Every single current effort for a Mars journey is poorly planned PR nonsense.
We’re putting the cart before the horse. We should not be wasting this much resources & effort into human spaceflight beyond the moon. We should be working to capture mineral rich asteroids, bring them into a Lagrange point, and start working on autonomous mining/refining/manufacturing from the asteroids.
This is key to human colonization of the solar system. Trying to launch everything we’ll need from out of the gravity well is stupid. Once we have autonomous space manufacturing perfected, we can have massive spacecraft delivered to earth, and all we need launch is the personnel and their food. We can also have bases built at our destination point long before any humans arrive.
it’s very goofy to see the difference in attitude for any post involving obviously spacex things between lemmy and normal spaceflight communities lmao
Is it true that starship will have less payload weight to LEO than all other SpaceX rockets?
I mean SpaceX is only about 5 years and $5 billion behind in their timeline and budget to go to the moon. So, Starship doesn’t seem to be a serious vehicle.
People love bringing up that Starship was supposed to be doing round trips to the Moon and Mars by now, but when has anything space ever been on budget, in time, and working perfectly on the first try? Every new launch vehicle takes longer and more money than initial optimistic predictions state. Damn near every probe and telescope is years over deadlines and often a significant percentage of first estimates over budget.
i mean…going to the moon be expensive
the u.s. spent about 96 billion on launch vehicles alone so getting stretching those 5 billion as far they did is pretty impressive in comparison!
sure, it’s taking longer than musk claimed, but pretty much everyone else said from the very beginning that musk’s timeline is unrealistic…
god i hate that idiot…spaceX could be so much better at what it does without him…
He’s being generous by assuming 100% fuel transfer and no boil off.
I’m sure that leaking methane into the upper atmosphere will have only beneficial affects to our climate.
oh they’ll be way past the upper atmosphere when transferring fuel
Except for that whole ‘atmosphere extends 100,000 miles past the moon’ bit that was recently acknowledged, but I do get what you mean. ;)
Well, he’s not wrong technically, but the context feels like it’s obviously missing. We have no Saturn V vehicles anymore, nor can we build them again. Starship might require that many launches to get to TLI, but with reusability, it probably can. Not to mention that the cost will come down a bit. So it can at least do it soon.
I’m sure others have more coherent and thought out rebuttals.
why can’t we build them again? were the blueprints and knowledge lost? deliberately destroyed? genuine question
because they were insanely expensive
The production lines are shut down and any custom tooling has had its materials reclaimed to make other things. The institutional knowledge, the little bits that never got written down in the blueprints or manufacturing instructions, it’s all gone. The people who worked on that rocket and its components are dead or have been working on something else for the last 50 years. How well would you remember some little tidbit of information that you last needed half a lifetime ago?
Because it is based on obsolete technology. You wouldn’t want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software, would you? A lot of it would also have to be reverse engineered, to the point where you might as well build a new vehicle.
You wouldn’t want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software
We can use an FPGA for that
The software was the thing that was in the wires, not I/O.
The wires would be replaced by FLASH memory.
Wouldn’t they use a MROM or something instead, because flash memory can be quite volatile in the extreme conditions?
Because a lot of “Released Engineering Documents” were just engineering notebooks, and each vehicle was different, even the parts that were supposed to be the same. There was a lot of “repair” versus “rework” disposition, and a “Just make it work; it only needs to work once” culture.
Basically, because it was a race against the Russians, and the Russians were winning.
huh, impressive that we did a (relatively) slapdash job of it and still pulled it off. Thanks for clarifying.
Because the nazis America brought in to build them are all dead.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/nasa-nazi-history-von-braun.html
A bunch of Canadian engineers went to NASA after the Avro Arrow project was killed, Jim Chamberlain being a notable example.
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/984/
Some say our attitude should be one of gratitude, like the widows and orphans of old London Town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
Ignoring the onvious fact that Starship has been designed from the beginning for going to Mars and SLS only to go to the Moon…
Didn’t even the first Starship generation theoretically have a higher payload capacity than the SLS Block 2? And that doesn’t even include the further enhancements to the ship design and Raptor updates since.
Could you explain to us how a vehicle capable of getting payload to Mars would not be capable of putting the same or even a greater payload on the moon? What is the obvious difference in design?
As far as I understand it, getting to Mars is harder, requiring more energy to get there, more energy to slow down and having an atmosphere to content with. Sure aerobraking is a thing, but in the big picture having to deal with an atmosphere makes things harder and not easier.
delta v isn’t really a issue if you have orbital refueling and frequent+cheap flights figured out (as long as a full tank can complete a trans Martian injection and orbital capture at mars) , so I’d say they’re both similarly difficult:
on Mars you have to deal with the atmosphere, higher gravity, etc
on the moon you have to deal with the dusty surface, so you have issues with landing gear and landing engines kicking up dust
I saw a graph of our local gravity wells, the moon and Mars are surprisingly similar. The moon has many extra challenges that Mars does not. Propulsively landing on a dust pile is trickier than slowing down with aerobraking.
And to land on Mars you need both, ideally. The athmosphere is too thin to rely on just aerobreaking and the other would use much more propulsion.
Didn’t even the first Starship generation theoretically have a higher payload capacity than the SLS Block 2?
No? SLS block 2 is 130 tons to LEO. Starship “block 1” did “about 50 tons” according to one of Musk’s update videos with SpaceX, promising Starship 2 would do 100 tons.
After years of saying Starship can do 100 tons to LEO… 'Block 1’s actual proven payload capacity is ‘a banana’… not 50 tons.
Starship has never launched any actual payload to orbit.
Anyway, onto ‘Block 2’, that’ll be able to do what ‘Block 1’ was aupposed to do, even though none of the contracts Musk’s signed to develop Starship have any mention of different Blocks… but its ok because Block 3 will do 150 tons!
Just like how Hyperloop is an idea that makes any sense and will work.
Just like how FSD is will be complete and ready in 2017.
Just like how Solar Roof tiles are totally real and not completely fake.
Just like how Tesla cars will be able to fly with monopropellant thrusters.
Just like how Elon is a free speech absolutist except when people mock or disagree with him.
As with basically all of Musk’s promises to shareholders and aspirations presented as facts at publicized events since about 2014… what Musk says is all almost entirely bullshit, and anyone would be a fool to take him at his word.
but its ok because Block 3 will do 150 tons!
When we were on the “4 ships to Mars in 2024” promises, it was 150 tons for the first edition
And knowing that everything Musk says has turned out to be total BS, who knows what the actual number is. So far no Starship has been to LEO and hasn’t carried any payload. Sure the last one carried a banana and technically made it to orbital speeds before plunging back into the atmosphere. That’s a long way from actually doing the thing and putting 50 tons into LEO.
Wait, are you saying we won’t have 4 starships on Mars before 2024 is over?
I intentionally picked the most generous interpretation, and even that isn’t great
