[HN Gopher] Starship is Still Not Understood (2021)
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Starship is Still Not Understood (2021)
Author : MichaelNolan
Score : 15 points
Date : 2024-10-13 20:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
| BryanLegend wrote:
| Feel's like we're finally conquering the gravity well!
| amelius wrote:
| We have been for more than half a century ...
| kemotep wrote:
| > Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes
| of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows
|
| Again, this is from 2021, one of those set of launches was to be
| _last year_. And it was to be 1,000 starships bound for Mars to
| meet that goal.
|
| Starship is impressive but we need to be realistic about these
| numbers. We haven't even technically had a launch with any
| payload. Additionally they claim that within 2 years of the
| Artemis mission we could get 1,000 people on the moon (though say
| this isn't going to happen at least).
|
| Starship will make Starlink V2 feasible and dozens if not
| hundreds of missions that would otherwise never be possible. But
| getting 1 million people to Mars (or even 1,000 people to the
| Moon) is just fantasy. I will gladly eat crow but none of these
| capabilities that exist on paper have actually been demonstrated
| that are necessary to meet these goals. SapceX is the best there
| is and likely will get to Mars. Just not how Musk describes it.
| xupybd wrote:
| He is a salesman that always over promises but still does some
| cool stuff.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Just not how Musk describes it.
|
| Every innovative mission needs someone pushing people to do the
| impossible. That being said, every company trying to accomplish
| the impossible needs an adult in the room to ground that
| visionary.
|
| In the case of Space-X, there's an adult in the room. Elon's
| direct input at Space-X almost set the entire Starship project
| back a year by insisting on trying a concrete launch pad that
| all of his engineers told him would fail (and it did). After
| that failure he appeared to get so distracted by Twitter that
| Shotwell could point the engineers in a more effective
| direction.
|
| In the case of Tesla, there unfortunately is not. Elon's direct
| input resulted in canning a low-cost model in favor of a "robo-
| taxi" that is 100% dependent on full self driving using nothing
| but cameras. That's pretty obviously not going to be viable
| with any existing technology. An adult in the room would've
| told him to either stick with the low-cost model to compete
| with incoming Chinese imports, or use Lidar so that there's a
| viable self-driving vehicle that can be sold sometime in the
| next decade...
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(page generated 2024-10-13 22:00 UTC)