This headline seems wrong. There was nothing announced recently about this. It's highly misleading.
The document specifying the $100M expansion was available and known about from February of this year. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50660.msg2567468#msg2567468 https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/TABS/Search/Project/TABS2024011437
And that $100M is only part of the expansion, an expansion nearing completion. It's already been in construction for a while.
And the "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion.
The headline is "Plans to build a new extension" but the body is "They already built a new extension that isn't quite finished yet".
From the headline the obvious implication is they're planning ANOTHER giant factory which doesn't seem to be the case, or at least isn't what they're discussing here, it's possible they are secretly planning another giant factory.
The one a day, may also come from the goal of making engines. With how many each rocket has and the turn around between launches shortening, that is one of the goals they would need to reach.
> The one a day, may also come from the goal of making engines.
No that was very clear. It came from here: https://youtu.be/OZVR2SNjyug?t=1963
> "[The factory expansion] will enable us to increase our production rate significantly as we build toward our long term goal of producing one ship per day."
Yea... like.. one a day IS possible. You can build one of anything a day if you commit enough resources and money to it.
It's not going to happen in the real world I don't think. Even if some crazy world where we're all hopping in Starships for city to city journeys they wouldn't need that many.
That is absolutely *unreal.* 🤯
What would they even do with that many space ships?
I wonder if someone asked a similar question in 1924 about airplanes.
Seriously, what a crazy concept to think about. Reminds me of Gattaca where he likes to go outside after work to watch the rocket launches which seem to be happening basically every day.
And it's been getting faster. In January and February they did 10 and 9 launches respectively, which works out to one every 3.2 days on average.
Then in March and April they did 12 for both, or one every 2.5 days.
Last month in May they did 14 launches - one every 2.2 days.
Entirely possible that we see them average one every two days by the end of the year.
Yeah I think F9 flight rate is like one every 2.7 days right now, and still increasing. And that's with only partial reuse - have to build a whole new second stage each time. And plenty of the flights are drone ship landings, so it takes days to get the ships out there and back again. Starship, eventually being fully reusable and always returning directly to the launch site, could have an insane launch rate in comparison.
Honestly, I think the kinda amazing thing that flies under the radar is this Falcon 9 upper stage production line.
Orbital launch vehicles have always been very bespoke items, built one at a time to exacting specifications, requiring tests and retests and re-retests. SpaceX is turning them out like sausages.
I imagine the speed is only increasing.
There was almost a first booster to make it to 20 launches, but after it landed successfully on the droneship it faced high seas and then when it arrived it had toppled over and lost half itself. Apparently the newer boosters already had more advanced landing legs that would have ridden through the waves - such legs would also allow the droneship to travel back more quickly in calmer seas.
On the other hand, Superheavy is far more complex than Falcon 9 and certifying that nothing broke and that all the engines and piping is good for another launch would necessarily take longer. Starship is even more finicky because it has a heatshield and they would absolutely need to inspect all of the tiles and surfaces for damage extensively before sending it out.
Starship/Superheavy will be reusable, but the idea that it can simply land/fuel/takeoff seems dubious.
I know nothing really on this but if rates are picking up like this is that going to have any effect on availability of fuel for them? Or other effects of all that fuel being used?
Falcon 9 uses RP-1, a type of kerosene. No risk of shortage. If you mean from an environmental perspective - all of spaceflight and rocketry combined is a rounding error in global emissions, not even 1% of 1%. I think the statistics were something like one year of all rocketry doesn't even match 1 day of airline flights.
> No risk of shortage.
Yes and no...it's a very specialized blend of kerosene, and I think SpaceX has deals directly with the refineries to get enough of it produced for their launch rate. It's not going to run out, but the logistics behind getting enough RP-1 are part of the reason for going with methane for Starship.
Definitely, methane is a big improvement - much cheaper, and also less environmentally damaging as a sweet bonus. Also easier to hypothetically produce on Mars.
Less environmentally damaging in normal operation, and much less hazardous when things go wrong. Consider the damage of releasing hundreds of tons of kerosene at either the Florida or Texas sites...far, far worse than a few thousand tons of methane.
And yes, easier to produce on Mars, and easier to store than hydrogen in cislunar space or on the lunar surface even if you have to import it from Earth, but even vehicles like Vulcan, Zhuque-2, New Glenn, Ariane Next, etc are using it due to its other advantages.
I'm a bit morbidly curious. For the fuel that Booster/ship uses, parts of it would be able to be re-converted from CO2 later on, but as for the Ship burn in space, is any of that exhaust lost to the earth (reach EV) or does it all more or less come down?
Gattaca is such a fascinating movie. Practically all the technology it predicted in 1990 came true - not quite in the predicted time and not with the predicted speed, but nonetheless, it does exist.
The main difference between the society depicted in Gattaca and reality is that we chose to not use the technology like it is used in the movie. We *could* run extensive pre-implantation diagnostics on in vitro fertilized embryos, but we don't, for ethical (and cost) reasons.
Personally, as a molecular biologist, I HATE(D) GATTACA. It really struck me as a movie about the author's personal fears without understanding anything about what they were writing about. I've only seen it once, mind you, so correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I remember, they can analyze your entire genome from a single hair in a second, but they cannot do any somatic cell modifications? So no ability to change your genetics after birth? In a society that values genetic contributions that much? Come on, really? They have that much understanding of the human genome and don't have the technology or desire to modify it. Yea, sure. The "faith births" (not to mention the "regular people") would be such an untapped market for "upgrades" that it would go beyond anything else in the society.
As for why we don't do it ourselves - it mostly has to do with the fact that we also don't know the consequences for eliminating alleles from the population. Those "negative" traits might be useful down the road, because they are good at resisting a particular disease that would otherwise wipe out the entire population.
I'm a molecular biologist, too.
I think you're right in the sense that Gattaca didn't predict all technology available today - it only focused on some technologies that were predictable at the time, and was pretty accurate doing so. The sci-fi aspects of sequencing a genome within seconds aside, it has two clear weaknesses:
- It vastly overestimates the predictive power of genetic variations. Just because we know in which bases an individual differs from the reference genome, that doesn't mean we can predict their health, intelligence, abilities, life span, etc. The author obviously didn't understand the complexity of genetic networks and the weak statistics of population genetics. They also depict society to lean towards the "nature" side of the "nature vs nurture" debate - which it doesn't in reality.
- It didn't predict the power we already have and will continue to build over our genomes. But to be fair, anyone predicting CRISPR in the 90s would have been laughed at. Also, I don't think the bottom line of the movie really changes whether or not we take genome engineering into account: There would be people who use this technology, and there would be people who don't. Using this technology in an unregulated manner would inevitably result in discrimination.
> It vastly overestimates the predictive power of genetic variation.
Isn't that the whole point of the film. It's not that the people with 'better' genes are more successful because their genes are better. It's that they are more successful because they have more opportunities and can get better jobs because of their genes. It becomes a self fulling prediction in a in a society that vastly overestimates the predictive power of the genes.
The entire story is about how someone without 'good genes' can be just as successful. Not by getting better genes but by faking it so he is treated equally.
He does achieve the same things, but he has to work much harder to do so than the "genetically superior" people. For example the running exam: the point wasn't for the subjects to run the distance, the point was to do so with a stable heart rate. He had to cheat on that exam, because his genetics did not allow him to perform on the same level.
One could of course argue that the entire exam wasn't designed to select the most capable astronauts, but rather to discriminate against "God-children".
>He does achieve the same things, but he has to work much harder to do so than the "genetically superior" people. For example the running exam: the point wasn't for the subjects to run the distance, the point was to do so with a stable heart rate. He had to cheat on that exam, because his genetics did not allow him to perform on the same level.
This is pretty much accurate, though. If you want to join an elite cycling or running program at a school they give you a VO2Max test to see how efficient your heart/lungs are at oxygenating your blood. If you don’t get a good score on that they won’t even accept you because you’ll never be able to perform at a high level.
Also he has a fatal heart condition with a 99% chance of killing him in a few years. After the running test he collapses clutching his chest.
All his cheating is actually really irresponsible since he is absolutely not flight qualified with that heart condition. Which is why they sensibly have fitness checks before starting multiyear space missions.
I get that wasn't the intended interpretation of the film, but this is what they showed.
> I get that wasn't the intended interpretation of the film, but this is what they showed.
Obviously you were meant to get this aspect of the movie, or else it wouldn't be in the movie. He's shown several times in the movie to be pretty irresponsible and makes dangerous decisions to achieve his goals. There are a few different ways to interpret the higher level themes around that, but those underlying aspects are definitely there and deliberate.
Just like today, there's a lot of systems in place to discretely and not so discretely filter out people who aren't of the right social class, etc. That and other tests like it in gattaca can be likened to how, for example, unpaid internships are used to filter out people who aren't wealthy enough to survive without an income that doesn't come from their parents or trust fund for several years. People can and do manage it, but like in gattaca, it's done at great personal cost and sacrifice.
And it's been a while since I've seen the movie, but weren't there hints that some of the predictions were basically pseudoscience? Some genuine stuff, like the protagonist's heart defect, but some stuff that was basically gene-based astrology. (Maybe reading of entrails would be more apt?)
My issue was that he really had a legitimate heart defect (which, yes...couldn't that be corrected? Would it even require gene therapy?). He wasn't proving everyone wrong about judging people based on their genes, he was putting other people's lives at risk to fulfill his personal dream.
It’s a good allegory for systemic social problems. I’m surprised it’s not been more heavily cited when it comes to debates around affirmative action. Hell I have talked to pretty smart people in tech who were convinced that women couldn’t be engineers because of their physiology, which always floors me because I personally know so many great women engineers.
They probably have the tech, but the cost is so high that “normal” humans that need/want the upgrades cannot afford them.
Also the society in GATTACA didn’t seem to lack workers. Employers are so choosy that screen by DNA before doing anything else. Thus no need to increase workforce via upgrading “normal” humans.
Well, the entire society was on a Good partner selection activities if they were able to do so it would break the entire society picture that was driving the movie drama itself.
Like if you could alter and fix all then there is no longer a point to go and find a good partner
Actually, the pianist at the recital the Hawke and Thurman characters go to has 6 fingers on each hand to be able to play a score a regular ten-fingered person couldn't possibly perform. From what I recall it is at least implicated that he was a product of genetic engineering
I still think there’s a future for designer babies. Once the box gets opened it will be difficult to close. Getting rid of genetic health issues would be akin to early inoculations.
No. Nobody really knows what "superior" genetics means or whether even makes sense. Definitely we cannot predict life spans based on genes. All we know is how to avoid a few genetic conditions and we do already do genetic screening for those.
I’ve always said that starship is envisioned to be like an airline company. But to hear it actually stated like this makes me pause lol
1 per day is roughly the same production rate of a 737. So, theoretically, this space ship will be built at the same rate as one of the most popular jets of the last four decades. We’re theoretically going to see over ten thousand starships at some point in the next 20-30 years. That’s just crazy to me.
Yeah, with aspirational statements like these you can safely take it to mean “well into the future”. Like, if starship truly is able to bring cost per lb to orbit into the double digits, then there literally isn’t a limit for what we could do. It changes everything. But even with those low costs, it’ll take many years for firms to design systems to take advantage of it.
If the cost per lb is as low as they say it could be, let’s say, by the end of the decade, then yeah, demand for 1 starship today will exist in the late 2030’s. If the cost per lb is lowered but still in the hundreds, then there will still be a lot of demand. But the 1 per day production would exclusively be needed for musk trying to get us to mars/make it self sufficient despite the expense.
We know something like orbital manufacturing is a thing but we have no idea how to do it or even what it looks like. In zero G and in vacuum what could you manufacture that you could not on Earth. What new materials are possible. The truth is the you need like a huge amount of research done with possibly hundreds of people in space. Ambitions need to massively expand.
Do we even know how to do machines in space? Maybe machines in space look different. Maybe to manufacturer or build something it's more like a spider spinning a web then it is like an assembly line. I don't know. It's probably going to take a hundred years to really figure out.
At the American Astronomical Society Meeting I am attending right now, some groups are complaining about the 8,000 satellites in space and nearly daily launches messing up their instruments. There are requests to launch 547,000 satellites in various constellations. There will be more than one launch a day in a couple years.
It takes many flights to fully refuel a Starship in orbit. If the plan is to send a handful of them to Mars, it will require dozens and dozens of flights to fuel them in orbit.
I assume the factory will be mostly producing ships and not boosters, similar to how they mostly produce second stages for Falcon 9 and just reuse boosters.
1 a day, a crazy number is really only 365 a year, which sounds crazy but is very consumable, at least initially. You'll need multiple fuel depot ships, multiple cargo variants as well as stripped down expendable ships for outer system science missions. This doesn't even go down the rabbit hole which is the entire purpose for the existence of SpaceX which is the colonization of Mars. Quite a few of those ships will never come back and if you plan on colonizing a place that far away you need to send a pile of people and material every launch window. I've heard the ultimate goal is thousands of ships transferring every window, which seems ambitious but is also basically necessary.
I wonder what the ratio between Superheavy boosters and Starships will be. Since both are reusable, it's probably different from what we're seeing with Falcon 9.
Even without Mars colonization, SpaceX is highly likely here to stay. Their operations in LEO are indispensable to both space agencies and companies looking to launch satellites.
I think it might even be more extreme than F9 once they work the bugs out. As in far more starships in comparison to boosters in contrast to Falcon 9 boosters to 2nd stages.
A giant stainless steel booster that doesn't need a re-entry burn should be more resilient to lots of things, including fatigue than a thinner F9 booster.
So once they arrive at the "Block 5" version of SuperHeavy, they can just build say 4-5 for every launch site, stack a couple dozen spare engines per launch site and then build ships. If the booster lands on the launch mount and achieves it's goal of basically being inspected and flown again you could fly the same booster multiple times a day. Ships on the other hand have to go places and do things all the while surviving a much more punishing return to Earth. I'm sure they might eventually get to a "land and launch" cadence with some future variant of Starship but for the foreseeable future I'm sure those things will need an inspection/reuse procedure that is closer to the current Falcon 9 booster regime.
That's a shit load of methane they will be burning. It's there even the infrastructure in place to pipe everything required to sustain that to launch platforms?
I wonder how feasible on site methane production is for this scale and launch cadence. If they do this, they'd have most of the kinks ironed out before needing to refuel Mars return trips
Plus it'd be 'carbon neutral'
Imagine that. Would pretty much be the closest we can get (so far) to electric rockets lifting payload into LEO. Nuclear reactor -> electricity -> electrolysis/carbon capture/Sabatier -> Starship/Super Heavy. CH4 + O2 to CO2 + H2O AND BACK BABY
God I love thermodynamics
I believe their recent proposal for the Florida site does mention a plant to produce their own methane. Much better than the current "bring in dozens of trucks" strategy.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together. The infrastructure has decades to develop.
How did you do that? I calculate it as only 1%. Still an extraordinary figure but not quite 2-4%
* CH4 Mass of superheavy booster: 750 t
* Mass of CO2 created when CH4 is burned: 2025 t
* Duration of Superheavy booster burn: 170 s
* CO2 generated per second: 12 t / s
* Global CO2 produced in 2022: 37.15 bn t
* Average CO2 produced per second in 2022: 1177 t / s
* Percentage of CO2 contributed by starship during its boost phase: 1%
Getting a single Starship to the moon requires like 20 refueling flights. We're probably talking about the typical deep-space mission requiring like 6 flights, 1 tanker, and 1 passenger ship. So probably 6 boosters to maybe 8 Starships.
They want to launch about 1,000 ships to Mars every Mars Hohman Transfer Window once able, every 2 years nonstop, until they've sent a million people and a billion tons of useful payload to Mars.
SpaceX is a lightning in a bottle anomaly of a company. They're a private company with ambitions of multiple state actors and capital efficiency at the speed of thought. IFT4 proved that a private company can build an SLS/N1 class vehicle without breaking the wallet. If they catch booster with IFT5 or 6, it'll prove that not even nation states can compete with them.
It's scary how far ahead they are.
That is absolutely *unreal.* 🤯
>What would they even do with that many space ships?...I wonder if someone asked a similar question in 1924 about airplanes.
IBM's CEO in 1943 predicted a world market of 5 computers. When things get cheap, fast, and light weight, who knows how far we'll go.
One a day is within an order of magnitude of the highest rate of bomber production for a factory during WWII. Willow Run produced a B-24 roughly every hour, 24/7.
Like you, I can't imagine that there will be any need for that many Starships any time soon, nor the urgency required to justify spending the money to build them that fast. For comparison, Falcon 9 production topped out at 18 per year in 2018. In 2023, only four were built.
Having a re-usable vehicle means you don't need to build very many of them. Is SpaceX envisioning a time when there will be tens of launches per day, requiring hundreds of vehicles to be built per year? And, more importantly, is Musk going to foot the bill personally? There seems little chance that the United States Congress will appropriate the kind of money required to colonize Mars.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
I mean, that's what they're doing.
But you're implying that it will take hundreds of tries to get it right. That's an AWFUL lot of money to throw away. And, frankly, I think SpaceX has shown that they can get to a usable vehicle with a lot fewer launches than that.
No one in their right mind would build a production line capable of building one a day unless there was an operational need for building one a day.
Not necessarily. They might just want the capability to make hundreds of launches a year before they figure out the design for starship mk2 heat resistant boogaloo.
> Like you, I can't imagine that there will be any need for that many Starships any time soon, nor the urgency required to justify spending the money to build them that fast. For comparison, Falcon 9 production topped out at 18 per year in 2018. In 2023, only four were built.
This is a bit misleading as the production shifted to upper stages, which are being built in over a hundred per year.
>One a day is within an order of magnitude of the highest rate of bomber production for a factory during WWII. Willow Run produced a B-24 roughly every hour, 24/7... Is SpaceX envisioning a time when there will be tens of launches per day, requiring hundreds of vehicles to be built per year?
And all that goes without saying that orbital capable rockets (let alone ones that have the ability to land and be reused) are orders of magnitude more complex than a B-24 and won't have the benefit of a full on war time economy backing it.
Frankly this seems like Musk talking out of his ass right after he teased a SpaceX IPO.
> Frankly this seems like Musk talking out of his ass right after he teased a SpaceX IPO.
There hasn't been any SpaceX IPO teased, and this didn't come from Elon Musk, it came from the SpaceX webcast during the launch.
> this seems like Musk talking out of his ass
That was my take on it too. OTOH, the quote that number came from wasn't by Musk. It was Kate Tice, the manager of SpaceX Quality Systems Engineering. Who knows?
I honestly don't know much about the inner workings of SpaceX, but I do work in the aerospace industry and I feel qualified enough to say that it would take a monumental shift in a lot of things to get a company like SpaceX capable of producing one ultra heavy lift vehicle per day. Like we're talking some combination of wartime-esque economy, more lax regulations and requirements, requisition of VAST amounts of raw materials (some of which, like helium, are in scarce supply). And all this is without an immediate need to even have that many rockets. Like who is contracting that many heavy lift vehicles right away? Basically my read on it is that it would require an investment of WAY more than $100 million.
I'm sure you're correct about the money required. And we all know Musk doesn't spend his own money on capital expansion unless forced to.
Since you're in the industry, I do have a question about pace. You mentioned complexity earlier. I wouldn't have thought the complexity of the vehicle to be an impediment to whatever production rate is desired, provided the parts, labor, and money needed to achieve the desired rate are available. I know this is a vast oversimplification, but don't modern production methods mean you can break the build up into small enough units of work to achieve whatever rate is desired? That's the "magic" of a production line, no? Or is there something special about building these particular vehicles that would make a one per day rate impossible even if infinite money, labor and parts were available?
You're not wrong that modern production methods can allow for significant streamlining so to speak. But to give context a modern narrow body airliner (think 737 or A320) is built at a pace of about 30-40 a month. Some more complex widebody aircraft (787 off the top of my head) production rate was as low as half a dozen or so a month due to supply chain issues (that's post covid). And that's after decades of investment from Boeing and Airbus and significantly more demand from airlines than SpaceX would get anytime in the near future. That is to say as the thing you're building gets bigger and more complex so will your supply chain (often exponentially so). And that means that you're more prone to stoppages because you can't source something.
And this is just me kinda spit balling off the top of my head because I currently work with compliance stuff that sometimes has a trickle down effect on production stoppages.
Fair enough. I was actually thinking about Boeing's (now shelved) plans to increase 737 production rates from the current level when I asked the question. I have little doubt that if the economic incentives were there to produce a 737 a day, AND the supply chains and labor pool could support a one per day rate, Boeing would want to do it.
But back to SpaceX, I just don't see the economic incentives justifying the building of hundreds of vehicles per year. And, frankly, no one has ever made an economic case for a Mars colony at all. 🤷♂️
They want to colonize Mars. The plan is to send a fleet of ships with everything necessary, in every Mars launch window. Like a thousand ships in each window.
The goal is to send a fleet of like 2000 starships per year to Mars every 26 months when earth and mars align to establish a self sustaining Mara colony. The goal is to be done in like half a century or something. So this seems reasonable since the early missions I think they want to diss-assemble the starships on Mars for raw materials.
When debating the possible uses for so many starships, the potential for logistics may be the first real large scale implementation of the starship platform.
This would be largely because, in reality, the ability to rapidly arrive at any location in the world, with at least 100t of cargo in a max of 2 hrs, will be the next revolution in applied logistical support for projection of power on a global scale, something the US is extremely keen on remaining, by a large margin, the leading super power in.
The USs status as the most powerful army in the world, even more so than all of Europe combined, is supremely achieved through their mastery of applied logistics and rapid power projection.
As of now, China is attempting to reach a level of logistical support that can rival the US directly off their coast in a potential invasion of Taiwan, by allowing them to more rapidly supply, and reinforce their forces, and the US would not be in favor of being outmatched in the ability to rapidly deploy superior amounts of munitions, troops, and armor, to any location, at any time, across the world.
The Starship platform is, without a doubt, the next great revolution in achieving that level of logistics, which is why a not-insignificant amount of US politicians, and generals, are so eager to pump spacex with as much military budget as they can get away with, without pissing off the wrong people in other parts of the government.
Like the old saying goes, Munitions win battles, Logistics win wars.
Now, do I agree with everything SpaceX has done, especially the actions and words of one particular CEO who would see people like me dead 6ft under? Absolutely not! But I do believe, in the grand scheme, spacex as a whole will do a lot of good for humanity, and potentially help us avert, or mitigate, the rapidly approaching collapse of our current way of life, by providing more easy access to places beyond our atmosphere.
I don't need a ride I need ammo. - Vladimir Zelensky
Getting 100tons of stuff somewhere in a handful of hours would be amazingly useful. Getting prepositioned supplied that were left on orbit dropped within 90 minutes or so would be stunning.
Space x will be a military and gov agency contractor building and supporting medium and heavy lift service anywhere in the world within an hour. They won’t just be building rockets. They will supply cargo modules and infrastructure for pads around the globe.
I think it could be used in some cases:
1. Lunar tourism: Even though Dear Moon was canceled, if given the chance and at an affordable price, who wouldn't want to see the Moon?
2. Deep space transportation missions: This includes both government and private companies. Since the projection of power isn't limited, why not purchase a few for exploring the solar system?
3. Attempting landings on various celestial bodies: If simulations show it's feasible, besides Mars and the Moon, other locations could be attempted for landings with similar goals to point 2.
It sounds so goofy, but the costs being suggested around starship are about the same as airline prices for an adult ($20 per kg). You could Starship my ass to the other side of the world for what an airline ticket costs some day, giving me a cool view of space and cutting off maybe 20 hours of travel time and layovers.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Yes but a 1924 airplane didn’t burn 3,400 tons of fuel every flight!!!!!!!! Yes he talks about 10 launches a day! Just from Boca Chica alone. Just think about the size of the catalytic converters it will need!!!!!!
I hope they're also thinking about what multiple packages of 200 tons they'll actually be sending. All that stuff has to be developed too, and if they're not already working on it, then it stands to reason that Starship will be ready for Mars before any meaningful payloads are.
I imagine there is a backlog of manufacturing and test equipment that was outright too heavy with past spacecraft. Hell they could just start launching water or metal sheeting
I wonder how feasible it would be to just start sending up loads of pre fab building components then in a few years send some a crew with equipment to assemble a full martian base with what's there.
They could probably send a crew of Boston Dynamic robots, just update it with new weights or directives for whatever jobs it needs to do, and send all the equipment to repair them and have them do maintenance on each other and build up Mars, working 24/7, as we keep sending them new materials.
At this point, I think it makes more sense to wait a few more years before sending a human for just that reason. Robotics are likely already capable but in a few years they will be for sure. Work out some kinks with solar charging or going nuclear and for the delay in sending commands and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to send a person first. Let the robots build a small habitat or whatever and then send a couple humans for any needed finishing touches.
I still disagree with the "just have autonomous robots go to Mars" camp. I think this is a variation of that; saying "we'll send humans, but later. A few more years...", then "a few more".
This really overestimates the current capabilities, or underestimate the challenges.
Sending increasingly complex robots should be done. Ingenuity and Perseverance were exactly that. We should work on ruggedized, highly programmable robots that are able to be given commands in the field to perform increasingly complex tasks. But glossing over the details of "transport this pallet of solar panels, inspect that ridge, unpack these ground mounts and bury them, unpack and mount the panels, cable them, find a safe location for the inverters, etc" constitutes thousands of individual tasks which we don't have software ready to autonomously perform. That means extremely long, error-prone round trips between mission control, developers, etc.
We should stage enough equipment, life support, and habitat components to land humans on Mars, and allow them to both remote-control resources on the ground in realtime and perform work themselves, while coordinating high-level mission objectives with Earth.
Robotic autonomy will continue to get better, but we're far from the point where we can rely on AI/ML to bootstrap a base on Mars.
And for God's sake, send another Ingenuity to scout us an LZ, lava tubes and caverns like yesterday. Let's do this!
That is actually a big advantage of Starship. It is so big that for many purposes, you no longer need to engineer overly complex mechanism so that it can fit into a rocket. For example the James Web telescope would have been far less complex if they didn't need to shove it into a 5m wide Ariane 5, but instead into a 8m wide Starship.
Like, if you can get your payload into a 40-feet shipping container, you can fit it into Starship. And that is just a massive gamechanger, especially combined with the massive weight Starship can lift, meaning you can do stuff like e.g. build your satellite/space station part out of steel instead of needing to go with expensive stuff like titanium/composites/similar.
I think the bigger question is when SpaceX wants the factory to produce 1 Starship per day. 5 years would be far too early, but I could see something like 15 years, that is a long enough time for a large space customer base to grow.
Starship can in fact yeet up 4 extended length shipping containers worth of volume to LEO.
Basically you could bundle 4 tractor trailers together in a diamond, and they'd fit within the Starship payload bay with no issues. At that point mass is your only concern. As long as you aren't making your equipment out of depleted uranium though, you can basically yeet up like a third of the ISS on a single launch.
Edit: actually, I just modeled it for shits and giggles. [This is the payload faring, with four 40' standard containers for reference.](https://i.imgur.com/dh7V2Sc.png) Shit is insane, like not even the shuttle could come close to this.
> Like, if you can get your payload into a 40-feet shipping container, you can fit it into Starship. And that is just a massive gamechanger,
People throw around gamechanger as a buzzword so often it loses meaning, but this is probably a lot more significant than people realize because that's a STANDARD form factor for global trade. If it ships on a container ship it should ship on Starship.
> Like, if you can get your payload into a 40-feet shipping container, you can fit it into Starship.
I...knew it was big, but holy fuck, that really puts it into perspective.
I just want to see asteroid mining, and on-site refining at orbital construction platforms built at the L5/L5 lagrange points within my lifetime.
Yeah, I'd say the best description of Starship isn't something like "the most powerful space vehicle ever made" but something like "space truck". Because that will be Starships intended purpose, to be a space truck transporting thousands of tons into orbit/space (or to bring stuff from space back to earth).
> You'll always want to maximize space and payload
Not really. What you want is a balance of cost vs benefit. The costs and space limitations have been prohibitively restrictive up to now, making the size and weight of the payload a primary concern. This rocket should give a lot more breathing room in those calculations, meaning for some applications it will be better to go with a larger heavier payload that's simpler, sturdier, or just has more functionality.
It could make a Venus probe feasible. If you can finally send a probe properly resistant to corrosive environments that's strong enough to withstand the pressure we could get a long term study of the planet.
They are building this much capacity for their own plans. They need that many stsrships to fuel interplanetary fleets. Customers will be the ones who find other utility in the system. That said, between large orbital habitats, enormous space telescopes, and rare earth mining on asteroids, there is plenty pf potential for market 10 years from now.
The entire HLS development contract amounts to $3B, and that includes payment that comes after many upcoming milestones that they haven't received, including two test flights to the moon's surface. They've only gotten a some hundreds of millions of it so far. SpaceX stated in mid-2023 that they'll have spent $5B by the end of 2023 on Starship development, so we're beyond $5B at this point. https://spacenews.com/spacex-investment-in-starship-approaches-5-billion/
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Just a game of trial and error until they get it properly right, then ramp to mass production.
Same evolution as cars, planes, trains. Just way bigger and more expensive😂
Y’all conflate Elon and his other companies and SpaceX so often it’s crazy.
SpaceX has failed at its stated goals like twice in the two decades they’ve been around. They walked back on Red Dragon, and they walked back on landing Crew Dragon propulsively. That’s it. And in both cases it was because they aren’t married to ideas if they find more practical solutions.
SpaceX has achieved every goal it’s set out to achieve so far. The only thing that slides is the timeline. But they have an undeniable “track record” at this point.
I feel like both Red Dragon and propulsive Crew Dragon didn't so much fail as NASA didn't want to fund them. Everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding. Actually propulsive Crew Dragon, I am sure it wasn't even a funding thing, NASA just didn't want it because they didn't think it was safe.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re “dependent” on nasa funding. But yeah, at least for red dragon, it was obvious at the time that it would just be a waste of money. And they demonstrated crew dragon hovering using its Draco engines. Like you said, nasa just didn’t have the stomach for it.
So yeah I agree. I don’t personally view those items as failures. I’m just offering what few pivots SpaceX has done despite those pivots being more or less out of practicality.
> Everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding.
Not true at all. Most of SpaceX's funding is not from NASA. Sure NASA is the biggest single component, but it's not even the majority.
If NASA doesn't want to fund something like Crew Dragon, SpaceX isn't going to do it because NASA is the only customer that can pay. NASA doesn't have to be the majority of their funding to define SpaceX's direction.
The only thing where SpaceX has a clear customer in mind other than NASA is Starlink. (And yes, they're selling launches to other businesses, but NASA defines the market.)
> If NASA doesn't want to fund something like Crew Dragon, SpaceX isn't going to do it because NASA is the only customer that can pay.
I agree there. Crew Dragon was developed almost entirely for NASA's purposes. It was a bit of a side-diversion away from things like fully reusable rockets.
> NASA doesn't have to be the majority of their funding to define SpaceX's direction.
That's different than what you said before. You said everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding.
> The only thing where SpaceX has a clear customer in mind other than NASA is Starlink. (And yes, they're selling launches to other businesses, but NASA defines the market.)
Falcon 9 is a thing that exists.
It's more correct to say "Dragon's existence is entirely dependent on NASA's continued usage." The other major parts of SpaceX, Falcon 9, Starlink, and Starship, are not.
> That's different than what you said before. You said everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding.
I didn't say *completely* dependent, but it is dependent. Falcon 9 would never have launched if NASA hadn't been there to purchase Dragon launches. SpaceX is taking big risks but they can't afford to spend money on hardware NASA won't buy. That doesn't mean the hardware has to be *only* sold to NASA but it does have to sell to NASA. SpaceX can't just build whatever they think is best.
Starship has to fit the mission requirements for Artemis. Starlink is a secondary customer which was only possible because SpaceX started out by building Falcon 9 for NASA. Starship might prove to be similarly useful for Starlink, but they're not going to bet the farm on building a Starship which can only do Starlink and can't sell to NASA.
Track record?
Send a payload to space.
return a booster to a bardge
Land a booster
reuse a booster
reuse a booster 20 times.
launch 80% of all mass to LEO wordwide in a year
Human rated
launch the largest rocket ever
He's track record looks pretty good to me. Actually that record is pretty mindblowing. What he's not so good at is the timing.
He didn't "promise" anyone. People said in an offhand statement, multiple times, and multiple dates. People need to learn how to separate idle conversation from promises.
The magnitude of the promise is certainly wrong, but SpaceX has achieved some absolutely incredible feats. 30 Starships a year would be insane from where we're standing now, imagine if they exceed that.
I love this quote, and it's so true.
The goal at first seems laughable.
And then later when it's apparent that the goal will be achieved, just very late, people again laugh at the delayed fulfillment.
Him delivering his milestones late is still quite the achievement, just because it started from scratch and the milestones are new to even compagnies who've been in the field for decades.
On the other hand, Boeing finally sent a rocket to ISS but with all the leaks that are being discovered everyday, I'm not sure if they'll come back in it or ditch it in space and hop in with a Suyuz or SpaceX crew.
Nobody is arguing that his timelines aren't usually wrong. We know they are. We're just saying that it is still definitely going to happen, and the company has some incredible feats already under its belt
'Last week’s test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket was a big win for SpaceX, marking the fourth successful launch. Its first-stage booster, Super Heavy, made a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico while the 165-foot upper stage, called “Ship,” dropped into the Indian Ocean. The four successes follow two failures, including an explosion, of the first two Starships.
“We have Ships and Super Heavy boosters built and either ready to launch or in testing for the next several flights with more coming off of the production line as SpaceX’s Starfactory continues to grow,” said Jessie Anderson, SpaceX’s Falcon Structures Manufacturing Engineering Manager, according to space.com. “The latest phase of the factory currently under construction will come online this summer, giving us several 100,000 more square feet of space.”
There are hundreds if not thousands of companies who would love to do things in space. The current barrier is cost. With mass production cost drops significantly and allows all those companies to start becoming customers.
If/when colonies are established on the moon or other planets it will require a large transportation network to maintain. The space station has less than a dozen people and requires resupply every 2-3 months. Imagine 500 on a moon base.
The technology is too close for it not to be completed. it is almost inevitable that there will be a large space industry in the next few decades. Even if SpaceX was not profitable the US government would likely support it just to keep the technology and production facilities on US soil. The economic and military potential demands it.
This is not the time to repeat the mistakes of the semiconductor industry.
The overriding goal has always been to make a long-term independently sustainable Mars base, requiring perhaps a million people.
Yes, that's bonkers, but it's what they're shooting for.
That doesn’t address the question of lack of demand. If no one wants the rockets they won’t have the profit to pay for Mars missions.
I was super excited when they started talking about colonizing mars - as of late I’ve become more of the mindset we need to build a self sustaining colony in Antarctica, and then the moon before we try to do it on another planet.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Starlink, mainly, for now. Starlink is the "bridge" in the short-term. They're building 2-3 times bigger than they need for Starlink, for induced demand, I think.
Starship is being built, primarily, to lift Starlink v2. They had plans for 50,000 satellites (before v2 got hefty). At, say, 50,000 v1 satellites you are losing many satellites a day, you have to replenish them.
And then, when the cost (not price) for 100 tons heavy lift to LEO is under $10M, people will find uses for that. The military (Starshield) and NASA (HLS) are already starting to throw money at this.
[Casey Handmer wrote about this back in 2021](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/). Also [Handmer's for-science ideas](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/) are interesting. That's just one application/area of spaceflight. All you can really say is that it will be different.
Really, I don't think even SpaceX fully knows, yet. It's just a different _thing_, entirely. Cheap upmass to orbit, by 1-3 orders of magnitude depending how far and how well this goes. It's a sea change of some sort.
Cis lunar manufacturing. The moon base program being the testing ground they will RND techniques for manufacturing and shipping material around cis lunar space. So space based solar, zero gravity materials manufacturing, even biologics like cell culturing and pharmaceuticals. Theoretically better products can be made in space.
The most expensive part is shipping from earth so capital needs to be entrenched in cis lunar space where the gravity well isn’t a barrier so raw materials can be captured from the moon and near earth asteroids. Starship is big enough to bring that capital. When that becomes clear we will see lots of companies taking advantage of space as a place for manufacturing.
I can see why they're making this aim, however ridiculous it sounds. If there is even a fraction of this number made it could change spaceflight. One of the biggest problems with the shuttle was they could never produce enough external tanks to meet demand.
I read an updated version of Gerard O'Neill's *The High Frontier*, and one legit criticism of expectations around the space shuttle is that the reentry tiles naysayers complain about aren't the problem for reusability when you can only build 12 external tanks a *year* at most. You CAN'T launch the white ladies without an external tank!
Seriously I have seen people whine about how "awful" the shuttle was and not ONCE have I seen someone mention that it was IMPOSSIBLE to live up to launch expectations when they couldn't build enough tanks to meet the demand. Armchair scientists complain about the cost, size, the tiles, the arms, even the concept of reusability, and only O'Neill, a supporter of the shuttle, pointed out this critical flaw. I do need to find more real literature on the shuttle to be fair, yet I feel this is an important point to put into the discourse around our great white ladies.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[DoD](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ngzsk "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|[EIS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8at5yg "Last usage")|Environmental Impact Statement|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l89sae8 "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[GAO](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8e6zsl "Last usage")|(US) Government Accountability Office|
|[H2](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ehelg "Last usage")|Molecular hydrogen|
| |Second half of the year/month|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8jodsc "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bt2dl "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[ITS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8j7yod "Last usage")|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)|
| |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ahxwy "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[L5](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8a8dam "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8fcqaq "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LZ](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bvsgo "Last usage")|Landing Zone|
|[MCT](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8j7yod "Last usage")|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)|
|[N1](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8cj6zg "Last usage")|Raketa Nositel-1, Soviet super-heavy-lift ("Russian Saturn V")|
|[NERVA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8coys2 "Last usage")|Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (proposed engine design)|
|[QA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bud34 "Last usage")|Quality Assurance/Assessment|
|[RP-1](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8az8md "Last usage")|Rocket Propellant 1 (enhanced kerosene)|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8coys2 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ch0u9 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8evi9j "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Sabatier](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8c54u8 "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8c9amy "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8nkdhv "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bcdnd "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
|[crossfeed](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8cs2pv "Last usage")|Using the propellant tank of a side booster to fuel the main stage, or vice versa|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ezlr5 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|[electrolysis](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8a4jwb "Last usage")|Application of DC current to separate a solution into its constituents (for example, water to hydrogen and oxygen)|
|[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
|[kerolox](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|Portmanteau: kerosene fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[methalox](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
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I highly suspect "build one starship per day" was intended to mean 1 rolls off the assembly line every day, not a 24 hour start to finish for each rocket.
The construction time per unit will likely still be months
Not start to finish but every day a complete starship will complete the assembly process. It could take a year to build but if they have 365 in progress then they complete at a rate of one per day.
They are building one every month now. A new Boeing plane rolls out the door every day and has much more complexity in it.
I will say Elon talks big, but SpaceX is doing incredible things and I wouldn't be surprised if they get close to this in future.
This is like asking, in 1925, why the world would ever need 50,000 airplanes.
Space is big, beautiful, there's lots of stuff there, and people want to go there. The only limiting factor is cost. Per economy of scale, more spacecraft means less cost. Less cost means more realized demand.
A single near-earth asteroid, picked at random, contains trillions of dollars in mineral wealth. Entire corporations could exist dedicated to exploiting a single mining claim, and they would be F100 companies. If SpaceX were to be the sole supplier of launch vehicles for those companies, they'd become the most important infrastructural platform in the history of the species.
You may as well be asking "why bother going to space at all?" If something is worth doing, it is worth investing in the infrastructure to do it super cheap and easily.
Wasn't he dreaming to moving everyone to mars at some point? Like they pay zero upfront, but repay their voyage by working on mars?
While the 1% probably gets back a paradise on earth or something.
That was basically how the American colonies worked at the start. Unfortunately those people that took the voyage paid by someone else became debt slaves and were bound by contracts to their masters. Mars slaves lessgo
I love it so much because it’s clear why they need all these Starships. You can’t build a colony on Mars if you’re limited in how many Starships you can send at once
After IFT-4 Musk says the the eventual plan is to send anything upto 1000 Starships for each Earth-Mars rendezvous. I think it's more like that, by that point, we'll be building nuke powered cycler type ships (like the ship in the Martian)
For who. Who is the customer demanding one per day. These goofy grandiose claims have been being made for years now, I'd like to know what the demand signal that requires a production rate that high. Fer Chrissake, Fiat sold TWO cars per day in the US in 2023. Do we really need one Starship per day?
This headline seems wrong. There was nothing announced recently about this. It's highly misleading. The document specifying the $100M expansion was available and known about from February of this year. https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50660.msg2567468#msg2567468 https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/TABS/Search/Project/TABS2024011437 And that $100M is only part of the expansion, an expansion nearing completion. It's already been in construction for a while. And the "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion.
The headline is "Plans to build a new extension" but the body is "They already built a new extension that isn't quite finished yet". From the headline the obvious implication is they're planning ANOTHER giant factory which doesn't seem to be the case, or at least isn't what they're discussing here, it's possible they are secretly planning another giant factory.
The one a day, may also come from the goal of making engines. With how many each rocket has and the turn around between launches shortening, that is one of the goals they would need to reach.
> The one a day, may also come from the goal of making engines. No that was very clear. It came from here: https://youtu.be/OZVR2SNjyug?t=1963 > "[The factory expansion] will enable us to increase our production rate significantly as we build toward our long term goal of producing one ship per day."
Yea... like.. one a day IS possible. You can build one of anything a day if you commit enough resources and money to it. It's not going to happen in the real world I don't think. Even if some crazy world where we're all hopping in Starships for city to city journeys they wouldn't need that many.
It may not happen, but the Boca Chica factory will be able to churn out many a year, I say hundreds of Starships, not that many of boosters.
That is absolutely *unreal.* 🤯 What would they even do with that many space ships? I wonder if someone asked a similar question in 1924 about airplanes.
Seriously, what a crazy concept to think about. Reminds me of Gattaca where he likes to go outside after work to watch the rocket launches which seem to be happening basically every day.
To be fair we are pretty close to daily rocket launches as is. SpaceX is pretty much launching a Falcon 9 every 3-4 days.
*Every 2.7 days on average, for 2024 so far.
And it's been getting faster. In January and February they did 10 and 9 launches respectively, which works out to one every 3.2 days on average. Then in March and April they did 12 for both, or one every 2.5 days. Last month in May they did 14 launches - one every 2.2 days. Entirely possible that we see them average one every two days by the end of the year.
We shall witness a Double Event within the next seven years.
Yeah I think F9 flight rate is like one every 2.7 days right now, and still increasing. And that's with only partial reuse - have to build a whole new second stage each time. And plenty of the flights are drone ship landings, so it takes days to get the ships out there and back again. Starship, eventually being fully reusable and always returning directly to the launch site, could have an insane launch rate in comparison.
Honestly, I think the kinda amazing thing that flies under the radar is this Falcon 9 upper stage production line. Orbital launch vehicles have always been very bespoke items, built one at a time to exacting specifications, requiring tests and retests and re-retests. SpaceX is turning them out like sausages.
It's not too much unlike aircraft I suppose
They recently had a drone turnaround time of like 2 days or similar, the fastest they've done.
I imagine the speed is only increasing. There was almost a first booster to make it to 20 launches, but after it landed successfully on the droneship it faced high seas and then when it arrived it had toppled over and lost half itself. Apparently the newer boosters already had more advanced landing legs that would have ridden through the waves - such legs would also allow the droneship to travel back more quickly in calmer seas.
On the other hand, Superheavy is far more complex than Falcon 9 and certifying that nothing broke and that all the engines and piping is good for another launch would necessarily take longer. Starship is even more finicky because it has a heatshield and they would absolutely need to inspect all of the tiles and surfaces for damage extensively before sending it out. Starship/Superheavy will be reusable, but the idea that it can simply land/fuel/takeoff seems dubious.
I know nothing really on this but if rates are picking up like this is that going to have any effect on availability of fuel for them? Or other effects of all that fuel being used?
Falcon 9 uses RP-1, a type of kerosene. No risk of shortage. If you mean from an environmental perspective - all of spaceflight and rocketry combined is a rounding error in global emissions, not even 1% of 1%. I think the statistics were something like one year of all rocketry doesn't even match 1 day of airline flights.
> No risk of shortage. Yes and no...it's a very specialized blend of kerosene, and I think SpaceX has deals directly with the refineries to get enough of it produced for their launch rate. It's not going to run out, but the logistics behind getting enough RP-1 are part of the reason for going with methane for Starship.
Definitely, methane is a big improvement - much cheaper, and also less environmentally damaging as a sweet bonus. Also easier to hypothetically produce on Mars.
Less environmentally damaging in normal operation, and much less hazardous when things go wrong. Consider the damage of releasing hundreds of tons of kerosene at either the Florida or Texas sites...far, far worse than a few thousand tons of methane. And yes, easier to produce on Mars, and easier to store than hydrogen in cislunar space or on the lunar surface even if you have to import it from Earth, but even vehicles like Vulcan, Zhuque-2, New Glenn, Ariane Next, etc are using it due to its other advantages.
I'm a bit morbidly curious. For the fuel that Booster/ship uses, parts of it would be able to be re-converted from CO2 later on, but as for the Ship burn in space, is any of that exhaust lost to the earth (reach EV) or does it all more or less come down?
Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg are getting pretty frequent. I'm sad I moved away from LA because of the noctilucent clouds from the launches.
They are on track to fly the F9 150 times this year. So more like 1 every 2 days
Sometimes multiple times in the same day.
Gattaca is such a fascinating movie. Practically all the technology it predicted in 1990 came true - not quite in the predicted time and not with the predicted speed, but nonetheless, it does exist. The main difference between the society depicted in Gattaca and reality is that we chose to not use the technology like it is used in the movie. We *could* run extensive pre-implantation diagnostics on in vitro fertilized embryos, but we don't, for ethical (and cost) reasons.
Personally, as a molecular biologist, I HATE(D) GATTACA. It really struck me as a movie about the author's personal fears without understanding anything about what they were writing about. I've only seen it once, mind you, so correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I remember, they can analyze your entire genome from a single hair in a second, but they cannot do any somatic cell modifications? So no ability to change your genetics after birth? In a society that values genetic contributions that much? Come on, really? They have that much understanding of the human genome and don't have the technology or desire to modify it. Yea, sure. The "faith births" (not to mention the "regular people") would be such an untapped market for "upgrades" that it would go beyond anything else in the society. As for why we don't do it ourselves - it mostly has to do with the fact that we also don't know the consequences for eliminating alleles from the population. Those "negative" traits might be useful down the road, because they are good at resisting a particular disease that would otherwise wipe out the entire population.
I'm a molecular biologist, too. I think you're right in the sense that Gattaca didn't predict all technology available today - it only focused on some technologies that were predictable at the time, and was pretty accurate doing so. The sci-fi aspects of sequencing a genome within seconds aside, it has two clear weaknesses: - It vastly overestimates the predictive power of genetic variations. Just because we know in which bases an individual differs from the reference genome, that doesn't mean we can predict their health, intelligence, abilities, life span, etc. The author obviously didn't understand the complexity of genetic networks and the weak statistics of population genetics. They also depict society to lean towards the "nature" side of the "nature vs nurture" debate - which it doesn't in reality. - It didn't predict the power we already have and will continue to build over our genomes. But to be fair, anyone predicting CRISPR in the 90s would have been laughed at. Also, I don't think the bottom line of the movie really changes whether or not we take genome engineering into account: There would be people who use this technology, and there would be people who don't. Using this technology in an unregulated manner would inevitably result in discrimination.
> It vastly overestimates the predictive power of genetic variation. Isn't that the whole point of the film. It's not that the people with 'better' genes are more successful because their genes are better. It's that they are more successful because they have more opportunities and can get better jobs because of their genes. It becomes a self fulling prediction in a in a society that vastly overestimates the predictive power of the genes. The entire story is about how someone without 'good genes' can be just as successful. Not by getting better genes but by faking it so he is treated equally.
He does achieve the same things, but he has to work much harder to do so than the "genetically superior" people. For example the running exam: the point wasn't for the subjects to run the distance, the point was to do so with a stable heart rate. He had to cheat on that exam, because his genetics did not allow him to perform on the same level. One could of course argue that the entire exam wasn't designed to select the most capable astronauts, but rather to discriminate against "God-children".
>He does achieve the same things, but he has to work much harder to do so than the "genetically superior" people. For example the running exam: the point wasn't for the subjects to run the distance, the point was to do so with a stable heart rate. He had to cheat on that exam, because his genetics did not allow him to perform on the same level. This is pretty much accurate, though. If you want to join an elite cycling or running program at a school they give you a VO2Max test to see how efficient your heart/lungs are at oxygenating your blood. If you don’t get a good score on that they won’t even accept you because you’ll never be able to perform at a high level.
Also he has a fatal heart condition with a 99% chance of killing him in a few years. After the running test he collapses clutching his chest. All his cheating is actually really irresponsible since he is absolutely not flight qualified with that heart condition. Which is why they sensibly have fitness checks before starting multiyear space missions. I get that wasn't the intended interpretation of the film, but this is what they showed.
> I get that wasn't the intended interpretation of the film, but this is what they showed. Obviously you were meant to get this aspect of the movie, or else it wouldn't be in the movie. He's shown several times in the movie to be pretty irresponsible and makes dangerous decisions to achieve his goals. There are a few different ways to interpret the higher level themes around that, but those underlying aspects are definitely there and deliberate.
Just like today, there's a lot of systems in place to discretely and not so discretely filter out people who aren't of the right social class, etc. That and other tests like it in gattaca can be likened to how, for example, unpaid internships are used to filter out people who aren't wealthy enough to survive without an income that doesn't come from their parents or trust fund for several years. People can and do manage it, but like in gattaca, it's done at great personal cost and sacrifice.
And it's been a while since I've seen the movie, but weren't there hints that some of the predictions were basically pseudoscience? Some genuine stuff, like the protagonist's heart defect, but some stuff that was basically gene-based astrology. (Maybe reading of entrails would be more apt?) My issue was that he really had a legitimate heart defect (which, yes...couldn't that be corrected? Would it even require gene therapy?). He wasn't proving everyone wrong about judging people based on their genes, he was putting other people's lives at risk to fulfill his personal dream.
It’s a good allegory for systemic social problems. I’m surprised it’s not been more heavily cited when it comes to debates around affirmative action. Hell I have talked to pretty smart people in tech who were convinced that women couldn’t be engineers because of their physiology, which always floors me because I personally know so many great women engineers.
A much more relaxed and in depth analysis. Thank you.
They probably have the tech, but the cost is so high that “normal” humans that need/want the upgrades cannot afford them. Also the society in GATTACA didn’t seem to lack workers. Employers are so choosy that screen by DNA before doing anything else. Thus no need to increase workforce via upgrading “normal” humans.
Well, the entire society was on a Good partner selection activities if they were able to do so it would break the entire society picture that was driving the movie drama itself. Like if you could alter and fix all then there is no longer a point to go and find a good partner
Actually, the pianist at the recital the Hawke and Thurman characters go to has 6 fingers on each hand to be able to play a score a regular ten-fingered person couldn't possibly perform. From what I recall it is at least implicated that he was a product of genetic engineering
I still think there’s a future for designer babies. Once the box gets opened it will be difficult to close. Getting rid of genetic health issues would be akin to early inoculations.
No. Nobody really knows what "superior" genetics means or whether even makes sense. Definitely we cannot predict life spans based on genes. All we know is how to avoid a few genetic conditions and we do already do genetic screening for those.
I’ve always said that starship is envisioned to be like an airline company. But to hear it actually stated like this makes me pause lol 1 per day is roughly the same production rate of a 737. So, theoretically, this space ship will be built at the same rate as one of the most popular jets of the last four decades. We’re theoretically going to see over ten thousand starships at some point in the next 20-30 years. That’s just crazy to me.
I honestly don't think there will be the demand for it. It is really crazy. But I guess we will soon find out.
Yeah, with aspirational statements like these you can safely take it to mean “well into the future”. Like, if starship truly is able to bring cost per lb to orbit into the double digits, then there literally isn’t a limit for what we could do. It changes everything. But even with those low costs, it’ll take many years for firms to design systems to take advantage of it. If the cost per lb is as low as they say it could be, let’s say, by the end of the decade, then yeah, demand for 1 starship today will exist in the late 2030’s. If the cost per lb is lowered but still in the hundreds, then there will still be a lot of demand. But the 1 per day production would exclusively be needed for musk trying to get us to mars/make it self sufficient despite the expense.
We know something like orbital manufacturing is a thing but we have no idea how to do it or even what it looks like. In zero G and in vacuum what could you manufacture that you could not on Earth. What new materials are possible. The truth is the you need like a huge amount of research done with possibly hundreds of people in space. Ambitions need to massively expand. Do we even know how to do machines in space? Maybe machines in space look different. Maybe to manufacturer or build something it's more like a spider spinning a web then it is like an assembly line. I don't know. It's probably going to take a hundred years to really figure out.
At the American Astronomical Society Meeting I am attending right now, some groups are complaining about the 8,000 satellites in space and nearly daily launches messing up their instruments. There are requests to launch 547,000 satellites in various constellations. There will be more than one launch a day in a couple years.
116 launches around the world in 161 days in 2024. Thats 5 a week.
It takes many flights to fully refuel a Starship in orbit. If the plan is to send a handful of them to Mars, it will require dozens and dozens of flights to fuel them in orbit.
I assume the factory will be mostly producing ships and not boosters, similar to how they mostly produce second stages for Falcon 9 and just reuse boosters. 1 a day, a crazy number is really only 365 a year, which sounds crazy but is very consumable, at least initially. You'll need multiple fuel depot ships, multiple cargo variants as well as stripped down expendable ships for outer system science missions. This doesn't even go down the rabbit hole which is the entire purpose for the existence of SpaceX which is the colonization of Mars. Quite a few of those ships will never come back and if you plan on colonizing a place that far away you need to send a pile of people and material every launch window. I've heard the ultimate goal is thousands of ships transferring every window, which seems ambitious but is also basically necessary.
I wonder what the ratio between Superheavy boosters and Starships will be. Since both are reusable, it's probably different from what we're seeing with Falcon 9. Even without Mars colonization, SpaceX is highly likely here to stay. Their operations in LEO are indispensable to both space agencies and companies looking to launch satellites.
I think it might even be more extreme than F9 once they work the bugs out. As in far more starships in comparison to boosters in contrast to Falcon 9 boosters to 2nd stages. A giant stainless steel booster that doesn't need a re-entry burn should be more resilient to lots of things, including fatigue than a thinner F9 booster. So once they arrive at the "Block 5" version of SuperHeavy, they can just build say 4-5 for every launch site, stack a couple dozen spare engines per launch site and then build ships. If the booster lands on the launch mount and achieves it's goal of basically being inspected and flown again you could fly the same booster multiple times a day. Ships on the other hand have to go places and do things all the while surviving a much more punishing return to Earth. I'm sure they might eventually get to a "land and launch" cadence with some future variant of Starship but for the foreseeable future I'm sure those things will need an inspection/reuse procedure that is closer to the current Falcon 9 booster regime.
I mean, both Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule are reusable. It's only the Falcon 9 second stage that isn't.
That's a shit load of methane they will be burning. It's there even the infrastructure in place to pipe everything required to sustain that to launch platforms?
I wonder how feasible on site methane production is for this scale and launch cadence. If they do this, they'd have most of the kinks ironed out before needing to refuel Mars return trips Plus it'd be 'carbon neutral'
Pretty sure they'd just about need their own nuclear plant to pull that off.
Sure, but at least nuclear is clean (carbon-wise)
Imagine that. Would pretty much be the closest we can get (so far) to electric rockets lifting payload into LEO. Nuclear reactor -> electricity -> electrolysis/carbon capture/Sabatier -> Starship/Super Heavy. CH4 + O2 to CO2 + H2O AND BACK BABY God I love thermodynamics
It could actually be the first carbon neutral rocket, it will remove 100s of tonnes of carbon from the planet
It would also take no less than a decade to set up, on the absolute best case scenario. They'll just use thermal power
And you could plug the Texas grid into it, stabilize that shitshow a bit.
I believe their recent proposal for the Florida site does mention a plant to produce their own methane. Much better than the current "bring in dozens of trucks" strategy.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together. The infrastructure has decades to develop.
I once computed that when super heavy is burning, it amounts to something like ~~2-4%~~ 1% of global CO2 emissions in that period
How did you do that? I calculate it as only 1%. Still an extraordinary figure but not quite 2-4% * CH4 Mass of superheavy booster: 750 t * Mass of CO2 created when CH4 is burned: 2025 t * Duration of Superheavy booster burn: 170 s * CO2 generated per second: 12 t / s * Global CO2 produced in 2022: 37.15 bn t * Average CO2 produced per second in 2022: 1177 t / s * Percentage of CO2 contributed by starship during its boost phase: 1%
That's an interesting calculation.
Getting a single Starship to the moon requires like 20 refueling flights. We're probably talking about the typical deep-space mission requiring like 6 flights, 1 tanker, and 1 passenger ship. So probably 6 boosters to maybe 8 Starships.
They want to launch about 1,000 ships to Mars every Mars Hohman Transfer Window once able, every 2 years nonstop, until they've sent a million people and a billion tons of useful payload to Mars. SpaceX is a lightning in a bottle anomaly of a company. They're a private company with ambitions of multiple state actors and capital efficiency at the speed of thought. IFT4 proved that a private company can build an SLS/N1 class vehicle without breaking the wallet. If they catch booster with IFT5 or 6, it'll prove that not even nation states can compete with them. It's scary how far ahead they are.
That is absolutely *unreal.* 🤯 >What would they even do with that many space ships?...I wonder if someone asked a similar question in 1924 about airplanes. IBM's CEO in 1943 predicted a world market of 5 computers. When things get cheap, fast, and light weight, who knows how far we'll go.
What will they do with them all? Send things to space. A LOT.
see, what innovations are already happening. Why hasn't anyone thought to send stuff to space A LOT before?
One a day is within an order of magnitude of the highest rate of bomber production for a factory during WWII. Willow Run produced a B-24 roughly every hour, 24/7. Like you, I can't imagine that there will be any need for that many Starships any time soon, nor the urgency required to justify spending the money to build them that fast. For comparison, Falcon 9 production topped out at 18 per year in 2018. In 2023, only four were built. Having a re-usable vehicle means you don't need to build very many of them. Is SpaceX envisioning a time when there will be tens of launches per day, requiring hundreds of vehicles to be built per year? And, more importantly, is Musk going to foot the bill personally? There seems little chance that the United States Congress will appropriate the kind of money required to colonize Mars.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Maybe SpaceX is envisioning treating starship as if it was single use (or 1 or 2 uses) while it works out the kinks with its heatshield.
I mean, that's what they're doing. But you're implying that it will take hundreds of tries to get it right. That's an AWFUL lot of money to throw away. And, frankly, I think SpaceX has shown that they can get to a usable vehicle with a lot fewer launches than that. No one in their right mind would build a production line capable of building one a day unless there was an operational need for building one a day.
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Not necessarily. They might just want the capability to make hundreds of launches a year before they figure out the design for starship mk2 heat resistant boogaloo.
> Like you, I can't imagine that there will be any need for that many Starships any time soon, nor the urgency required to justify spending the money to build them that fast. For comparison, Falcon 9 production topped out at 18 per year in 2018. In 2023, only four were built. This is a bit misleading as the production shifted to upper stages, which are being built in over a hundred per year.
>One a day is within an order of magnitude of the highest rate of bomber production for a factory during WWII. Willow Run produced a B-24 roughly every hour, 24/7... Is SpaceX envisioning a time when there will be tens of launches per day, requiring hundreds of vehicles to be built per year? And all that goes without saying that orbital capable rockets (let alone ones that have the ability to land and be reused) are orders of magnitude more complex than a B-24 and won't have the benefit of a full on war time economy backing it. Frankly this seems like Musk talking out of his ass right after he teased a SpaceX IPO.
> Frankly this seems like Musk talking out of his ass right after he teased a SpaceX IPO. There hasn't been any SpaceX IPO teased, and this didn't come from Elon Musk, it came from the SpaceX webcast during the launch.
> this seems like Musk talking out of his ass That was my take on it too. OTOH, the quote that number came from wasn't by Musk. It was Kate Tice, the manager of SpaceX Quality Systems Engineering. Who knows?
I honestly don't know much about the inner workings of SpaceX, but I do work in the aerospace industry and I feel qualified enough to say that it would take a monumental shift in a lot of things to get a company like SpaceX capable of producing one ultra heavy lift vehicle per day. Like we're talking some combination of wartime-esque economy, more lax regulations and requirements, requisition of VAST amounts of raw materials (some of which, like helium, are in scarce supply). And all this is without an immediate need to even have that many rockets. Like who is contracting that many heavy lift vehicles right away? Basically my read on it is that it would require an investment of WAY more than $100 million.
I'm sure you're correct about the money required. And we all know Musk doesn't spend his own money on capital expansion unless forced to. Since you're in the industry, I do have a question about pace. You mentioned complexity earlier. I wouldn't have thought the complexity of the vehicle to be an impediment to whatever production rate is desired, provided the parts, labor, and money needed to achieve the desired rate are available. I know this is a vast oversimplification, but don't modern production methods mean you can break the build up into small enough units of work to achieve whatever rate is desired? That's the "magic" of a production line, no? Or is there something special about building these particular vehicles that would make a one per day rate impossible even if infinite money, labor and parts were available?
You're not wrong that modern production methods can allow for significant streamlining so to speak. But to give context a modern narrow body airliner (think 737 or A320) is built at a pace of about 30-40 a month. Some more complex widebody aircraft (787 off the top of my head) production rate was as low as half a dozen or so a month due to supply chain issues (that's post covid). And that's after decades of investment from Boeing and Airbus and significantly more demand from airlines than SpaceX would get anytime in the near future. That is to say as the thing you're building gets bigger and more complex so will your supply chain (often exponentially so). And that means that you're more prone to stoppages because you can't source something. And this is just me kinda spit balling off the top of my head because I currently work with compliance stuff that sometimes has a trickle down effect on production stoppages.
Fair enough. I was actually thinking about Boeing's (now shelved) plans to increase 737 production rates from the current level when I asked the question. I have little doubt that if the economic incentives were there to produce a 737 a day, AND the supply chains and labor pool could support a one per day rate, Boeing would want to do it. But back to SpaceX, I just don't see the economic incentives justifying the building of hundreds of vehicles per year. And, frankly, no one has ever made an economic case for a Mars colony at all. 🤷♂️
They've already said they'll need to send like 1000 Starships every 2 years to actually build a viable colony on Mars.
Apparently, the launch window for mars is optimal every 2 years. maybe they intend to send up loads in that short window.
They want to colonize Mars. The plan is to send a fleet of ships with everything necessary, in every Mars launch window. Like a thousand ships in each window.
Imagine how much uses we find for space once access becomes as cheap as a plane ticket.
The goal is to send a fleet of like 2000 starships per year to Mars every 26 months when earth and mars align to establish a self sustaining Mara colony. The goal is to be done in like half a century or something. So this seems reasonable since the early missions I think they want to diss-assemble the starships on Mars for raw materials.
Economy of scale - cost of a failure and cost of each ship will go down.No need to delay or skip a launch if there is some anomaly with one ship.
When debating the possible uses for so many starships, the potential for logistics may be the first real large scale implementation of the starship platform. This would be largely because, in reality, the ability to rapidly arrive at any location in the world, with at least 100t of cargo in a max of 2 hrs, will be the next revolution in applied logistical support for projection of power on a global scale, something the US is extremely keen on remaining, by a large margin, the leading super power in. The USs status as the most powerful army in the world, even more so than all of Europe combined, is supremely achieved through their mastery of applied logistics and rapid power projection. As of now, China is attempting to reach a level of logistical support that can rival the US directly off their coast in a potential invasion of Taiwan, by allowing them to more rapidly supply, and reinforce their forces, and the US would not be in favor of being outmatched in the ability to rapidly deploy superior amounts of munitions, troops, and armor, to any location, at any time, across the world. The Starship platform is, without a doubt, the next great revolution in achieving that level of logistics, which is why a not-insignificant amount of US politicians, and generals, are so eager to pump spacex with as much military budget as they can get away with, without pissing off the wrong people in other parts of the government. Like the old saying goes, Munitions win battles, Logistics win wars. Now, do I agree with everything SpaceX has done, especially the actions and words of one particular CEO who would see people like me dead 6ft under? Absolutely not! But I do believe, in the grand scheme, spacex as a whole will do a lot of good for humanity, and potentially help us avert, or mitigate, the rapidly approaching collapse of our current way of life, by providing more easy access to places beyond our atmosphere.
I don't need a ride I need ammo. - Vladimir Zelensky Getting 100tons of stuff somewhere in a handful of hours would be amazingly useful. Getting prepositioned supplied that were left on orbit dropped within 90 minutes or so would be stunning.
Space x will be a military and gov agency contractor building and supporting medium and heavy lift service anywhere in the world within an hour. They won’t just be building rockets. They will supply cargo modules and infrastructure for pads around the globe.
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I think it could be used in some cases: 1. Lunar tourism: Even though Dear Moon was canceled, if given the chance and at an affordable price, who wouldn't want to see the Moon? 2. Deep space transportation missions: This includes both government and private companies. Since the projection of power isn't limited, why not purchase a few for exploring the solar system? 3. Attempting landings on various celestial bodies: If simulations show it's feasible, besides Mars and the Moon, other locations could be attempted for landings with similar goals to point 2.
It sounds so goofy, but the costs being suggested around starship are about the same as airline prices for an adult ($20 per kg). You could Starship my ass to the other side of the world for what an airline ticket costs some day, giving me a cool view of space and cutting off maybe 20 hours of travel time and layovers.
If it were only that simple
Will be used to move stuff to mars or wherever else and also for space mining.
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Build a self sustaining city on Mars. That’s has been their stated goal all along
D'oh! Enron Musk will switch on full self driving and they'll be used as robotaxis.
Yes but a 1924 airplane didn’t burn 3,400 tons of fuel every flight!!!!!!!! Yes he talks about 10 launches a day! Just from Boca Chica alone. Just think about the size of the catalytic converters it will need!!!!!!
Well. Remember the article claiming we will never be able to fly for 1000 years?
Colonize the solar system. Kind of wish he spent 40 billion on this instead of the Twitter buy.
There will be a time when its till not enough.
I hope they're also thinking about what multiple packages of 200 tons they'll actually be sending. All that stuff has to be developed too, and if they're not already working on it, then it stands to reason that Starship will be ready for Mars before any meaningful payloads are.
I imagine there is a backlog of manufacturing and test equipment that was outright too heavy with past spacecraft. Hell they could just start launching water or metal sheeting
I wonder how feasible it would be to just start sending up loads of pre fab building components then in a few years send some a crew with equipment to assemble a full martian base with what's there.
They could probably send a crew of Boston Dynamic robots, just update it with new weights or directives for whatever jobs it needs to do, and send all the equipment to repair them and have them do maintenance on each other and build up Mars, working 24/7, as we keep sending them new materials.
At this point, I think it makes more sense to wait a few more years before sending a human for just that reason. Robotics are likely already capable but in a few years they will be for sure. Work out some kinks with solar charging or going nuclear and for the delay in sending commands and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to send a person first. Let the robots build a small habitat or whatever and then send a couple humans for any needed finishing touches.
I still disagree with the "just have autonomous robots go to Mars" camp. I think this is a variation of that; saying "we'll send humans, but later. A few more years...", then "a few more". This really overestimates the current capabilities, or underestimate the challenges. Sending increasingly complex robots should be done. Ingenuity and Perseverance were exactly that. We should work on ruggedized, highly programmable robots that are able to be given commands in the field to perform increasingly complex tasks. But glossing over the details of "transport this pallet of solar panels, inspect that ridge, unpack these ground mounts and bury them, unpack and mount the panels, cable them, find a safe location for the inverters, etc" constitutes thousands of individual tasks which we don't have software ready to autonomously perform. That means extremely long, error-prone round trips between mission control, developers, etc. We should stage enough equipment, life support, and habitat components to land humans on Mars, and allow them to both remote-control resources on the ground in realtime and perform work themselves, while coordinating high-level mission objectives with Earth. Robotic autonomy will continue to get better, but we're far from the point where we can rely on AI/ML to bootstrap a base on Mars. And for God's sake, send another Ingenuity to scout us an LZ, lava tubes and caverns like yesterday. Let's do this!
That is actually a big advantage of Starship. It is so big that for many purposes, you no longer need to engineer overly complex mechanism so that it can fit into a rocket. For example the James Web telescope would have been far less complex if they didn't need to shove it into a 5m wide Ariane 5, but instead into a 8m wide Starship. Like, if you can get your payload into a 40-feet shipping container, you can fit it into Starship. And that is just a massive gamechanger, especially combined with the massive weight Starship can lift, meaning you can do stuff like e.g. build your satellite/space station part out of steel instead of needing to go with expensive stuff like titanium/composites/similar. I think the bigger question is when SpaceX wants the factory to produce 1 Starship per day. 5 years would be far too early, but I could see something like 15 years, that is a long enough time for a large space customer base to grow.
Starship can in fact yeet up 4 extended length shipping containers worth of volume to LEO. Basically you could bundle 4 tractor trailers together in a diamond, and they'd fit within the Starship payload bay with no issues. At that point mass is your only concern. As long as you aren't making your equipment out of depleted uranium though, you can basically yeet up like a third of the ISS on a single launch. Edit: actually, I just modeled it for shits and giggles. [This is the payload faring, with four 40' standard containers for reference.](https://i.imgur.com/dh7V2Sc.png) Shit is insane, like not even the shuttle could come close to this.
> Like, if you can get your payload into a 40-feet shipping container, you can fit it into Starship. And that is just a massive gamechanger, People throw around gamechanger as a buzzword so often it loses meaning, but this is probably a lot more significant than people realize because that's a STANDARD form factor for global trade. If it ships on a container ship it should ship on Starship.
This is game changing news
> Like, if you can get your payload into a 40-feet shipping container, you can fit it into Starship. I...knew it was big, but holy fuck, that really puts it into perspective. I just want to see asteroid mining, and on-site refining at orbital construction platforms built at the L5/L5 lagrange points within my lifetime.
Yeah, I'd say the best description of Starship isn't something like "the most powerful space vehicle ever made" but something like "space truck". Because that will be Starships intended purpose, to be a space truck transporting thousands of tons into orbit/space (or to bring stuff from space back to earth).
You'll always want to maximize space and payload, so I don't think your argument of extra space reducing complexity really works.
> You'll always want to maximize space and payload Not really. What you want is a balance of cost vs benefit. The costs and space limitations have been prohibitively restrictive up to now, making the size and weight of the payload a primary concern. This rocket should give a lot more breathing room in those calculations, meaning for some applications it will be better to go with a larger heavier payload that's simpler, sturdier, or just has more functionality.
It could make a Venus probe feasible. If you can finally send a probe properly resistant to corrosive environments that's strong enough to withstand the pressure we could get a long term study of the planet.
There are break limits. JWST would have been far less mechanically complex if it had been able to be shipped in a wider fairing.
They are building this much capacity for their own plans. They need that many stsrships to fuel interplanetary fleets. Customers will be the ones who find other utility in the system. That said, between large orbital habitats, enormous space telescopes, and rare earth mining on asteroids, there is plenty pf potential for market 10 years from now.
I agree. They are depending on NASA for developement to a large degree.
Not true. Starship has thus far been mostly funded with private funds.
Whats the break down?
The entire HLS development contract amounts to $3B, and that includes payment that comes after many upcoming milestones that they haven't received, including two test flights to the moon's surface. They've only gotten a some hundreds of millions of it so far. SpaceX stated in mid-2023 that they'll have spent $5B by the end of 2023 on Starship development, so we're beyond $5B at this point. https://spacenews.com/spacex-investment-in-starship-approaches-5-billion/
Well they'll need an orbital fuel depot for Mars and other missions. So building will be a few launches and supplying will be reoccurring launches.
Pretty sure they've thought of it.
There was 6 shuttles ever built and they want to build that many Starships in a single week! 🤯
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Just a game of trial and error until they get it properly right, then ramp to mass production. Same evolution as cars, planes, trains. Just way bigger and more expensive😂
They want to, but they never will. Call me a pessimist but I'm just looking at elons track record.
I was just reading about the success rate of the Falcon 9 this morning. It’s impressive.
Y’all conflate Elon and his other companies and SpaceX so often it’s crazy. SpaceX has failed at its stated goals like twice in the two decades they’ve been around. They walked back on Red Dragon, and they walked back on landing Crew Dragon propulsively. That’s it. And in both cases it was because they aren’t married to ideas if they find more practical solutions. SpaceX has achieved every goal it’s set out to achieve so far. The only thing that slides is the timeline. But they have an undeniable “track record” at this point.
I feel like both Red Dragon and propulsive Crew Dragon didn't so much fail as NASA didn't want to fund them. Everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding. Actually propulsive Crew Dragon, I am sure it wasn't even a funding thing, NASA just didn't want it because they didn't think it was safe.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re “dependent” on nasa funding. But yeah, at least for red dragon, it was obvious at the time that it would just be a waste of money. And they demonstrated crew dragon hovering using its Draco engines. Like you said, nasa just didn’t have the stomach for it. So yeah I agree. I don’t personally view those items as failures. I’m just offering what few pivots SpaceX has done despite those pivots being more or less out of practicality.
> Everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding. Not true at all. Most of SpaceX's funding is not from NASA. Sure NASA is the biggest single component, but it's not even the majority.
If NASA doesn't want to fund something like Crew Dragon, SpaceX isn't going to do it because NASA is the only customer that can pay. NASA doesn't have to be the majority of their funding to define SpaceX's direction. The only thing where SpaceX has a clear customer in mind other than NASA is Starlink. (And yes, they're selling launches to other businesses, but NASA defines the market.)
> If NASA doesn't want to fund something like Crew Dragon, SpaceX isn't going to do it because NASA is the only customer that can pay. I agree there. Crew Dragon was developed almost entirely for NASA's purposes. It was a bit of a side-diversion away from things like fully reusable rockets. > NASA doesn't have to be the majority of their funding to define SpaceX's direction. That's different than what you said before. You said everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding. > The only thing where SpaceX has a clear customer in mind other than NASA is Starlink. (And yes, they're selling launches to other businesses, but NASA defines the market.) Falcon 9 is a thing that exists. It's more correct to say "Dragon's existence is entirely dependent on NASA's continued usage." The other major parts of SpaceX, Falcon 9, Starlink, and Starship, are not.
> That's different than what you said before. You said everything SpaceX does is dependent on NASA funding. I didn't say *completely* dependent, but it is dependent. Falcon 9 would never have launched if NASA hadn't been there to purchase Dragon launches. SpaceX is taking big risks but they can't afford to spend money on hardware NASA won't buy. That doesn't mean the hardware has to be *only* sold to NASA but it does have to sell to NASA. SpaceX can't just build whatever they think is best. Starship has to fit the mission requirements for Artemis. Starlink is a secondary customer which was only possible because SpaceX started out by building Falcon 9 for NASA. Starship might prove to be similarly useful for Starlink, but they're not going to bet the farm on building a Starship which can only do Starlink and can't sell to NASA.
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Track record? Send a payload to space. return a booster to a bardge Land a booster reuse a booster reuse a booster 20 times. launch 80% of all mass to LEO wordwide in a year Human rated launch the largest rocket ever He's track record looks pretty good to me. Actually that record is pretty mindblowing. What he's not so good at is the timing.
Your read on elons track record came to a very different conclusion that mine……..
>I'm just looking at elons track record. Yeah, SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink are are notoriously failed companies.
? You mean creating the company that is already doing it successfully? Which track record are you looking at lol
I mean the guy who said humans would be on mars by 2021.Do I need to list off his dozens of broken promises?
He didn't "promise" anyone. People said in an offhand statement, multiple times, and multiple dates. People need to learn how to separate idle conversation from promises.
When did Elon musk promise to put people on Mars by 2021?
The magnitude of the promise is certainly wrong, but SpaceX has achieved some absolutely incredible feats. 30 Starships a year would be insane from where we're standing now, imagine if they exceed that.
We turn the impossible into the delayed - Musk in a recent interview
I love this quote, and it's so true. The goal at first seems laughable. And then later when it's apparent that the goal will be achieved, just very late, people again laugh at the delayed fulfillment.
Him delivering his milestones late is still quite the achievement, just because it started from scratch and the milestones are new to even compagnies who've been in the field for decades. On the other hand, Boeing finally sent a rocket to ISS but with all the leaks that are being discovered everyday, I'm not sure if they'll come back in it or ditch it in space and hop in with a Suyuz or SpaceX crew.
Nobody is arguing that his timelines aren't usually wrong. We know they are. We're just saying that it is still definitely going to happen, and the company has some incredible feats already under its belt
My understanding is that the one per day goal includes new and rebuilt rockets.
1 per day would put the united federation of planets to shame.
'Last week’s test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket was a big win for SpaceX, marking the fourth successful launch. Its first-stage booster, Super Heavy, made a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico while the 165-foot upper stage, called “Ship,” dropped into the Indian Ocean. The four successes follow two failures, including an explosion, of the first two Starships. “We have Ships and Super Heavy boosters built and either ready to launch or in testing for the next several flights with more coming off of the production line as SpaceX’s Starfactory continues to grow,” said Jessie Anderson, SpaceX’s Falcon Structures Manufacturing Engineering Manager, according to space.com. “The latest phase of the factory currently under construction will come online this summer, giving us several 100,000 more square feet of space.”
I don’t understand where the demand is coming from to justify that
There are hundreds if not thousands of companies who would love to do things in space. The current barrier is cost. With mass production cost drops significantly and allows all those companies to start becoming customers. If/when colonies are established on the moon or other planets it will require a large transportation network to maintain. The space station has less than a dozen people and requires resupply every 2-3 months. Imagine 500 on a moon base. The technology is too close for it not to be completed. it is almost inevitable that there will be a large space industry in the next few decades. Even if SpaceX was not profitable the US government would likely support it just to keep the technology and production facilities on US soil. The economic and military potential demands it. This is not the time to repeat the mistakes of the semiconductor industry.
The overriding goal has always been to make a long-term independently sustainable Mars base, requiring perhaps a million people. Yes, that's bonkers, but it's what they're shooting for.
That doesn’t address the question of lack of demand. If no one wants the rockets they won’t have the profit to pay for Mars missions. I was super excited when they started talking about colonizing mars - as of late I’ve become more of the mindset we need to build a self sustaining colony in Antarctica, and then the moon before we try to do it on another planet.
Massive constellations like starlink is the demand
To be clear, "one a day" thing came from one of the presenters during the SpaceX webcast during the launch. It's a very long term goal, not something immediate or soon or associated with the $100M expansion. The article is linking unrelated things together.
Starlink, mainly, for now. Starlink is the "bridge" in the short-term. They're building 2-3 times bigger than they need for Starlink, for induced demand, I think. Starship is being built, primarily, to lift Starlink v2. They had plans for 50,000 satellites (before v2 got hefty). At, say, 50,000 v1 satellites you are losing many satellites a day, you have to replenish them. And then, when the cost (not price) for 100 tons heavy lift to LEO is under $10M, people will find uses for that. The military (Starshield) and NASA (HLS) are already starting to throw money at this. [Casey Handmer wrote about this back in 2021](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/). Also [Handmer's for-science ideas](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-still-not-understood/) are interesting. That's just one application/area of spaceflight. All you can really say is that it will be different. Really, I don't think even SpaceX fully knows, yet. It's just a different _thing_, entirely. Cheap upmass to orbit, by 1-3 orders of magnitude depending how far and how well this goes. It's a sea change of some sort.
Cis lunar manufacturing. The moon base program being the testing ground they will RND techniques for manufacturing and shipping material around cis lunar space. So space based solar, zero gravity materials manufacturing, even biologics like cell culturing and pharmaceuticals. Theoretically better products can be made in space. The most expensive part is shipping from earth so capital needs to be entrenched in cis lunar space where the gravity well isn’t a barrier so raw materials can be captured from the moon and near earth asteroids. Starship is big enough to bring that capital. When that becomes clear we will see lots of companies taking advantage of space as a place for manufacturing.
I can see why they're making this aim, however ridiculous it sounds. If there is even a fraction of this number made it could change spaceflight. One of the biggest problems with the shuttle was they could never produce enough external tanks to meet demand. I read an updated version of Gerard O'Neill's *The High Frontier*, and one legit criticism of expectations around the space shuttle is that the reentry tiles naysayers complain about aren't the problem for reusability when you can only build 12 external tanks a *year* at most. You CAN'T launch the white ladies without an external tank! Seriously I have seen people whine about how "awful" the shuttle was and not ONCE have I seen someone mention that it was IMPOSSIBLE to live up to launch expectations when they couldn't build enough tanks to meet the demand. Armchair scientists complain about the cost, size, the tiles, the arms, even the concept of reusability, and only O'Neill, a supporter of the shuttle, pointed out this critical flaw. I do need to find more real literature on the shuttle to be fair, yet I feel this is an important point to put into the discourse around our great white ladies.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[DoD](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ngzsk "Last usage")|US Department of Defense| |[EIS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8at5yg "Last usage")|Environmental Impact Statement| |[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l89sae8 "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[GAO](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8e6zsl "Last usage")|(US) Government Accountability Office| |[H2](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ehelg "Last usage")|Molecular hydrogen| | |Second half of the year/month| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8jodsc "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bt2dl "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[ITS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8j7yod "Last usage")|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)| | |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ahxwy "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[L5](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8a8dam "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8fcqaq "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LZ](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bvsgo "Last usage")|Landing Zone| |[MCT](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8j7yod "Last usage")|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)| |[N1](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8cj6zg "Last usage")|Raketa Nositel-1, Soviet super-heavy-lift ("Russian Saturn V")| |[NERVA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8coys2 "Last usage")|Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (proposed engine design)| |[QA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bud34 "Last usage")|Quality Assurance/Assessment| |[RP-1](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8az8md "Last usage")|Rocket Propellant 1 (enhanced kerosene)| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8coys2 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ch0u9 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8evi9j "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Sabatier](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8c54u8 "Last usage")|Reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure, with nickel as catalyst, yielding methane and water| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8c9amy "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8nkdhv "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bcdnd "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| |[crossfeed](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8cs2pv "Last usage")|Using the propellant tank of a side booster to fuel the main stage, or vice versa| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8ezlr5 "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |[electrolysis](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8a4jwb "Last usage")|Application of DC current to separate a solution into its constituents (for example, water to hydrogen and oxygen)| |[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| |[kerolox](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|Portmanteau: kerosene fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[methalox](/r/Space/comments/1de4o4b/stub/l8bqxjv "Last usage")|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(31 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1dgeq9g)^( has 18 acronyms.) ^([Thread #10167 for this sub, first seen 12th Jun 2024, 13:40]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
I highly suspect "build one starship per day" was intended to mean 1 rolls off the assembly line every day, not a 24 hour start to finish for each rocket. The construction time per unit will likely still be months
How the HELL can they build one starshp PER DAY? That has to be impossible.
Not start to finish but every day a complete starship will complete the assembly process. It could take a year to build but if they have 365 in progress then they complete at a rate of one per day.
Im glad we have SpaceX, otherwise we would be stuck with Starliner
trust? no trust. verify. i don't believe a word of this.
They are building one every month now. A new Boeing plane rolls out the door every day and has much more complexity in it. I will say Elon talks big, but SpaceX is doing incredible things and I wouldn't be surprised if they get close to this in future.
Why? Like. Its reusable. They already have Falcon 9 boosters sitting dormant in storage.
This is like asking, in 1925, why the world would ever need 50,000 airplanes. Space is big, beautiful, there's lots of stuff there, and people want to go there. The only limiting factor is cost. Per economy of scale, more spacecraft means less cost. Less cost means more realized demand. A single near-earth asteroid, picked at random, contains trillions of dollars in mineral wealth. Entire corporations could exist dedicated to exploiting a single mining claim, and they would be F100 companies. If SpaceX were to be the sole supplier of launch vehicles for those companies, they'd become the most important infrastructural platform in the history of the species. You may as well be asking "why bother going to space at all?" If something is worth doing, it is worth investing in the infrastructure to do it super cheap and easily.
Wasn't he dreaming to moving everyone to mars at some point? Like they pay zero upfront, but repay their voyage by working on mars? While the 1% probably gets back a paradise on earth or something.
That was basically how the American colonies worked at the start. Unfortunately those people that took the voyage paid by someone else became debt slaves and were bound by contracts to their masters. Mars slaves lessgo
> They already have Falcon 9 boosters sitting dormant in storage. No there aren't. They're in processing preparing for launch.
I love it so much because it’s clear why they need all these Starships. You can’t build a colony on Mars if you’re limited in how many Starships you can send at once
I’m sure this will go just as well as the giga factory and the cyberstuck… i mean truck.
The gigafactories are going just fine. Also, unrelated to SpaceX
I hate to break it to you, but SpaceX performs very well. You sound just like the people who doubted Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
What is the problem with the giga factories? Anyway that’s besides the point. They are completely separate companies
That's pocket money. Single test launch costs that much right now.
After IFT-4 Musk says the the eventual plan is to send anything upto 1000 Starships for each Earth-Mars rendezvous. I think it's more like that, by that point, we'll be building nuke powered cycler type ships (like the ship in the Martian)
There is no way that demand is that high. 1 starship a day? Outside of starlink is there demand for more than one starship a year?
As long as they are cheap.
For who. Who is the customer demanding one per day. These goofy grandiose claims have been being made for years now, I'd like to know what the demand signal that requires a production rate that high. Fer Chrissake, Fiat sold TWO cars per day in the US in 2023. Do we really need one Starship per day?
We were also supposed to have fully self driving cars 2 years ago. I'm not buying the hype