> 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.
>Just not how Musk describes it.
Every innovative mission needs someone pushing people to do the impossible. That being said, every company trying to accomplish the impossible needs an adult in the room to ground that visionary.
In the case of Space-X, there's an adult in the room. Elon's direct input at Space-X almost set the entire Starship project back a year by insisting on trying a concrete launch pad that all of his engineers told him would fail (and it did). After that failure he appeared to get so distracted by Twitter that Shotwell could point the engineers in a more effective direction.
In the case of Tesla, there unfortunately is not. Elon's direct input resulted in canning a low-cost model in favor of a "robo-taxi" that is 100% dependent on full self driving using nothing but cameras. That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology. An adult in the room would've told him to either stick with the low-cost model to compete with incoming Chinese imports, or use Lidar so that there's a viable self-driving vehicle that can be sold sometime in the next decade...
>compete with incoming Chinese imports
The current regime of tariffs and restrictions means they won't have to.
It was 6 months to the next launch after he "almost set the entire Starship project back a year." And after the next launch, which didn't destroy the pad, it was 4 months to the next launch. So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe.
He also came up with building it out of stainless steel, which worked, and catching it at the launch tower. But I'm sure you know better.
>So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe.
So you didn't follow it at all? Because multiple government agencies were considering blocking them full-stop for an extended period of time after that disaster. So "maybe 2 months" was their absolute best-case scenario.
https://www.tpr.org/environment/2023-04-27/photos-spacex-is-...
>He also came up with building it out of stainless steel
And you know he was the one who personally came up with that idea... how? You work at Space-X? Or you've just read a couple press releases where he took credit for it?
Elon has a long history of taking credit for other people's ideas. And I'm willing to bet whatever you'd like to risk that one of the engineers at Space-X suggested using stainless steel, not Elon.
"Disaster" LOL. 0 injuries. That's how Spacex does it. Blow it up and iterate, and that's why they are decades ahead of the competition. So useless government bureaucrats, not Elon Musk, almost set them back a year over a stupid concrete launch pad.
The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king. He goes on stage and says a bunch of bullshit (IMO he commits securities fraud) and then his executives generally do what they think is correct for the company while making sure he feels placated. It seems to sort of work out well enough.
It may be that this layer of management is getting weaker.
It’s too bad the visionary lunatic and the sane person can’t be the same person, but this is exceedingly rare.
The lunatic alone will hype and then fail. The sane voice alone will plod along and take aeons to make any progress, or stagnate entirely.
I'm pretty sure if I knew I could never lose a dime of my billions of fortune I'd be working on teleporters, warp drives, and time machines. People would call me a genius because I could pay for the press. Musk isn't a visionary, he's just a rich nerd throwing money at really cool things other visionaries imagined before he was born (all of his companies were ideas other people already had been working on; 100%), and then failing upwards when it doesn't work out.
Yet, there are tons of people much richer than Musk was (before Tesla and SpaceX) who have achieved nothing of note with their billions.
It’s easy to shout from the sidelines that you’d do better given the opportunity, but reality suggests it’s more difficult. It’s the HN equivalent of sports fans hurling abuse at their football team’s players.
Why hasn’t Blue Origin done similar things then, or any of the other billionaire funded space ventures?
SpaceX is just spectacular. Something is different there.
Isn’t that difference Shotwell? It might be a bit myopic to credit a singular leader when many contributed but she feels like the obvious answer.
I don’t credit just Elon. It’s tons of people. But he did do a good job getting this thing going and has some role in pushing them to take risks and do hard things.
Shotwell is probably a big reason SpaceX does better than Tesla or the others. Elon needs to be paired with a cooler head that knows how to manage well. I get the sense the others don’t have anyone as strong in that role.
>That's pretty obviously not going to be viable with any existing technology.
Counterpoint, new technology needs a bleeding edge product necessitating and thus incentivizing its birth and existence.
When you need to create a chicken from nothing so you can get eggs which turn into chickens for more eggs, it's oftentimes expensive as fuck and more likely than not going to fail. But someone needs to do it if you want those eggs and the chickens.
> we need to be realistic about these numbers
We need to be realistic about timelines. Specifically, the timelines promulgated by Musk versus SpaceX. (Not an easy task, I know, in part because the latter is more sparing with such predictions.) But we should also be clear eyed about emerging capabilities.
Barring a major engineering challenge in in-orbit propellant transfer, Starship's fundamental design looks solid. V1 probably won't get a million people to Mars. But V1 Falcon couldn't be re-used twenty-odd times. The author is correct: national space agencies are copy pasting legacy missions onto paradigm-changing platforms.
The closest exception is NASA: Artemis is overly complicated for a single Moon landing, but its use of Starship on the Moon and for in-orbit re-fuelling is a bet-the-house play that could open a real space economy in propellant alone. (First, storage and shuttling. Later, manufacture.) To the degree Artemis might get canned, it's because Lockheed can't manufacture an Apollo-era heat shield [1], Bechtel can't build a non-catching tower [2] and NASA refuses to be mean to them.
[1] https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-report-highligh...
[2] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-016.pd...
> Barring a major engineering challenge in in-orbit propellant transfer
We already have that challenge. Last I checked, SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here). But according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission. That's not exactly inspiring, especially given what it implies about the number of launches it would take to get to Mars and back. To solve the cryogenic boil-off issue we might need to switch to different fuels entirely, which would necessitate new engines.
> SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here)
Apollo was disposable. Starship is not. Apollo could thus max out payload at launch, which Starship cannot do design or fuel budget wise.
The Apollo paradigm was for literal moon shots. Starship and Artemis are more about building infrastructure.
> according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission
That is not NASA's position. Folks at NASA and SpaceX disagree around the boil-off rates. Everyone thought about it. We just don't know what it is. We should have a preliminary figure next year, and a final-ish one within two or three years (after the first vehicle's boil-off characteristics are optimized).
But yes. There are major engineering challenges in-orbit propellant transfer could raise that could require going back to the drawing board. Hence why I flagged it. Given that's something humanity has never really done, it seems like a fair risk to take given the upsides.
(Note, too, that in present designs Starship must function as a launch vehicle, spacecraft and fuel tank. That's not required long term. Well-insulated orbiting fuel depots start making sense rather quickly if you have <$1000/kg launch costs.)
Please provide a reference showing that NASA thinks that Starship will lose 3/4 of the fuel, and there is no way to fix it.
“It’s in the high teens in the number of launches,” Hawkins said. That’s driven, she suggested, about concerns about boiloff, or loss of cryogenic liquid propellants, at the depot. [...] Critics of NASA’s selection of Starship for HLS have pointed to the number of launches as a weakness in the architecture. The Government Accountability Office, in its rejection of protests by Blue Origin and Dynetics of the Starship HLS award in 2021, noted that SpaceX required 16 launches overall for a Starship lunar lander mission. Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, disagreed, calling the need for 16 launches “extremely unlikely” in an August 2021 social media post. He said a “max of 8” tanker launches should be needed to fuel the Starship lander, adding it could be as few as four.
https://spacenews.com/starship-lunar-lander-missions-to-requ...
Would note that’s the GAO, not NASA. 16 launches is well within possibility, though unlikely that would ever be accepted as a final solution.
Thank you for providing a reference. Sight unseen, I'm inclined to think that SpaceX is more likely right here. In particular part of the higher figure is a lower launch cadence. But SpaceX is building their technology around very rapid turnaround times. With multiple Starships, there is good reason to believe that they will not need to wait 6 days between launches.
Of course this depends on FAA permission. Whether they get FAA permission may well depend on who wins the election. Musk has gone out of his way to place a big bet on Trump, and it is clear that Trump will happily get rid of red tape for Musk in return. My read is that part of the reason why Musk placed that bet on Trump is because the Biden/Harris administration has already decided to place lots of red tape in Musk's way. At first as a reaction to Musk's hostility towards unions and COVID restrictions on manufacturing, and then as a reaction against what Musk was doing with Twitter.
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjWCEFioT_Y
Conclusions:
* Standard Starship is probably good enough for HLS
* Simple coatings and/or a specific orientation makes things a lot better
> But according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission.
According to one person at NASA. There's disagreement on the point.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/what-nasa-wants-to-see...
"[Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA's Human Landing System program] suggested the range in the number of Starship tanker flights for a single Artemis mission could be in the "high single digits to the low double digits." Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has suggested the company is looking at expanding Starship's capacity with larger propellant tanks. This could help reduce the number of tanker flights."
There's a lot of unknowns. Falcon 9 versions saw significant performance boosts over the generations; we may see the same with Starship.
He is a salesman that always over promises but still does some cool stuff.
> still does some cool stuff.
Arguably he tweets about it. For the most part the 'doing' of the cool stuff is happening due to the Engineering and Manufacturing teams who are putting in sweat equity on that vision.
Judging by the erratic and deteriorating public displays in the past few years I am not even sure he does anything on the strategic level anymore.
If that's the case, what is the issue with the Engineering and Manufacturing teams of Boeing, Blue Origin, Arianne, etc, etc? The role of a leader is to end deadlocks. All these companies have plenty of talented people, and they often have huge egos, personal agendas, various constraints, some lack resources, some squander them, etc. A leader understands where the problems are and decides. The "buck stops with him". He doesn't do the work himself, but being able to say "you are right, and you are not" is hugely consequential. By comparison, Jeff Bezos seems totally incompetent to lead a space company. Why? Not because he cannot be a good leader, he obviously can. But because he did not put enough personal energy to understand in details what the problems (technical and otherwise) at Blue Origin are, so he can eliminate the deadlocks that make that company unproductive.
Without Musk there would not be the breathtaking booster catching happening today, according to his biography:
"Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth.
It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it."
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?" After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?"
https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/phot...
> 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.
Literally every expert said that about landing the first stage of Falcon 9.
Then they said it about reusing it more than 10 times.
Then they said it about having good internet from a mega constellation of LEO stas.
Then they said it about using stainless steel for starship.
Then they said it about having a full-flow staged combustion cycle engine
Then they said it about catching the booster with chopsticks.
Now they're saying it about...
Yes, Elon is wildly optimistic about timelines. I have to laugh at his quote "At SpaceX we make the impossible merely late".
You can't deny SpaceX are absolutely doing what everyone said was impossible, and they're continuing to push forward. You'd have to be nuts to bet against them.
UPDATE: It was only a couple of months ago the CEO of United Launch Alliance called out SpaceX for showing what he claimed was a "partially assembled engine" [1].
It was a fully-functional engine that test fired [2]
Even the CEO of their biggest competitor, and ostensibly the second best rocket company on earth can not fathom what SpaceX are doing.
[1] https://x.com/torybruno/status/1819819208827404616
[2] https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1821674726885924923?t=v...
> Yes, Elon is wildly optimistic about timelines. I have to laugh at his quote "At SpaceX we make the impossible merely late".
I think an important part of this quote is “At SpaceX”. For my part, I generally assume that “SpaceX Elon” and “other venture Elon” are different people. He has certainly burned a lot of good will with his FSD predictions, and to a smaller degree with things like hyperloop, boring company, etc.
SpaceX in contrast has always greatly exceeded expectations.
But the timeline for Mars is slipping already. This very article says Starship is capable of doing the Mars mission as Musk described which is using the next 10 launch windows to deliver 1 million tons to Mars.
That would have involved launching 1,000 Starships last year. They have not done *1* launch with 100 tons of payload, the capacity of this rocket on paper.
They will absolutely with this design get to Mars. But the realistic timeline is within the next 20 years, and only a few hundred tons. It will be a monumental achievement that will be immortalized for the rest of humanity. But that scenario is 1/1000th of what Musk describes.
Starship is an incredible program but it is still rocket science not rocket fantasy. Please don’t think being realistic about getting 1,000 Starships to Mars in the next two years means I think Starship is a failure.
Musk is frequently wrong with his timelines. That’s not a surprise to anyone. Even he has joked about his often unrealistic optimism with timeframes on multiple occasions.
But I mean, most of us here are probably the same. Most CEOs I’ve worked with are quite poor at time estimates too. Come to think of it, I’ve never met a single human who is good at it.
The problem is often unknown unknowns that you had no way to predict. I once had a project delayed by months due to a rare bug in the .NET CLR that just took a really long time to track down. I don’t know much about rocket science, but operating at the edge of known science and technology presumably has some difficult periods...
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
If Elon Musk plans to land on mars in 2026 and he actually does it in 2046, you know what the history books will say:
Elon Musk launched the first mission to Mars in 2046.
Nobody cares about delays.
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.)
> not exactly the government spending / misaligned incentive argument
It sort of is. The folks selling specialised design services for optimising the third sigma of weight savings absolutely don't want NASA to use off-the-shelf components.
It definitely is also that. The whole Starliner thing is afaict totally ridiculous. Crazy how much money is being wasted, and how much would be wasted even if everything was working on schedule when compared to spacex.
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.
Tell me why we should be. Your answer can’t just be a vague reference to “some studies”.
Yes, because the "charge forward and worry about the consequences later" mantra has proven so historically successful over the past 100 years when it comes to environmental stewardship. CFC's, HFC's, PFAS, leaded fuel, and abundant plastic waste are proof we definitely know what we're doing when it comes to ensuring we don't pollute our planet or ourselves, right? The science on this remains novel precisely because the idea of launching hundreds of rockets a day was inconceivable even 10 years ago.
You want more specifics, I take it?
* It's been well known for decades that high-altitude supersonic flight damages the ozone layer significantly faster than conventional aircraft. New Scientist, 1997 [1]
* More recently, concerning reentries of spacecraft: Atmospheric impacts of the space industry require oversight, Nature, 2022 [2]
Our upper atmosphere is fragile and contains the bulk of the ozone layer that protects us all from skin cancer and being bathed in brutal ultraviolet radiation. You willing to risk it because "space is cool"?
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15320692-500-science-...
If needed and wanted methane can be created sustainably. But not sure about upper atmosphere issue.
Because you should consider the upside when you mention the downsides. 1000 Starships launching a year can mean exoplanet imaging, drilling on Europa, interstellar probes, an actual Mars colony, asteroid mining, brilliant pebbles, O'Neil cylinders, L1 solar shields, space junk removal and so on. Not all at the same but each of these is a project that is potentially feasible with enough mass in orbit. I'm not saying you have to like or care about any of them but you should consider what you actually gain for all that emitted CO2.
I agree space is cool. But why do you think the "space is cool" mantra is more important than ensuring that for the 8 billion humans that call this planet home—we have somewhere sustainable and safe to live?
Your asteroid mining for profit is arguably meaningless if we have no ozone layer.
And turn planet earth to barren mars in the process..
Because we can convert all produced carbon dioxide from a Starship back into methane using the Sabatier process [1].
Why isn't SpaceX doing that then? Why isn't any airline doing that then? Oh look, it's cheaper to use refined natural gas from a well. That's why. In the absence of either properly priced externalities, the market will always choose the cheapest option—Sabatier-generated Methane is not remotely comparable in price to fossil nat gas.
Mentioning theoretical solutions doesn't help if they will never be used practically.
I don’t think airliners use Methane?
Aircraft use hydrocarbons which require similarly intensive chemical processes to create the fuels from the same constituent ingredients as the Sabatier reaction.
discussion in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025020
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?
Somewhere between $30 and $150/kg. Depends a lot on how reusable Starship is and that's not something which will be known for a while.
Feel's like we're finally conquering the gravity well!
We have been for more than half a century ...
I wouldn't say well, but yeah, we're conquering it okay.
I will interpret this as a joke
You're interpreting it okay.