It reminds of the art of M.C.Escher in the sense that it is driven by a mathematical mindset, yet goes beyond mindless repetition. This artist and M.C. Escher would have loved having access to computer drawing program I think.
I have a 135 minute train ride to my office which I probably undertake once every week or two. Thankfully I can be seated for it and usually have enough room to either work with my laptop or just have a snooze or chillout to some media. While driving might get me their (on a good day) in 30 minutes less time, the train trip is definitely more relaxing and a better investment of my time.
Yes, pretty amazing. While I did have a couple of free tourist maps, I planned and executed a 1700km road trip to New Zealand basically using Google Maps on my laptop and then simply navigated on my phone. It seems incredible that you could entrust everyday's travel plans using this and it just worked. Sure you had to make sure you had downloaded maps (or at least cached) ahead of time for spotty networks. Only 25 years or so ago you absolutely had to have paper maps (and know how to read them) to embark on such a venture
I think they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. While their own Mars goals will need 100s if not 1000s of launches they also see new customers that would want launch and even recover much larger payloads than what are feasible today
I think that's a reasonable attitude to a point, but like, it doesn't scale infinitely. Build it and it will come to 50-100x today's launch capacity? And Mars is still a laughable pipedream. Doing 100s of launches will cost SpaceX so much more than they are making selling launches to the rest of the world, it simply makes no sense.
And like, I'm a space enthusiast. I think we should be out mining asteroids and setting up space living quarters. I just... hourly starship launches don't make any sort of logical sense.
What they do make sense as is a marketing gimmick for Elon to get on stage to appeal to emotions of investors and nerds online. It's a gorgeous dream! I want it to be! But it's just a clever emotional appeal to get you to not think too hard or too critically.
Let's take the pessimistic estimates of Falcon 9 Heavy, which are about $3000/kg to LEO. (The optimistic estimates put it closer to $1500.)
You are suggesting that pessimistically, Starship is aiming at $30-60/kg to LEO. (Or, using the optimistic estimates, $15-$30/kg to LEO).
I don't think in even Elon Musk's wildly optimistic press conferences he pushed a number below ~$100/kg to LEO. I don't know where you get the idea that launch costs are going to come down 50-100x.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations look like this: fully reusable Starship's flight costs roughly the cost of fuel, which is 1-2 million dollars per flight, both stages. If the Starship carries 150 tons to orbit per flight, and it costs $1.5e6, then we have the price of 1 kg on orbit equal to $1.5e6 / 150e3 = $10. Which is rather comfortably 100 times cheaper than SOTA.
Wildly optimistic would seem to be even lower estimations. If both oxygen and methane we can get from atmosphere - and we have both efficient detanders and demonstrations of e.g. Terraform Industries which use solar panels and oxygen to pull CO2 from atmosphere and produce CH4 - then the question is of optimization, and we're just starting here for this application. So, a flight of Starship might get cheaper than $1 million - the question is, how much and how soon?
I haven't seen anywhere suggesting a $1-2m launch cost is a reasonable target. Sure, maybe $10m is achievable, but $1m is so far off it's not useful as a cost estimate.
You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to get to meaningful asteroids, and in fact many fantastic candidate asteroids come much, much closer than Mars.
Some asteroids are water rich, some asteroids are mineral rich. Many mineral rich asteroids appear to be 'hydrated', meaning that among the rocks they contain ice. Solar power will be more effective on an asteroid in NEO than on the surface of Mars, but gravity will be lower. I don't know that we, as a species, really know which will be harder. They'll require different technologies, but the raw materials exist in both places sufficient to manufacture fuel.
We have a lot of experience with chemical processes like fractional distilling that will take a lot more work in micro-gravity. Yeah there are tradeoffs, but my hunch is the surface of Mars will be a lot more familiar.
It depends on what you are thinking critically about - what is your frame of mind. You don't see a viable business here.
But SpaceX does see several possibilities. One is supplying a US Moon base and US space stations. Since Starship/Superheavy rockets are so inexpensive to build (about 100M in expendable configuration [1] even doing something like that would be profitable for SpaceX.
For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.
It might also be that a nation state might want to fund something like that to establish a base there.
Again, you may see a viable business in Mars colonization. But SpaceX does. So do other people. It was conventional wisdom that Starlink would not work, but it is now quite profitable. [2]
You seemingly ignored the cost of the return ticket, which even with your fantasy numbers would cost many millions of dollars.
Cramming one hundred people into a starship is eerily reminiscent of overloaded slave ships. The assumption is that you will die on the journey or at your destination.
> For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.
Musk has lied many times about many things. This one in particular makes less than 0 sense - Starship has nowhere near the capacity to take 100 humans to Mars even just including the provisions needed for the trip, unless you assume that those people will essentially sit in their own little cell for 2 months.
Thank you. I was timed out, but I was going to say there's 0% chance of Starship taking 100 people. Do you have any concept of how much water, oxygen, C02 scrubbing, food, shielding, medicine, and infrastructure you need to support 100 people?! Imagine the device they have on the ISS, multiply it by 20, and then pack all the water it uses in a year in advance onto the ship. Then pack 100 warm bodies in there too?
It's simply not possible in the ship they've designed.
I would imagine that if you just had a switch connected to nowhere, in the morning you would remember what you Morse coded in any case just because it has raised your alertness
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