly being overlooked is "how do you get the rocket (and people) back from Mars?". Refuelling in Earth orbit might allow a safe Mars landing but then it has to take off again and eventually land on Earth. The Mars landing is the limit of its fuel capacity, which is why the earliest 'plan' was to start with robotic missions that would produce liquid methand and oxygen that would be the fuel store for later manned landings. That's the part I have trouble with - the amount and range of robotically-operated gear to produce the fuel is vast.

Some years ago here, discussing this very subject, I commented that one very early step would be for SpaceX to develop a solar-powered rover that could trundle around a patch of desert here on Earth, collect useful amounts of sand and rock (to mimic collecting icy Martian regolith) and transport it back to base. And that's just one very small bit of tech that resembles what will need to perform reliably before we could think of sending people. Are they doing anything along those lines?

Yes, I agree that's an important and difficult step in the process. It's not obvious that this is achievable in the short term, but it does seem to me at least possible. But as you say there's a lot of work to be done. I guess the question you are bringing up is "is now the right time to start that work, if they are actually serious about a Mars return?" And your answer is yes. Further, I guess the idea is that if they're not starting that work now it suggests that they aren't serious about a Mars return mission.

That doesn't seem so obvious to me. Starship is still doing test flights. The idea that they'd focus first on getting the rocket reliably flying commercial missions before they work on the problem of orbital refueling, and then reliably able to do orbital refueling before trying to solve the problems of Mars refueling seems entirely reasonable to me.

That's also how the company has gone through every expansion in their capabilities in the past. They first developed a rocket that could fly to orbit before trying to develop a rocket with a reusable booster. They flew that reusable booster for years before Starship went into development.

It's sort of the minimum viable product philosophy. You get a product to market as quickly as possible in a form that will meet the market demand that you've identified, and then use the revenue stream to continue to develop and improve it and do R&D on future products. This isn't the only way to go about things, but it seems to me to be a reasonable way.
 
I was just as much pointing out that "agile" can only get you so far. SpaceX is going to have to have a big cultural change to cope with a vastly expanded and interconnected scope. That's difficult and it's going to be something Musk won't ever accept.

Yeah, I think there are major challenges that come with scale and in the end most companies lose their innovative edge when they get too large.
 
But not cheaply. And the economics of it are essential to any attempt to actually have people live on Mars. You don't disagree with that, do you? The cost of getting mass from earth to Mars changes everything about what you can do there.

That's true, but it's one thing that remains to be demonstrated; a Starship launch might be far cheaper than a Delta II launch (the platform that delivered the Mars Exploration Rover mission) for instance; I haven't seen actual numbers yet for any of the Starship test launches. But SpaceX and NASA also say they need to launch somewhere between ten and twenty Starships - they still haven't settled on a number - in order to get one Starship to the Moon; and that's just to the Moon. It's the strategy they're running with, they don't have any alternative designs or plans. Again, it remains to be seen, but the cost savings of a single launch could easily be eaten up by just how many launches are now required; and it also raises the complexity of a mission by an order of magnitude when you take all the potential points of failure in a single launch and then multiply that by, say, 14, for just one mission.

But aside from all of that; the rocket - again - might be "the most important thing" to focus on at this time, and that's fair. But it's not as if thought is a zero sum game here. SpaceX doesn't need to shift priority away from Starship development in order to have someone working on buildings and infrastructure for the proposed colony that it says it wants to build.
 
Tim Dodd made another interview with Elon, with some nice shots of the Starship factory. No talk about Mars directly, but Elon says he plans to build one Starship every 3 days, and to reduce launch cadence from days to hours, with the same launch platform and the same booster.
Another interesting part is the interview happened just before the previous launch, and he speaks about problems of heatshield, how they still have known unknowns especially around the hinges. Guess they were right on the money :-D But the ship landed, which he estimated as 50:50 before the launch, hoping to achieve the landing in 2 or 3 launches.
And damn, seeing those 3 boosters side by side in a factory hall is something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFqjoCbZ4ik
 
I'll repeat. The rapid turn around is a fantasy. Flight four wasn't even a full speed reentry from orbital speed. The Starship didn't get that fast.

It will be a long process to get Starship up to being reliable at reentry with a detailed post flight check and service.

It has been built to launch with redundancy from the rocket engine control system to cover failures during launch. Those failed rockets will have to be replaced after each launch.

Rocket engines will have to be serviced. The current turbo fan technology in commercial jets is pushing the limits of what is possible in flight engines. Those engines don't experience anything like the stresses that rocket engines do.

The test flights have not been carrying any loads, real or dummy. It will be interesting to see exactly what the Starship launch system will be able to lift and his many refueling flights will be required to get a load beyond LEO.

All launch systems to date have been required to have an escape system for a failed launch to be human rated. The last Soyuz mission saved lives when it had to be activated. So far there are no indications what Starship will do about that.

The SpaceX web site refers to a multiplanetary future for man. To Mars and beyond.

What is beyond? There is nothing remotely habitable beyond and we don't even know if Mars is.
 
I'll repeat. The rapid turn around is a fantasy. Flight four wasn't even a full speed reentry from orbital speed. The Starship didn't get that fast.

FailStamp.png


You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is meant by "rapid turnaround" which is NOT the same thing as "rapid re-usability"

Rapid Turnaround

1. The Super Heavy Booster launches Ship "A" into orbit from the OLM

2. The booster lands and is caught by Mechazilla, and is placed back on the OLM

3. While the booster undergoes a post landing/pre-launch inspection, ship "B" is rolled out to the launch tower

4. Mechazilla lifts Ship "B" onto the Super Heavy Booster

5. It takes 34 minutes to refuel the Super Heavy Booster/Ship stack.

6. The Super Heavy Booster launches Ship "B" into orbit from the OLM

Rinse and repeat for Ship "C", "D" etc...

Rapid Re-usability

The original premise may have been that they might be able to launch the same ship two or three times a day, but that was in 2020 - four years is an absolute age in modern rocket science. To be able to debate this issue with any knowledge, you have to keep up with those changes. At this time, the intention is to have many more Ships in the pipeline than Boosters (about five ships per booster).

Now, if you bothered to do just the tiniest bit of research (which you clearly have not) instead of just interviewing your keyboard and then pontificating off the top of your head, you would have known all of this.
 
That's true, but it's one thing that remains to be demonstrated; a Starship launch might be far cheaper than a Delta II launch (the platform that delivered the Mars Exploration Rover mission) for instance; I haven't seen actual numbers yet for any of the Starship test launches. But SpaceX and NASA also say they need to launch somewhere between ten and twenty Starships - they still haven't settled on a number - in order to get one Starship to the Moon; and that's just to the Moon. It's the strategy they're running with, they don't have any alternative designs or plans. Again, it remains to be seen, but the cost savings of a single launch could easily be eaten up by just how many launches are now required; and it also raises the complexity of a mission by an order of magnitude when you take all the potential points of failure in a single launch and then multiply that by, say, 14, for just one mission.

But aside from all of that; the rocket - again - might be "the most important thing" to focus on at this time, and that's fair. But it's not as if thought is a zero sum game here. SpaceX doesn't need to shift priority away from Starship development in order to have someone working on buildings and infrastructure for the proposed colony that it says it wants to build.


The problem with people who think the way you do is that you think putting a Starship HLS lander on the moon should be no different that putting a Lunar Module on the moon.
 
It's sort of the minimum viable product philosophy. You get a product to market as quickly as possible in a form that will meet the market demand that you've identified, and then use the revenue stream to continue to develop and improve it and do R&D on future products. This isn't the only way to go about things, but it seems to me to be a reasonable way.
It's reasonable when human lives aren't on the line.
 
It's reasonable when human lives aren't on the line.

I'm not sure how "design a useful rocket first and use the profits from that to fund further research" is any less compatible with safety that "design a useful rocket and do R&D on other issues related to supporting humans on Mars in parallel".

The former approach seems to me more likely to succeed than the latter, but both need to do significant safety testing before any human lives are put on the line.
 
That's true, but it's one thing that remains to be demonstrated; a Starship launch might be far cheaper than a Delta II launch (the platform that delivered the Mars Exploration Rover mission) for instance; I haven't seen actual numbers yet for any of the Starship test launches. But SpaceX and NASA also say they need to launch somewhere between ten and twenty Starships - they still haven't settled on a number - in order to get one Starship to the Moon; and that's just to the Moon. It's the strategy they're running with, they don't have any alternative designs or plans. Again, it remains to be seen, but the cost savings of a single launch could easily be eaten up by just how many launches are now required; and it also raises the complexity of a mission by an order of magnitude when you take all the potential points of failure in a single launch and then multiply that by, say, 14, for just one mission.

Sure, SpaceX's approach may end up failing. My point is simply that they are trying to develop a more economical approach to delivering cargo both to orbit and beyond. And if they are successful then that is very different than just the ability to get cargo to Mars. This was in response to your comment:
For what it's worth, we already have rockets that can take things to Mars and leave them there.
And my only point is that the cost matters. Obviously if SpaceX fails to lower the cost then yes, that would be a failure, but the whole point of what they are doing is trying to get that cost down.


But aside from all of that; the rocket - again - might be "the most important thing" to focus on at this time, and that's fair. But it's not as if thought is a zero sum game here. SpaceX doesn't need to shift priority away from Starship development in order to have someone working on buildings and infrastructure for the proposed colony that it says it wants to build.

Money is fungible. The salary they pay someone to research buildings and infrastructure for the proposed colony can go to engineers working on Starship. Maybe if they already had people working on that it wouldn't make sense to shift them to rocket design work because it would be outside of their area of expertise, and it wouldn't make sense to fire them and hire someone new because the costs of doing so wouldn't be made up for by gains in the time to get Starship to the point of reliably entering service, or gains in improvements in its final design. But they are currently in the opposite situation where their workforce is already optimized for the rocket industry, so the loss would be even greater.

Anyway, its fine to think "they need to start working on this now if they're serious", and maybe that's the way you'd do it. But working on problems in sequence instead of in parallel isn't obviously the wrong approach. I think it's the right approach, but even if your approach is equally good, or better but not obviously so, then what they are doing is still entirely consistent with having a future goal of putting people on Mars.
 
Personally I think that the people at SpaceX are serious about wanting to eventually develop the ability to send humans to Mars. But, again, just personally, I also don't really care if they aren't. For me I think it would be cool if that happened, but it's one of the less exciting things that the success of Starship would enable. The really exciting thing to me is just the lowering of launch costs to LEO and beyond. That enables a lot of other things, most of which I expect no one has even really envisioned yet. Technology has a way of opening up possibilities that only become apparent as they become manifest. So personally I'm much more excited about increasing capabilities and lowering costs than any specific use that might be put to.
 
I'll repeat. The rapid turn around is a fantasy. Flight four wasn't even a full speed reentry from orbital speed. The Starship didn't get that fast.

Earlier, I forgot to call out another "fact" you got wrong, and you got it wrong because orbital mechanics does not work the way you think it does.

Orbital velocity for a circular orbit is typically in the range 7.7–6.9 km/s (27,772–24,840 km/h).... and most spacecraft go into orbits that are as close to a circle as possible to keep a constant altitude.

Ship 29 reached a peak velocity of 7.4 km/s (26,757 km/h), which means it was above the middle of the velocity range for typical orbital re-entry. Therefore, your statement "Flight four wasn't even a full speed reentry from orbital speed. The Starship didn't get that fast." is simply wrong.
 
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The original premise may have been that they might be able to launch the same ship two or three times a day, but that was in 2020 - four years is an absolute age in modern rocket science. To be able to debate this issue with any knowledge, you have to keep up with those changes. At this time, the intention is to have many more Ships in the pipeline than Boosters (about five ships per booster).

Now, if you bothered to do just the tiniest bit of research (which you clearly have not) instead of just interviewing your keyboard and then pontificating off the top of your head, you would have known all of this.

This rather rude reposte would make a valid point if we were talking about literally any other space rocket company. Unfortunately the fact is that these statements you're referencing aren't the progress reports of engineers who are actually working on the project, they're the off-the-cuff statements of a celebrity CEO who's prone to saying whatever he thinks will excite investors at the moment, wholly disconnected from any actual process or achievement. It makes little difference that his "intentions" right now are vastly different from what they were four years ago; four years hence, they will have changed again. To that end, no; it's not a valid one-up to assert that someone hasn't "kept up" with Elon's meaningless and constantly shifting speculative predictions about a product or system that hasn't been completed yet, and thus isn't entitled to discuss or ask questions about or critique it.
 
This rather rude reposte would make a valid point if we were talking about literally any other space rocket company. Unfortunately the fact is that these statements you're referencing aren't the progress reports of engineers who are actually working on the project, they're the off-the-cuff statements of a celebrity CEO who's prone to saying whatever he thinks will excite investors at the moment, wholly disconnected from any actual process or achievement. It makes little difference that his "intentions" right now are vastly different from what they were four years ago; four years hence, they will have changed again. To that end, no; it's not a valid one-up to assert that someone hasn't "kept up" with Elon's meaningless and constantly shifting speculative predictions about a product or system that hasn't been completed yet, and thus isn't entitled to discuss or ask questions about or critique it.

https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14339607&postcount=1227
 
This rather rude reposte would make a valid point if we were talking about literally any other space rocket company. Unfortunately the fact is that these statements you're referencing aren't the progress reports of engineers who are actually working on the project, they're the off-the-cuff statements of a celebrity CEO who's prone to saying whatever he thinks will excite investors at the moment, wholly disconnected from any actual process or achievement. It makes little difference that his "intentions" right now are vastly different from what they were four years ago; four years hence, they will have changed again. To that end, no; it's not a valid one-up to assert that someone hasn't "kept up" with Elon's meaningless and constantly shifting speculative predictions about a product or system that hasn't been completed yet, and thus isn't entitled to discuss or ask questions about or critique it.

Well, it doesn't even seem they are being held back be refurbishment at the moment. It's supposed to take 9 days now, but sure, Falcon 9 only has one engine, not 33.
But I think we might see 2 launches back to back really soon (like in a year). Musk clearly loves the idea, and it would be great publicity stunt. Once there are several successful landings, while still in the testing phase .. I bet he will do it.
Not sure if FAA will like it though ..
 
Well, it doesn't even seem they are being held back be refurbishment at the moment. It's supposed to take 9 days now, but sure, Falcon 9 only has one engine, not 33.
But I think we might see 2 launches back to back really soon (like in a year). Musk clearly loves the idea, and it would be great publicity stunt. Once there are several successful landings, while still in the testing phase .. I bet he will do it.
Not sure if FAA will like it though ..

Yeah. Something I hear frequently from the pig-ignorant haters..."Musk was gonna launch rockets in rapid succession, hur, hur, has hasn't hur hur, so he's full of **** hur hur."

Of course, SpaceX cannot launch Falcon 9s back to back off the same launch pad for a couple of reasons.

1. The launch pad facilities at VSFB (SLC-40) and CCSFS (SLC 4E) and KSC (LC-39A) are not designed for it.

2. F9 boosters were never designed for rapid reusabilty

But even if they were, and even if the launch facilities could do it, there would not be any point. There is this small matter that the haters are too stupid to understand... its called a launch window. Most satellite payloads have an associated launch windows, usually measured in minutes or hours (and sometimes they are instantaneous), during or at whcih the rocket musg be lauc hed in order for it do go into the required orbit. . There wouldn't be any point in rushing to stack a new rocket immediately after the launch if the window for the next launch is three days away :eye-poppi
 
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FailStamp.png


You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is meant by "rapid turnaround" which is NOT the same thing as "rapid re-usability"

Rapid Turnaround

1. The Super Heavy Booster launches Ship "A" into orbit from the OLM

2. The booster lands and is caught by Mechazilla, and is placed back on the OLM

3. While the booster undergoes a post landing/pre-launch inspection, ship "B" is rolled out to the launch tower

4. Mechazilla lifts Ship "B" onto the Super Heavy Booster

5. It takes 34 minutes to refuel the Super Heavy Booster/Ship stack.

6. The Super Heavy Booster launches Ship "B" into orbit from the OLM

Rinse and repeat for Ship "C", "D" etc...

Rapid Re-usability

The original premise may have been that they might be able to launch the same ship two or three times a day, but that was in 2020 - four years is an absolute age in modern rocket science. To be able to debate this issue with any knowledge, you have to keep up with those changes. At this time, the intention is to have many more Ships in the pipeline than Boosters (about five ships per booster).

Now, if you bothered to do just the tiniest bit of research (which you clearly have not) instead of just interviewing your keyboard and then pontificating off the top of your head, you would have known all of this.


STARSHIP

Starship is the fully reusable spacecraft and second stage of the Starship system. The vehicle comes in several different configurations, offers an integrated payload section and is capable of carrying crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond. Starship is also capable of point-to-point transport on Earth, enabling travel to anywhere in the world in one hour or less.
SpaceX website.


What is beyond Mars? Nothing for humans.
 
But aside from all of that; the rocket - again - might be "the most important thing" to focus on at this time, and that's fair. But it's not as if thought is a zero sum game here. SpaceX doesn't need to shift priority away from Starship development in order to have someone working on buildings and infrastructure for the proposed colony that it says it wants to build.

"Thought" is a meaningless metric. Hours worked are not. And hours worked absolutely are a zero sum game, so much so that I'm stunned you'd even bring this up as an argument. If you're paying someone to work an hour on one project, you're not paying them to work that hour on another project. Time is very much a limited resource.
 
To be more specific, I'm curious if anyone at SpaceX is actually designing or prototyping, for instance...infrastructure, or habitat-building tech. Surface vehicles. Supply mechanisms.
Why would they? R&D is inherently risky. It makes sense to assume that risk if there's a commercial opportunity that offsets it. It makes sense for SpaceX to risk its own money to R&D a more cost-effective heavy launch system, because there are customers that will pay handsomely if they succeed.

One of the great good things that NASA does for the aerospace industry, is assume some of the R&D risk for new aerospace projects. It typically does this when there is insufficient commercial incentive for aerospace companies to assume all the risk themselves.

It would be foolish for SpaceX to risk its own money on Mars voyage R&D, unless they know there's a paying customer for this service. Either a NASA contract to develop that tech on the government's dime, or an imminent demand (from NASA or others) to provide a supply of such tech.
 
Musk is hateful. He craves it. No ignorance required.

Nonetheless, plenty being shown here.

SpaceX website.
Starship is also capable of point-to-point transport on Earth, enabling travel to anywhere in the world in one hour or less.

Weak sauce.. is that all you could come up with?

And so ******* what anyway. Its clearly is capable of that, as just demonstrated in flight four, but just because someone says something is "capable" of doing something doesn't mean that it will be actually doing that something now, or at any time, even in the near future. I am capable of flying a light aircraft. Will I be doing so?

What is beyond Mars? Nothing for humans.

... in your ill-informed, unqualified, minority opinion.


What I am seeing here is a chronic inability to look beyond blind hatred and prejudice. I agree with you that Musk is an arse, but I'm a grown up - I'm capable of seeing beyond my disdain for the man, to the bigger picture of what he has started in SpaceX, and how good what they are doing could be for humanity. You clearly think its all fruit of the poisonous tree.

I always thought you were better than this - clearly, I will have to re-evaluate that position.
 
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Personally I think that the people at SpaceX are serious about wanting to eventually develop the ability to send humans to Mars. But, again, just personally, I also don't really care if they aren't. For me I think it would be cool if that happened, but it's one of the less exciting things that the success of Starship would enable. The really exciting thing to me is just the lowering of launch costs to LEO and beyond. That enables a lot of other things, most of which I expect no one has even really envisioned yet. Technology has a way of opening up possibilities that only become apparent as they become manifest. So personally I'm much more excited about increasing capabilities and lowering costs than any specific use that might be put to.
My thoughts exactly. Colonizing Mars is a fantasy, but if it provides the impetus for developing better rockets etc. I'm not complaining. The 'end goal' can always be changed once they realize it's not worth it and there are better uses for the technology.
 
Nonetheless, plenty being shown here.



Weak sauce.. is that all you could come up with?

And so ******* what anyway. Its clearly is capable of that, as just demonstrated in flight four, but just because someone says something is "capable" of doing something doesn't mean that it will be actually doing that something now, or at any time, even in the near future. I am capable of flying a light aircraft. Will I be doing so?



... in your ill-informed, unqualified, minority opinion.


What I am seeing here is a chronic inability to look beyond blind hatred and prejudice. I agree with you that Musk is an arse, but I'm a grown up - I'm capable of seeing beyond my disdain for the man, to the bigger picture of what he has started in SpaceX, and how good what they are doing could be for humanity. You clearly think its all fruit of the poisonous tree.

I always thought you were better than this - clearly, I will have to re-evaluate that position.
I have already said. Why do we need to read between the lines about the reality. You can't rely on Spacex own website. Instead, you have to go to the SpaceX watchers and get the information from them. Who is the authority there? A lot of them are just fanboys.
 
"Thought" is a meaningless metric. Hours worked are not. And hours worked absolutely are a zero sum game, so much so that I'm stunned you'd even bring this up as an argument. If you're paying someone to work an hour on one project, you're not paying them to work that hour on another project. Time is very much a limited resource.

But SpaceX is not suffering from a lack of it, nor of money.

Your answer, and others', seem to presume that SpaceX is not in fact doing any exploratory design work on surface facilities. That is certainly my presumption too; but is that indeed a presumption on your parts as well, or is it informed?
 

Shotwell has an engineering degree, but she was hired by SpaceX to be a business manager, not an engineer. What I'm allowed to see of her Twitter feed that you've linked is full of acknowledgements and celebrations of successful missions, and other announcements of the kind you'd expect from a company president, but nothing about technicals or engineering details. So unfortunately your first link is irrelevant.

The rest unfortunately are LinkedIn links which require an account to be able to view. Sadly trying to log into mine has locked my account because the activity was "suspicious", and now they want a picture of a government ID to unlock it and I hope you understand I'm not really going to go to that bother right now for the purpose of an argument I'm having with someone on the internet.

But also, if your single link to Shotwell's Twitter account is any indication of your intention, I should say I'm also not super excited to just hunt through someone's entire LinkedIn history because you hope there might be a statement in there somewhere that might be relevant to what I've said, so...are you willing to maybe provide a press statement or some other sourced quote from these individuals that directly addresses the particular thing I was talking about?
 
Shotwell has an engineering degree, but she was hired by SpaceX to be a business manager, not an engineer.

Right, so an engineer's experience and degree evaporate when they take a business management job. Good to know I will have to be re-taking my degree to regain my qualifications.

What I'm allowed to see of her Twitter feed that you've linked is full of acknowledgements and celebrations of successful missions, and other announcements of the kind you'd expect from a company president, but nothing about technicals or engineering details. So unfortunately your first link is irrelevant.

If your single link to Shotwell's Twitter account is any indication of your intention, I should say I'm also not super excited to just hunt through someone's entire LinkedIn history because you hope there might be a statement in there somewhere that might be relevant to what I've said, so...are you willing to maybe provide a press statement or some other sourced quote from these individuals that directly addresses the particular thing I was talking about?

I guess you don't realize that you can communicate with people directly via their LinkedIn acct.

The rest unfortunately are LinkedIn links which require an account to be able to view. Sadly trying to log into mine has locked my account because the activity was "suspicious", and now they want a picture of a government ID to unlock it and I hope you understand I'm not really going to go to that bother right now for the purpose of an argument I'm having with someone on the internet.

YP
 
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But SpaceX is not suffering from a lack of it, nor of money.

What on earth makes you say that? "Suffering" isn't a useful characterization either, "limited" is. And of course their resources are limited, both in manpower and money. How on earth could it be otherwise?

And as I said before, throwing more money at a problem like this can be very wasteful. The more people you hire, the worse those people will be, because the best people are the ones you hired first. And when it comes to cutting edge problems, there's a huge difference in productivity between the best people and the not-best people.

Your answer, and others', seem to presume that SpaceX is not in fact doing any exploratory design work on surface facilities. That is certainly my presumption too; but is that indeed a presumption on your parts as well, or is it informed?

It's a presumption on my part, I have no specific information in this regard.
 
But SpaceX is not suffering from a lack of it, nor of money.

Your answer, and others', seem to presume that SpaceX is not in fact doing any exploratory design work on surface facilities. That is certainly my presumption too; but is that indeed a presumption on your parts as well, or is it informed?

As far as I can tell, your presumptions seem to be that SpaceX should be doing this work if they're really serious, and it's yet another example of Musk's moral failings if they're not.
 
Musk is hateful. He craves it. No ignorance required.
So you say, but is it true?

I've seen no evidence that that Musk is any more hateful than the average person. I've seen far more hate directed at him than from him, and many of the haters appear to crave it.

Here's one example:-

Elon Musk haters vandalized dozens of Tesla Cybertrucks


picture.php


And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's almost impossible to discuss about anything related to SpaceX or Tesla these days without the haters chiming in, derailing the conversation with their childish name-calling and ignorant negativity. And if we rebut them they call us fanboys or worse. Engaging them doesn't help because their minds are firmly closed - they've found a 'legitimate' target to hate on and nobody's going to reason them out of it!
 
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I have already said. Why do we need to read between the lines about the reality. You can't rely on Spacex own website. Instead, you have to go to the SpaceX watchers and get the information from them. Who is the authority there? A lot of them are just fanboys.

Careful, your MDS is showing!
 
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So you say, but is it true?

I've seen no evidence that that Musk is any more hateful than the average person. I've seen far more hate directed at him than from him, and many of the haters appear to crave it.

Here's one example:-

Elon Musk haters vandalized dozens of Tesla Cybertrucks

[qimg]https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1476&pictureid=14065[/qimg]

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's almost impossible to discuss about anything related to SpaceX or Tesla these days without the haters chiming in, derailing the conversation with their childish name-calling and ignorant negativity. And if we rebut them they call us fanboys or worse. Engaging them doesn't help because their minds are firmly closed - they've found a 'legitimate' target to hate on and nobody's going to reason them out of it!

NailedIt.gif


Which is why, if you want to discuss scientific and technical aspects of what SpaceX is doing, this is not the place. Hateful trolls are allowed free rein here to disrupt serious discussion.

You need to go somewhere where the haters get stamped on, and their posts removed in short order. Dealing with haters is like dealing with Flat Earthers and Moon Landing Hoax Believers, they are unshakable in their blind hatred.
 
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