from Hacker News

Starship is Still Not Understood (2021)

by MichaelNolan on 10/13/24, 8:36 PM with 79 comments

• by kemotep on 10/13/24, 9:45 PM

  > Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows

  Again, this is from 2021, one of those set of launches was to be last year. And it was to be 1,000 starships bound for Mars to meet that goal.

  Starship is impressive but we need to be realistic about these numbers. We haven’t even technically had a launch with any payload. Additionally they claim that within 2 years of the Artemis mission we could get 1,000 people on the moon (though say this isn’t going to happen at least).

  Starship will make Starlink V2 feasible and dozens if not hundreds of missions that would otherwise never be possible. But getting 1 million people to Mars (or even 1,000 people to the Moon) is just fantasy. I will gladly eat crow but none of these capabilities that exist on paper have actually been demonstrated that are necessary to meet these goals. SapceX is the best there is and likely will get to Mars. Just not how Musk describes it.

• by lukealization on 10/13/24, 10:08 PM

  Tell me why I shouldn't be concerned about thousands of starships launching from Earth and emitting multiple megatons of Carbon Dioxide in the fragile upper atmosphere? Some studies indicate emissions here are significantly more impactful, and can also damage the Ozone layer as well.

  Any answers shouldn't consist of "well it's a fraction of what the aviation industry emits" because _the entire point_ of Starship is to scale-up to aviation-like operations.

• by awongh on 10/13/24, 10:25 PM

  I thought it was an interesting way to put it that:

  the JPL produces things at $1,000,000/kg, and that inside the engineering organization it'll be hard to reconfigure everyone's mindsets and practices to create stuff that doesn't spend so much money / is less concerned with weight.

  From an engineering perspective it seems like simply putting less into a finished product would be easy, but his argument is basically that the design parameters for every single thing produced are so fundamentally oriented towards weight (and size maybe?) that it's very hard to turn around. (This is not exactly the government spending / misaligned incentive argument that is made for many government projects- my read was that this is a subtly different problem.)

• by h2odragon on 10/13/24, 10:36 PM

  discussion in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025020

• by fnord77 on 10/14/24, 2:23 AM

  > aero flaps had never been demonstrated

  Does he mean grid fins? Because "flaps" are something else entirely.

  Grid fins have been around since the 1950s.

• by BurningFrog on 10/13/24, 11:31 PM

  The article say the cost to orbit is/was $10,000/kg.

  Anyone know what it is now? What it will/would be with Starship?

• by BryanLegend on 10/13/24, 9:25 PM

  Feel's like we're finally conquering the gravity well!