[HN Gopher] SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy ...
___________________________________________________________________
SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last
night
Author : _Microft
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-08-02 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| failuser wrote:
| This is like N1 first stage coming back on a new technological
| level.
| petewailes wrote:
| Hopefully it works better
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That seems highly likely. The N1 couldn't be static fired,
| and they didn't have the benefits of sophisticated modern
| computer control and design.
| milansuk wrote:
| In 2019, Elon tweeted[0] that the price of one Raptor engine is
| under $1M with the goal going under 250K for the next version.
| Any recent info where there are now?
|
| I'm still surprised they moved to this orbital fly so quickly
| without doing more tests. Going from 3 engines to almost 30 is
| crazy. Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship
| will end up in the ocean. I hope they will be able to reuse at
| least a few engines.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| No further word on costs as far as I'm aware, other than that
| <$1000/ton of thrust is still the goal long-term:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1420826978102435845
| jhgb wrote:
| Considering that cost-wise, they're already putting the RS-25
| to shame (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-
| pay-a-stag...), this seems more like an icing on the cake.
| lutorm wrote:
| Given that you could probably build a Merlin out of solid
| gold and it would come in cheaper than an RS-25, that's not
| exactly saying much...
| Diederich wrote:
| I LOLd but then had to do the math. Turns out that the
| dry weight of a SpaceX Merlin engine, in gold, costs
| almost exactly the same as a production RS-25.
|
| Current spot price of gold is $1800/oz. Merlin dry weight
| is 1380 pounds. 1380 pounds of gold is right at 40
| million dollars.
|
| Per
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Shuttle_program
| :
|
| "A total of 46 reusable RS-25 engines, each costing
| around US$40 million, were flown during the Space Shuttle
| program"
|
| Beautiful.
| jhgb wrote:
| They cost much more than $40M these days.
| piercebot wrote:
| Maybe not once you consider the R&D costs of figuring out
| how not to melt a solid gold Merlin engine ;)
| lutorm wrote:
| There is that... ;-)
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Wow, no kidding. The gold Merlin would be a quarter of
| the price![1][2][3] (At least in terms of materials.)
|
| [1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-
| pay-a-stag...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=merlin+engine+dry+mass
|
| [3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28630+kg+of+g
| old+in+U...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Only in America things like this can happen.
|
| A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors
| doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical
| hardware to commodity; SpaceX is doing the same thing with
| flight hardware. Contrast that with previous generation engines
| (the RS-25 comes to mind) with a sticker price of 125
| millions... per engine! [0]
|
| [0] https://spacenews.com/aerojet-rocketdyne-defends-sls-
| engine-...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Only in America things like this can happen._
|
| > _A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-
| conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic,
| mission critical hardware to commodity;_
|
| Silicon Valley did not bootstrap itself. It received untold
| billions of dollars from the US government during the Cold
| War (and lots of stuff happened during the WW2 economy, when
| the US was the Allies' armorer). Do you think it a
| coincidence that most spy satellites are launched from
| Vandenberg? Or that Skunk Works, located in California,
| developed so many secret aircraft?
|
| Do a search for "The secret history of Silicon Valley":
|
| * https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
|
| > _SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware._
|
| Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in their
| early stages.
|
| * https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html
|
| The list of spinoff technologies just from NASA is
| impressive:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
|
| The fact that the US was, post-WW2, the largest economy in
| the world, and the main developed nation that didn't see mass
| destruction, certainly didn't hurt.
|
| The fact that the US government throws a lot of money around
| certainly helps private industry:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
|
| This also does not diminish the entrepreneurs that, once the
| baton is handed to them, charge forward. My main argument is
| that there's not as much "bootstrapping" as many people
| believe.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in
| their early stages.
|
| And the billions spent on the technologies that allow those
| engines to exist. SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines. It
| stands on the shoulders of many giants.
| jvm wrote:
| This is such an annoying argument.
|
| The government gave $18B to the SLS and so far has vapor:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
|
| The government spent $211B on the shuttle program and got
| 133 launches. SpaceX will probably surpass that number this
| year at a fraction of the cost.
|
| NASA's record on rockets since Apollo has been abysmal.
|
| I don't think government is necessarily bad (the Russians
| did a much better job in recent decades!) but it leans into
| its failures and often has bad incentives. SpaceX fails
| fast, has great incentives, and has achieved an incredible
| amount on a (comparatively) shoestring budget.
| paxys wrote:
| Where in America are these magical semiconductors being made?
| theptip wrote:
| I took this to be a reference to the original Silicon
| Valley semiconductor companies. Fairchild etc.
| outworlder wrote:
| They are referencing Moore's law. Some of them are made in
| the US, some are not (not today, at least).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| bootstrapping itself by extending tech designed decades ago?
| that doesn't sound right. Until today, the biggest rocket
| design was still the soviet N1 from the 60s. It's good to
| celebrate space achievement but rewriting history is annoying
| mpg33 wrote:
| China is going to be the exception to this me thinks..
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> Only in America things like this can happen.
|
| > Semi-Conductor doubling every 18 months
|
| IIRC, the recent doublings have been happening in Taiwan.
| That's why people make such a big deal about TMSC. America
| (i.e. Intel) actually has some catching up to do.
| piercebot wrote:
| What is it about America (or other countries) that makes you
| think this couldn't happen anywhere else?
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Talent is one. Opportunity to become super rich giant is
| another? (Seeing how China is killing their tech giants).
| foxyv wrote:
| Personally, I think it has a lot to do with American sub-
| culture, the US dollar, our crazy university system, and
| immigration. This is speculation on my part so take it with
| a BIG grain of salt.
|
| The USA brings in 50 million or so people from other
| countries. Often they are bloody minded, stone cold, hard
| workers that will sacrifice everything to give their
| children the opportunity to be Americans. These people are
| some of the best in the world in my opinion.
|
| The US dollar being used as a reserve currency for most of
| the world means that it is the center of international
| investment. This means that the billions of dollars that
| flowed into PayPal and Elon Musk's startups probably came
| in large part from foreign investment funds.
|
| Our universities crank out some of the weirdest and least
| conventional engineers you can imagine. Most of them are
| half-crazy in the first place. The archetype of Mad
| Scientist can be found in physics departments and
| engineering labs all over the country. Conformity is often
| seen as a kind of perversity. We idolize professors like
| Feynman and read novels like Ignition! This is why you see
| bridges collapsing and power grids failing while we build
| some of the most advanced technology in the world. We hate
| boring maintenance and love to launches cars into space.
|
| Finally in no small part is American sub-culture.
| Specifically the science fantasy of space travel and
| colonization that is in the heart of a lot of American
| engineers and scientists. The same fantasy that captured
| the heart of Elon Musk, a billionaire South African
| immigrant who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. In
| addition there is the added fact that few other countries
| would allow some random small company to build ICBMs in
| their metaphorical backyard. The USA is kinda loose like
| that...
| e40 wrote:
| _> The USA brings in 50 million or so people from other
| countries. Often they are bloody minded, stone cold, hard
| workers that will sacrifice everything to give their
| children the opportunity to be Americans. These people
| are some of the best in the world in my opinion._
|
| Over the last 40 years I've known and worked with some of
| these people, and I marvel at their tenacity and the
| sheer force of will they have to succeed. It just blows
| me away. Sadly, it seems to disappear from the next
| generation. I'll admit that I have a small sample size.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Tough times make tough people. But their next generation
| is usually soft sadly.
| foxyv wrote:
| I've worked with a lot of people like that as well. It's
| always a bit awe inspiring.
|
| I don't know what component is responsible for the
| difference between immigrants and natives. Maybe it's the
| selection, the change of environment, the adversity, or
| sheer diversity of individuals. If we could manage to
| build an education system that produced students as
| dedicated, creative and hard working as our best
| immigrants, the USA would secure a place in history that
| would make the 1400 years of the Roman Empire seem like a
| blip in comparison.
| [deleted]
| narrator wrote:
| One problem with other countries is there is an industrial
| oligarchy that can't get shake itself out of the "The
| Innovator's Dilemma." Disruption is not considered
| valuable. The Russians have two aircraft design bureaus
| Sukhoi and MiG to help somewhat in preventing stagnation,
| but it would be impossible for a SpaceX to come out of
| nowhere in Russia like it did in the U.S. Elon even went to
| Russia in the early SpaceX days to buy an old ICBM and they
| told him to screw off.[1]
|
| One related anecdote. I read somewhere a while ago about
| how Apple had a lot of internal security, even between
| teams. They said the reason for that is that if someone in
| the iPod department found out about the iPhone they'd
| realize the threat to their career and work to undermine
| it.
|
| [1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34976-spacex-ceo-elon-
| musk-t...
| ianai wrote:
| Actually the US declared they were willing to spend money
| for commercial space flight at the end of the shuttle
| program. They literally said "I'm a demander for a
| good/service" and entrepreneurs got to work.
| api wrote:
| I've come to believe that the most important quality of
| capitalism isn't markets or some super-human intelligence
| that markets somehow possess, but simply the ability to
| bypass stagnant incumbents, entrenched interests, and
| bureaucracies.
|
| In other words the most critical quality is permission-
| free innovation.
|
| In all other systems from feudalism to socialism to
| communism there generally is just one department or
| agency responsible for each thing, and it's usually
| either the state itself or some state-blessed entity with
| an enforced monopoly. If that entity does it's job well,
| that's great. If it doesn't, tough shit. Nobody can go
| around it.
|
| This is also why I disagree with market purists about
| anti-trust. If a private company gets so huge that it is
| able to occupy an entire market niche for a prolonged
| period of time, it's important to do something to either
| break it up or incentivize other entrants. A private
| company allowed to remain super-dominant in one sector
| for too long starts to look and behave like a Soviet
| bureau.
| treespace88 wrote:
| In almost all other countries the rich use the government
| to keep competition out. All under the banner of national
| pride.
|
| In Canada we lock out all foreign investment in lots of
| areas.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I never understood why Canada would restrict
| international players from disrupting sectors like
| telecom (a commodity really) but didn't seem to have any
| problem with Airbus taking over the CSeries program for
| almost nothing.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _disrupting sectors like telecom_
|
| Perhaps the government doesn't like foreigns tapping
| Canadians' communications? The NSA listens in on its own
| citizens with the cooperation of the US telcos, so what
| chance would foreigners have?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_progr
| am)
| project2501a wrote:
| > (a commodity really)
|
| you mean a utility, right?
| eplanit wrote:
| Where else does it happen? (sincere question)
| gpm wrote:
| > Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship
| will end up in the ocean.
|
| You mean for the first test flight? Do you have a source?
|
| Long term plan is definitely land landing, but I haven't seen
| anything about the first test flight.
|
| I assumed that they would try and land it from the start,
| they've already landed starship a few times, and it seems like
| that's where a lot of the unknowns still are (e.g. they're
| apparently adjusting wing size down after the last landing)?
| maccam94 wrote:
| The plan for the first test flight is to aim for a controlled
| water landing, but the odds of that being completely
| successful aren't high enough to risk a land landing. The new
| drone ships are still under construction:
| https://spaceexplored.com/2021/07/07/update-on-spacexs-
| gulf-...
| gridspy wrote:
| The test flight trajectories are posted with the FAA and
| covered in numerous places, for instance
|
| Article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/13/spacex-
| outlines-plans-...
|
| Video (Marcus House): https://youtu.be/9-9k513UIVw?t=298
|
| Basically both vechicles (the massive booster and the
| starship itself (2nd stage) are going to "land" on the water,
| which means a hover and then sinking into the water.
|
| Booster - Boost and separate, boostback burn and splashdown
| off the coast. Starship - 90 min orbit at about 120km,
| reentry and spashdown near Hawaii
|
| It's fairly quite likely that both would crater on this first
| flight - for instance this is the first booster flight and
| also the first reentry for the starship itself.
|
| The Falcon 9 booster also had similar flight plans until it
| could successfully fly a controlled trajectory to the surface
| of the ocean before they risked a drone ship too.
| milansuk wrote:
| Yep, this is what I meant, thanks for the sources.
|
| Although, I'm not sure about that "then sinking into the
| water" part. There are big LO2 and methane tanks and If
| they are empty enough and closed, both Starship and Booster
| shouldn't sink. I guest, we'll see it soon.
| krisoft wrote:
| "sinking into the water" means that it enters the water.
| A splashdown. It doesn't mean that it will sink to the
| bottom.
| gpm wrote:
| Thanks :)
| chasd00 wrote:
| With a Democrat in the whitehouse and many establishment players
| (with politicians in their pocket) unhappy, I can see the FAA
| dragging things out. There are many powers that be who would love
| to see the FAA force SpaceX to tear down their launch tower and
| move it a few feet over because of baby turtles or some other
| ridiculous excuse.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| What's the scaling like for rocket engines? How much more
| efficiency (in various forms) could you get if you made 1 giant
| engine instead? (Disregarding reliability)
| sfblah wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand what the point of all this is. Is
| this all about sending people to Mars? Is it basic research? What
| is the end goal here? I don't follow this too much, so I'm hoping
| someone can paste me a link to something I can read to explain
| the justification for building this thing.
| grammarprofess wrote:
| one objective is to have affordable and perfomant global
| connectivity
| mlyle wrote:
| Starship/Super Heavy have the prospect of dramatically reducing
| the cost of launch to orbit, the moon, and beyond.
|
| NASA has selected the platform for supply to the Lunar Gateway.
|
| SpaceX wants to use it to take humans to Mars.
|
| But it's also a decent platform for just getting lots and lots
| of mass into LEO.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Elon Musk claims this is all to establish a civilisation on
| Mars in order to decrease the chance of humanity destroying
| itself. He might not have an entirely faithful relationship
| with the truth, but there is really no other rational reason to
| be so aggressive with the Starship program. SpaceX already does
| the vast majority of commercial launches using its Falcon 9
| rocket, so they don't need to do anything this drastic.
| perrylaj wrote:
| My assumption has always been that the first to Mars will
| have a huge edge in gaining access to any natural resources
| (ore, salts, etc) that might have commercial value. I imagine
| the first organization to establish mining and refining
| capabilities on Mars would stand to make trillions in the
| production of things like steel and aluminum, as would be
| needed to build out any sizeable settlements on the planet.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Do you have any idea how much raw material and energy would be
| available to humanity if we were able to successfully colonize
| the solar system? The scale of what we could build and learn
| would be absolutely shaking. Seriously. That's enough 'why' for
| me.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| The initial technical goal is "more mass to orbit". Due to the
| rocket equation, the amount of fuel needed is ~20x the amount
| of payload to low earth orbit. Any fuel needed to get from low
| earth orbit to higher orbits needs to get to low orbit first,
| and so counts as mass. So the more mass and the greater a
| distance one wants to fly, the larger the required rocket. This
| rocket is very large.
|
| People and the necessary life support for people are quite
| massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to
| orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low
| earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far,
| NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no
| farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft
| which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability
| to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the
| moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of
| the rocket behind.
| hirundo wrote:
| Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to
| demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike
| its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has
| a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their
| rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year
| from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity
| will never get to Mars. --
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876
|
| The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs
| into more than one basket. The FAA is standing athwart the most
| effective effort to move in that direction, yelling Stop. The
| more fragile our environment is, the more protection it needs,
| the more important it is for them to get out of the way of
| projects like this.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Strong statement after the 737 MAX debacle.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Can someone explain why the MAX was allowed to re-use the 737
| type certificate?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| There's a swath of people who have adopted the position
| that it's best to let industry be the primary agent of
| regulation, largely for ideological political reasons. As
| we saw with the MAX debacle, such a position is foolish, as
| companies will always be cravenly willing to cut corners in
| the interest of short term profits.
|
| This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone
| through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to
| what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize
| there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in
| both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two
| buttress each other against their individual flaws. However
| in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked
| this ideal.
|
| We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians
| who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of
| government we ask for.
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| It is unclear to me why anyone would vote this down. It's
| spot on.
| [deleted]
| kristianp wrote:
| Clickable tweet (links don't work in preformatted text):
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876
| Diederich wrote:
| > The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs
| into more than one basket.
|
| This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the
| most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket.
|
| While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very
| important thing SpaceX is doing:
|
| "The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated,
| no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be
| anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and
| not be sad."
|
| A lot of what SpaceX is doing is extremely inspirational, and I
| think the world could use more things to look forward to in the
| future.
| shakezula wrote:
| > This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that
| the most important job of humanity is to fix our current
| basket.
|
| It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can
| have both.
|
| People insist we should be spending our money fixing the
| planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored
| the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration
| method.
|
| First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to
| even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously
| money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon
| sequestration tech.
| gridspy wrote:
| There are a couple of major reasons the FAA is involved:
|
| 1. Fuel-air explosions at ground level can injure people or
| destroy property (even kilometers away)
|
| 2. Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
|
| 3. Lots of fuel is toxic, we need to mitigate this.
|
| Basically someone has to walk through all the worst case
| scenarios and ensure that everyone (and nature) remains safe or
| as safe as it is possible to be.
| onion2k wrote:
| _The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs
| into more than one basket._
|
| Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough
| that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic
| accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large
| amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much
| harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down
| _a lot._
|
| [1] The space race has only been going for 70 years, and less
| than 25 years commercially. The idea that anything is happening
| "too slowly" is quite baffling really.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Humans went ~11,900 years without flight, then ~60 years
| later we landed on the moon.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| From Musk's perspective, any timeline which does not
| establish a permanent presence on Mars within his lifetime is
| too slow. It looked like that would be impossible before the
| Starship program, now it merely looks unlikely.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs
| into more than one basket.
|
| We are _very_ far from a self sustaining society and economy on
| Mars. Easily a century or more. I 'm cheering on SpaceX, but
| find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little
| more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one
| knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of
| earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.
|
| For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we
| don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we
| certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or
| accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is
| political will/unity.
|
| We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend
| modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are
| directly possible, today, with no new invention.
|
| But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more
| prudent than we are today.
| nickik wrote:
| Musk always gets unreasonable angry if he feels something slows
| him down.
|
| They have really not been slowed down that much FAA.
|
| So everybody should just chill out.
|
| Btw, for people interest, this interview with Ken Davidian
| FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is interesting:
|
| https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/2...
| Crunsher wrote:
| How is this project going to protect the environment?
| mulmen wrote:
| By making it cheaper to do things in space instead of in the
| atmosphere we breathe.
| midasuni wrote:
| Off site backup might not save your machine if it burns in a
| house fire, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't have it
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| To be honest, I can't tell you what kind of future innovation
| is going to result from cheaper spaceflight. But there is
| serious scientific and engineering potential to be unlocked.
| What SpaceX is doing seems environmentally unfriendly, and I
| know no-one wants to hear "but xyz is worse". But we really
| do need to keep such things in mind, because SpaceX's
| footprint here is completely dwarfed by domestic carbon
| creation. The Apollo Project lead to all sorts of spinoff
| technologies that we use today. It wouldn't be _unreasonable_
| to expect some of the future technological advancements to
| reduce pollution or carbon emissions.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Well it's moving human life _outside_ the environment, so
| that even if something catastrophic happens to this one 's
| there's backup humans.
| freeopinion wrote:
| If you have ever lived next to the incarnation of this
| philosophy, you might be able to see through its holes.
| It's the plot of any number of bad scifi movies. Evil
| aliens travel from solar system to solar system, using up a
| planet, then moving on. They've now reached Earth.
|
| There are plenty of industrial/mining sites that argue they
| need to be able to create huge hazard dumps for the sake of
| the future of the human race. It tends to be a very poor
| argument for those left holding the bag when the owners
| have taken their money and skipped town.
|
| If the danger is so great that we have to get off this
| planet in the next five years or we all die, well, then we
| might justify more urgency. If we've got 10 or 20 years to
| do it, let's take the time to protect the environment while
| we do it.
|
| If you want to argue that none of this bureaucracy is
| protecting the environment, that's a different argument.
| paxys wrote:
| The single most important job for humanity right now is to save
| this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time
| to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much
| into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real.
| The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month
| late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This
| effort is going to play out over many generations and
| centuries. Meanwhile our entire species stands no chance
| against one slight more deadly virus released tomorrow.
|
| Criticizing regulators is Elon's MO, whether it is the SEC for
| his Tweets, various transportation departments for self driving
| software safety, labor departments for covid restrictions for
| worker safety, FAA for rocket launches... You'd think there is
| some national conspiracy against him at this point.
| colordrops wrote:
| Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how about
| doing a bit of critical thinking on this. What about all the
| resources going into video games, sports, movies, music,
| amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts,
| travel and vacations, etc? They dwarf everything put into
| space exploration, and are arguably less useful. Do you make
| the same tired comments when those industries are brought up?
|
| And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple
| things can be done by humanity at once.
|
| edit: apologies for the first sentence here which was
| unnecessary to make my point.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Instead of parroting what you read on social media, how
| about doing a bit of critical thinking on this
|
| Totally unnecessary. That gratuitous dig doesn't advance
| your argument at all.
|
| > What about all the resources going into video games,
| sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television,
| weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc?
|
| That doesn't seem like it's u/paxys issue to address. The
| person they responded to made a _very_ strong claim: "The
| single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs
| into more than one basket".
|
| It seems entirely consistent with both the original
| argument and the reply that humans could have two very
| important jobs to address (climate change, and becoming
| multi-planetary) and _still_ have resources to dedicate to
| all those other things you describe.
|
| > Do you make the same tired comments when those industries
| are brought up?
|
| I would make a similar argument that u/paxys made if the
| amusement park industry claimed that building amusement
| parks was the single most important job that humanity had.
| Similarly, for sports, video games movies, or most other
| industries. Claiming the mantle of "the most important job
| humanity has" is a _very_ big claim.
|
| > And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple
| things can be done by humanity at once.
|
| u/paxys didn't say that we could only address one thing at
| a time. They were disagreeing with the claim that becoming
| multiplanetary is the single most important job humanity
| has. Disagreeing with which singular job we have is the
| "most important" one makes absolutely no claim as to how we
| should be dividing our time.
|
| Ultimately, I actually agree with the original poster that
| becoming multiplanetary and multistellar is an important
| feat we should be aggressively perusing. But I also think
| surviving any extinction-event filters that may come along
| the way is _equally important_.
| colordrops wrote:
| > Totally unnecessary
|
| Good point, I should have restrained myself here.
|
| The rest of your comments would be fair, except that
| u/paxys said the following:
|
| > There is enough time to think about colonizing the
| stars after that.
|
| Which clearly indicates that we should not be working on
| space travel until AFTER we've solved humanity's
| problems.
| s5300 wrote:
| The nation with the largest amount of military force and
| nuclear weapons, as well as control of the globally used
| & prized currency ($ USD), and even the universal
| language of the skies (well, maybe you could say it's
| England's language, but the central power of the U.S. is
| the reason it's the language of the skies), has around
| 1/3rd of it's nation that actively would like to see at
| least an other 1/3 of it's nation die, and said other 1/3
| really only wants to get things like nationwide
| enforcement of basic human rights (like in all other, I
| think, 32 of 33 highly developed nations do), and to
| actually embody the meaning of "welfare state" that the
| U.S. has been defined as for... idk how long tbh, but for
| quite some time - Along with a want for the
| aforementioned 1/3rd not wanting to literally kill them.
|
| And they're simply unable to come to any understanding,
| after decades of botched discourse.
|
| I don't see how some group of people focusing on space
| travel as a way to potentially divert the end of humanity
| as something _that_ bad
| ncallaway wrote:
| > There is enough time to think about colonizing the
| stars after that.
|
| I didn't read it as indicating that we should fully
| postpone humanity's problems. For example, the next few
| sentences read:
|
| > The world isn't going to end because his next launch is
| a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever
| else. This effort is going to play out over many
| generations and centuries.
|
| That indicates to me that the delay the person is
| considering is on the order of the delay imposed by FCC
| regulations (i.e. months or years), not "start working on
| it after we've solved humanity's problems".
|
| But that's just how it reads to me
| colordrops wrote:
| Those comments were added after I responded. In fact it's
| still being edited. This was the entirety of the comment
| I responded to:
|
| > The single most important job for humanity right now is
| to save this one planet we have from destruction. There
| is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after
| that.
| mulmen wrote:
| This whole "whatever I don't like and/or understand isn't
| worth doing" philosophy is just not interesting. Humanity
| is not a hivemind. We can do more than one thing. History
| has countless examples of innovation in one area leading to
| breakthroughs in another. Just make your own contribution
| to humanity where you can, we will be fine.
| lucideer wrote:
| That's true most of the time. Where it falls down is in
| cases where it's not "we".
|
| There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important
| space exploration.
|
| There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who
| want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists
| fantasy to get backing.
|
| You're right that it's not either or: let's continue
| supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive
| about it.
| meepmorp wrote:
| GP: >> The single most important job humanity has is to get
| our eggs into more than one basket.
|
| OP: > The single most important job for humanity right now
| is to save this one planet we have from destruction.
|
| You're arguing with nobody's point.
| colordrops wrote:
| I'm arguing with this:
|
| > There is enough time to think about colonizing the
| stars after that.
|
| Which directly states that problems should be worked on
| serially - that space travel should be worked on AFTER we
| solve other problems.
| paxys wrote:
| Yes we can do multiple things at once. In the thread you
| joined we are discussing the _single most important_ thing.
| So what really is your point here?
| colordrops wrote:
| Your comment clearly indicates that we should hold on on
| space travel until after other problems are solved.
| Talanes wrote:
| "Clearly" is a bit too much, given that you've had to
| comment multiple times to people who didn't read it that
| way.
| colordrops wrote:
| Can you explain what you meant by that comment then?
| lucideer wrote:
| > _They dwarf everything put into space exploration_
|
| If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing &
| contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the
| collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony
| agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road
| transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore"
| in the world and lots in between.
|
| Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy
| scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally
| underfunded for decades.
|
| What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even
| uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS
| and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending
| phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR
| missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our
| planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete
| scientific illeterate would fall for it.
|
| SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions
| by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit
| outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.
|
| > _a bit of critical thinking_
|
| Indeed.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Who looks at a rocket and thinks "Hmm, I bet the
| engineers could have gone with a more efficient design,
| but they decided to go with a dick?"
|
| Like do people really think that there's better shapes to
| go with? And if people really believe this, what part of
| our public education system failed them most? Because my
| money is on critical thinking.
| s5300 wrote:
| Consider the fact, that the publicly richest citizen on
| Earth, as well as one of the people behind one of the largest
| financial transaction sites, may have genuinely already
| concluded that, as the history of politics among other things
| have shown, that the Earth/humanity may simply be unsavable,
| for whatever reasons they find.
|
| He has a _lot_ of talent at his disposable, and presumably
| information to a decent bit of otherwise locked away studies
| /reports. Do I think he is correct? Perhaps not, but my nor
| your opinion really matters.
|
| If he's made the decision shits truly FUBAR, ala Foundation,
| then leave him alone while he works on what he may genuinely
| believe to be a shot at surviving the FUBAR long-term.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| Or you know it's vaporware again like FSD and he is just
| making bank in an industry that is new? Now that technology
| allowed capital to keep up with government cheese enough to
| take on space freight.
| shakezula wrote:
| I'm getting bored of watching rockets land like they do
| in the movies.
|
| Soooooo. It's probably not vaporware homie.
| gridspy wrote:
| I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy
| industry into space. Move our power generation into space and
| beam it down. Make advanced technologies in space which
| benefit those on Earth. Move people into real orbital
| habitats.
|
| Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
|
| We can't "wait" for anything, or the window during which we
| can develop space travel will close. 10 or 100 years from now
| we might no longer have the motivation or the means to fund
| and build new vechicles like these.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy
| industry into space. Move our power generation into space
| and beam it down.
|
| Wasn't one of the disasters in Simcity 2000 having your
| power-beaming space laser miss your power station instead
| light your city on fire? It seems like such a thing would
| cause massive hazards.
|
| > Move people into real orbital habitats.
|
| > Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
|
| Or force people to live deep underground. Then when they
| save up enough money to buy a ticket, they can be
| transported there much more economically.
|
| As for me, I like living on the surface.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't know anything about the physical feasibility of
| any of this but honestly I don't think 'argument by video
| game' is terribly convincing.
| pyrale wrote:
| > I think the best way to save the planet is to move heavy
| industry into space.
|
| Good luck dealing with the absence of cheap oxydizer and
| the lack of convection which makes heat dispersion a
| nightmare.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd,
|
| I think you lack some self-awareness here. Space is clearly a
| mild curiosity to you at most.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Space is clearly a mild curiosity to you at most.
|
| I think it's _extremely_ unhelpful to tell people what
| their interests are, or what they believe. How much could
| you possibly know about this person 's interests from that
| one post?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| How could the OP possibly know how interested _other
| people_ are in spaceflight? They did exactly as much, by
| claiming they were as interested as the average nerd.
| midasuni wrote:
| Why are you posting on HN then? Get out there and save the
| planet.
| shakezula wrote:
| This isn't helpful or insightful input for anyone,
| including the people literally trying to get out and save
| the planet.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| He's not claiming there is a national conspiracy against him.
| He is claiming that between regulatory capture and regulators
| trying to justify their existence, government agencies are
| not acting in humanity's interest.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one
| in particular I hear very often and should be debunked.
|
| A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is
| 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It
| would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket".
|
| Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into
| why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge
| industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone
| advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not
| friendly enough to support us with lower tech.
|
| Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people
| there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a
| species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in
| less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars
| from scratch?
| boardwaalk wrote:
| Should be debunked if it's not true (that a colony could be
| self-sustaining), but you haven't debunked it here.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm probably not going to debunk it either, not by any real
| standards. But...
|
| It seems to me that our level of technology has increased,
| partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of
| applying those discoveries, but also at least partly
| through increased specialization. You've got a farmer
| growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a
| tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the
| chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites
| in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer.
| You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the
| workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory
| needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And
| you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS
| satellites in orbit. And the rocket _fuel_ manufacturers.
| And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated
| material culture to achieve that level of productivity on
| the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because
| the farmers are so productive that we don 't have to spend
| very many people on farming.
|
| A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been
| made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I
| worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate.
| (Africa, maybe?)
|
| So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000
| people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do
| that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means
| that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or
| replace every one of those tools ( _and_ any tools they use
| in the process). And there 's a hard cutoff below which
| they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't
| just fall back to being hunter-gatherers.
|
| So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the
| maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000
| people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a
| self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of
| machines?
| nickik wrote:
| Watch 'Mars Industrialization Roadmap' by Casey Handmer. That
| is exactly what he is addressing. He literally mentions the
| 'I, Pencil'. And btw a million people is the goal, not 1000.
|
| See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM
|
| And the corresponding book:
|
| How To Industrialize Mars: A Strategy For Self-Sufficiency:
| How To Settle A Lethal Vacuum In 400 Easy Steps
|
| Part of the whole project of Mars is making this very thing
| possible in the first place. It requires rethinking a lot of
| how we do things.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > A colony on mars, even of significant size and population,
| is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth
|
| It would be in the near future, true. In fact, the key
| milestone for humanity being truly multi-planetary is that
| each planet must be independently self-sufficient.
|
| There's no laws of physics that would prevent human life on
| Mars or Venus from eventually becoming self-sufficient.
|
| The time-frames to get to that point are large (mid-hundreds
| to low-thousands of years by my random guess). A thousand
| years isn't that long in terms of the evolution of the
| species, though, and are the time scales we should be
| thinking of multiplanetary life on.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| It should be remembered that the unspoken rule of any agency or
| institution is to justify its own continued existence. For be
| bureaucracy that is the FAA, all the onerous requirements they
| place on spaceflight is a feature, not a bug.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline
| passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one
| minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of
| the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a
| rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and
| it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want
| our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where
| they're okay dumping hydrazine on local villages [1].
|
| 1: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-
| rock...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not saying regulatory agencies are bad.
| What I am saying, though, is that these agencies don't have
| an incentive to trim down red-tape in the interest of
| efficiency. On one level, it would be bad for their
| employees and budget. On another level, something _might_
| slip through the cracks so it makes sense for a safety
| agency to be far more risk averse than what it watches.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per
| year and eventually interplanetary travel would be _bad_
| for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure?
|
| The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It
| seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage
| growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all
| seem unstable to me.
|
| When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-
| simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in
| correcting the problem.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Over the long run, more volume would provide more work
| for the FAA and its employees. For now, though, loosening
| the rules in hopes of getting more launches would serve
| to reduce work for the agency and diminish it's purpose.
| I could see a business making the short term tradeoff in
| the name of long term gains but not a government
| bureaucracy. Does that make where I am coming from a
| little more understandable?
| chasd00 wrote:
| If only the launch site was near, and launch trajectory
| over, a huge body of water where a crash would not endanger
| anyone or anything.
| Taniwha wrote:
| It's likely not just the FAA .... especially because they
| are launching within 5km of the Mexican border
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| And they aren't sending passengers on these autonomous
| test flights. Nor are they risking multi-billion dollar
| taxpayer funded payloads. It makes total sense to me to
| allow SpaceX a faster launch cadence for their
| prototypes.
| lttlrck wrote:
| How is the FAA blocking environmental protection programs? It's
| important that we explore, but exploring won't fix the mess
| we've made.
| mulmen wrote:
| It could. That's pretty much the entire argument in favor of
| exploration actually.
|
| We are going to need far more advanced technology than we
| have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate
| change. If we move heavy industry to space that can
| dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The
| technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other
| areas like energy generation or storage.
|
| I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day.
| They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they
| finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers
| doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and
| electricity resources.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Musk tweeted an amazing photo of the fuel lines being welded in.
| This was taken 3 days ago.
|
| https://www.space.com/starship-super-heavy-engine-section-ph...
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