And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.
Obviously a semblance of a schedule is good to have, but realistically, that's not really how research works. Look at James Webb telescope, it was originally scheduled for 2007, and ended up launching 14 years later. It's still an amazing piece of engineer/science, and it's amazing that it's up there now, even if it was very late to it. It's much better to be late and successful than early and failing.
I am taking issue with this claim. Are there cases where the cost/benefit actually come out favorably for Starship as it is actually turning out? Are they cases anyone should actually care about beyond sci-fi fantasies (i.e. not "colonize Mars")?
How many of those things that have never been done/attempted before sit downstream of poor strategic decisions?
I became a starship skeptic because I thought the project management was bullshit. Nothing I've seen changes in my mind about that.
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows. But, if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except for the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
So anyway the math is weird to only get twice that payload but require 10x more propellent.
I am a huge space nerd, therefore I have a lot of respect for SpaceX, and I have been hating on Blue for years. As weird as it is, Blue might actually beat SpaceX to the moon. Just the real chance of that is crazy, and if you look at the logistics, there's a real chance.
In the long term, aside from HLS, Stoke Aerospace has the coolest design. Late mover advantage.
Starship excels at funneling tax money into Musk's various enterprises. Whether it actually reaches orbit, much less the moon or Mars, merely incidental, the sexy marketing photos for an imaginary island resort.
By the time Starship does actually achieve orbit it will likely get damaged by all of the debris SpaceX has parked around the planet.
They're not scheduled until 2063 :)
Shouldn't even be phrased like this. We can cheer for progress without simping so badly that we can't acknowledge failures and missteps.
Space is hard and over promising and under delivering are real possibilities that a hype-person cannot run from. Just moderate the hype and let the engineers cook - is that so hard??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...
It's a lot more than you might think, and I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the non-spacecraft objects, some of which are hinted at in the first paragraph.
All of those impact sites have been located but the last one wasn't pinpointed until 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-mystery-solved-apollo-rock...
ref: https://books.google.ie/books?id=6QAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA...
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-tw...
Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter
Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]
As stupid as the basic idea is the scope he's described is beyond any reasonable endeavor it's nor clear our society could achieve it if it was the singular goal of our species and what for? There is simply no use nor demand for it and it's by no means a durable investment we should have to continue the effort forever to sustain it.
> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.
> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.
I still call it sound when I hear things under water. Gas isn't special.
When someone knocks on your door, you still say you heard the sound, even though the pressure wave was transmitted through the solid door material (before then being transmised to the gas in the room). Likewise, we still file a noise complaint when the neighbor is throwing a raging party, even though we are feeling the bass as much as we are hearing it.