The Raptor 2 engine is just an absurd. The original specs were already kind of insane. But Raptor 2 is an monster. They really pushed already significantly into a second generation design before first flight. Raptor 2 is not just a slight upgrade, its a huge upgrade.
If it can actually launch multiple times a day without any refurbishment, it will simply totally break space travel as we have known it. This engine makes everything else possible.
Whenever I read enthusiasm like this for space travel .. especially talk of Musks interplanetary species and stuff, I get a flashback to Stark by Ben Elton . Published in 1989, getting closer to true by the day. Also probably the funniest book I've ever read.
Where's the utopia in The Expanse? Humans move offworld; two communities with stable infrastructure spend a century abusing a scattered sub-class; then they all get into a war because a sociopath egotist finds alien technology powerful enough to wipe them all out or mutate them into components of itself. And then there's the meteorites...
Yes, we are a result of evolution and it is our evolutionary imperative to find and fill any biological niche available. You can try denying our nature but it is a futile endeavor.
However, these "locusts" can discover and create. We can do art, science, understand the Reality and the Universe. I find this absolutely beautiful and breathtaking, especially for a "swarm of locusts".
Yeah its as if politics while single planet species isn't hard enough already. Still i guess a lot of series and movies are still stuck in this end of history mode of the late 1990s and pre-2008 GFC. One single government inspired by the US system. A lot has changed in the last 14 years we seems to wade into a west vs east planet lets hope its stays a tech cold war.
I like how small and slender Raptor 2 is compared to Raptor 1. The turbo pump looks even scarier than usual though. It's amazing that something so small is producing 100k HP (the pump turbine).
That is interesting, so could you replace the biggest and most powerful internal combustion engine in the world that weighs 2,300 tons by [whatever powers] turbopumps from a raptor engine and get the same power output? Where is the catch? Less fuel efficient? Less torque?
Edit: What I meant to ask was: Can one use "whatever is powering the turbopumps and delivering the 100k HP" to power say a ship propeller, instead of that 2.3k ton internal combustion engine. Like, make some variant of raptor engine that delivers this power to a shaft.
Yes it's less efficient, you spent all this energy cooling off all the fuel and oxidizer to cryogenic temperatures before using it. The turbopumps in the raptors are also running very far off from stochiometric fuel mixtures (which is fine in the rocket because they're exhaust is used as fuel for the next stage) - which means if you're just using it for the pump your not actually burning most of the fuel. The exhaust is also really hot, and if you're not somehow using that energy it's definitely inefficient.
None of those issues matter to the rocket. Energy used on the ground to cool down propellants is "free", the colder the better because it means you can fit more propellants in the same tanks. The exhaust is just being piped into the main combustion chamber, so it will eventually be fully combusted extracting the left over chemical energy. The heat of the exhaust (after the main chamber) is the whole point, with a nozzle converting it into kinetic energy.
You've also got a bunch of safety issues. High pressures, liquid oxygen, and so on.
You could in theory do that. The downsides are that a turbopump needs comparatively perfect fuel, requires liquid oxygen instead of air, and would be inefficient in non-rocket applications (the ‘waste’ has other uses like cooling/protecting the rocket nozzle in some rockets).
Think of it as an engineering tradeoff where you get to pick 2 things to optimize for: weight, efficiency and size. A turbopump (and preburner) optimizes for weight/size. A ships engine picks efficiency twice, making it massive and heavy.
The turbopump on its own won't do anything. The turbopump takes the 100k hp, and uses that to compress fuel and liquid oxygen. It's powered by the engine. It doesn't produce power on its own.
It's not as small and powerful as the SpaceX one but I guess it needs some extra bits. Also it runs off air rather than liquid oxygen which must reduce power a tad.
Used everywhere, more complex and has a more limited operating parameters though. In the maritime industry it has generally been military or high speed ferries using them. Essentially, if your ship can get away with a larger more mechanically simple engine it is more economical because as long as they stay on the surface you are not paying the fuel price of also lifting the engine.
Commercial jets use the same mechanics with their turbofan engines. That is why they are growing huge, we're just encasing the propeller inside the cowling, with some other nice side-effects.
Every time I look at jet engine diagrams I get chills thinking about what it must take to make mechanical parts that function with that much precision for that many revolutions under that much heat and pressure.
like many here, I've spent my professional life in software. You can goto walmart, buy a $500 laptop, hook it up to free wifi at a coffee shop and you have access to all the tools you need to build cutting edge software technology. That is not the case in meatspace. Going from an empty space in a factory to a jet engine ready to be installed on a plane blows me away on so many different levels.
You could potentially use a turbine engine as a generator in a hydrocarbon-electric setup. It would in theory be lighter, simpler, and require less maintenance.
For now there's already a lot of momentum with ICE and they are very polished products. But I think the potential for turbine is there given the shift towards electrification.
Some hurdles include working with materials that can tolerate very high stress, and finding ways to improve efficiency from significant heat loss.
The raptor burns highly purified methalox for a couple minutes at most. The ship engines have to work for weeks and years economically running on bunker fuel. From fundamental thermodynamics, the bigger an engine is the more efficient it is but you obviously need to compromise on that in a rocket.
Soyuz rocket takes 9 minutes to get to orbit. Raptors are multiple-use engines, their lifetimes could be hours of work, which is a lot for rocket engines. However it could be possible to increase lifetimes at least another order of magnitude - an NK-33 engine once run uninterrupted for 14 thousands seconds. Consumed a lot of kerosene.
RL-10 can avoid too big stresses, at least not heating to high temperatures, so this is another hint on possibly long working rocket engines...
But I think what he means is that currently the chamber gets to much damage to be full reusable on a daily bases over a long period of time, not that it doesn't work at all.
Also, the only non-intentional engine RUD that I know of is SN8, where debris from ground destroyed the engine avionics at takeoff. Any other incident?
On Mars it would actually clash with one of the moons. But if you coordinate 1000s of pods correctly you can let the elevator wiggle so it never gets hit by the moon. It sounds insane but its doable.
Check out the talk about elevators from Mars Society conference.
Annoying, isn't it. SpaceX, like all worthwhile and impressing endeavours in the past, is the work of a legion of people in front of and behind the curtain!
If they are making such big upgrades before even getting to orbit, it suggests the rest of their design is falling short of expectations on mass/performance, and they need more thrust to make up for it.
No, they are always evolving everything as fast as they possible can. They don't have a 'target performance' that they need to hit because the military or somebody told them.
They are just iterating each individual part pushing towards ever higher performance.
My theory is that they aim to disrupt Earth travel (airlines). Elon pointed out that the reliability of Starship would exceed that of commercial airplanes, and the fuel costs are not that different than, say, a 747. Fewer moving parts than an airplane, less human costs, order of magnitude faster...
Concerns about cost per flight aside, how would one go about locating spaceports near enough to urban centers for this concept to be viable? If a fully fueled airliner crashes in an urban area, it’s devastating. Now consider a fully fueled rocket — would the crash be an order of of magnitude worse?
Perhaps I still have the “rockets are inherently dangerous, mitigate bad outcomes by isolating them” mentality. Maybe designs will get the the point where the likelihood of a bad outcome is so remote that it would make sense to locate a spaceport in the same way one locates an airport. Or maybe the spaceport could be way out there and just connected to the urban center with high speed ground transportation. Either way, if spaceports become commercially viable, it’s an interesting thing to consider from an urban planning perspective.
In the presentation he says one of the main problems is that launches are loud, and so would probably need to be 30mi from anything. The plan is lots of sea based launch & landing platforms.
Why not start with replacing loads of trans continental freight cargo? There's no risk of human casualties, you can land away from cities and transport it in. And I'm sure there's plenty of business to be had.
It's also a great way to fund the development of starship.
There are many safety and security issues that must be solved before suborbital passenger flights become viable. Some involve national security. For example, can you imagine a world where the US, Russia, and China keep launching ICBMs at each other all the time?
Others involve more mundane risks that are pretty much guaranteed to occur once in a while. Things like losing cabin pressure or something catching fire. How do you deal with such situations, how quickly can you get the rocket to land safely, and how quickly can you evacuate the passengers?
And SpaceX won a contract to transport cargo: "SpaceX wins $102 million Air Force contract to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world in a rocket"
My understanding is that rockets are good at getting a small mass to move really quickly. They will never win moving a lot of mass within the atmosphere. The fuel costs are radically different.
A 747 can lift and land ~80% of Starship's design cargo but uses something like 7 times less fuel.
Elon thinking is that on long distance flight you increase moved cargo per vehicle per unit of time.
He was saying that flying to the other end of the world will be 20x faster vs. airplane.
So if you move 20x more cargo per unit of time, then cost of cargo per vehicle + static infrastructure are proportionally lower.
But we need to take into account that number of cycles of a rocket engine may not be as good as jet engines, ground / water infrastructure seems a lot more complicated, fuel costs are higher etc. etc.
I doubt the math will close on it taking everything into account, but maybe there will be some limited use cases. USA army seems to be thinking about it. Extremely rapid deployment capability all around the world may be worthwhile for them.
Yeah, I've kept a close but unfortunately deeply skeptical eye on that technology. Seems that all the tolerances are razor thin and all the failure modes catastrophic. Like, water vapour in the pre-cooler tubes? This is waaay out there in engineering terms IMHO.
Reading the recent heat exchanger news [1] the are very careful to talk about Mach 5 airflow temperatures, not velocity. Surely it the product of these two that produce the mind-boggling heat flux that the pre-cooler is tasked with cooling. It feels like they're going to keep carving out smaller and smaller targets until they run out of money.
If you look at the cost the calculated originally for the Skylon, it doesn't actually beat Falcon 9 even.
And when I listened to some presentation with the people involved, it seem they had no real understanding of some of the complexity involved. Their history is mostly in academic and British space industry, and all the project they worked on before are canceled paper studies that were kicked around in Britain.
When asked about the structure of Skylon the answer was vague hand waving about some new materials that might exist. Nothing at all concrete that has even begun being tested for high complexity air frames and high requirements.
Elon himself was asked about this when he presented in Britain. And he answered by saying that investing massive amount of complexity in the easiest part of your flight was counter productive.
Pushing the thrust of your traditional rocket engine a little bit higher, is far, far easier then engines.
And if you are really optimizing to that kind of extreme, doing even more advanced version of second stage engines and structural optimization on the second stage would likely always have a higher pay off per complexity invested.
SpaceX vs Skylon/Sabre, feels a bit like the Henry Ford quote about "faster horses". I do appreciate the scale of the engineering problems and neither is easy, but SpaceX and rocketry just seems like another "faster horse", whereas Skylon/Sabre is something totally new. But I don't have much hope given how long it's taken to get to where we are now. It's the space equivalent of tech - get to market first with something that works, not something that's a tech tour-de-force.
Elon seemed to indicate that it would be stretching to get individual launch costs below $1M. That seems at least 2-3 orders of magnitude out of range for most conventional travel?
I believe that $1M includes the booster stage, and that for suborbital p2p travel you should be able to skip that. The booster consumes the majority of the fuel, has a lot more engines (which require upkeep), and so on.
$1M for an orbital flight strikes me as an insanely aggressive target, but if they can achieve that, they can probably achieve half that, or less, for suborbital hops.
There is no way the cost per trip (airline) is in the $1K - $10K range. The Boeing 787-8 has a fuel capacity of 33,500 gallons. I don't think an intercontinental flight costs significantly less than $1M
In round numbers, airlines’ cost basis is ~$0.15 per available seat mile.
So a trip from NYC to Rome of 4,300 miles in a 777-300ER with 350 passengers would cost in the ballpark of $225k.
LA to Shanghai at 6,500 miles in the same capacity plane would be more like $350k.
$1M wouldn’t make much sense because with 350pax you’d need them to pay $2,900 each leg just to cover the operating costs. So a round trip flight to Shanghai that was completely sold out in both directions would need to have an average ticket price of nearly $6k.
I’m sure they would find their customers. The Concorde from NY to Paris ran about 10k USD round trip. There are many more millionaires now than there were in the 90s.
I think their benchmark is a 100% business/first class ride with every seat having business/first class prices. The idea being they can beat that for long distance. Also time is money arguments as well. As most airlines actually make the majority of their money on business/first class seats for long distance international flights, which is used to subsidize the economy seats. This starts to make long distance flights uneconomic for airlines versus Starship.
That’s a falicy, why would air airline subsidise economy?
Several airlines have tried all business flights. I’ve taken some - Qatar to London for example, Paris-NY I think was all business too when I flew it, and there a London-New York one
But they are rare exceptions. Yes if you can fill a 787 with 100 first class passengers paying 5k each way you can make money, but the demand isn’t there.
Flying from Los Angeles is $1000 round trip, so $500 one way, which is $250k on a 500 passenger airliner. If Starship can carry 1000 people for $1000k, it would be twice the cost per passenger.
I'm not sure that this will ever be viable for the general population. Think about the acceleration at launch and reentry. It's more an amusement park experience than travel by car, ship or plane. There will be people mentally and physically fit for that (past some age and before another one) and people that will never be.
Other problems like cost, time from home to spaceport and boarding can be fixed or be irrelevant (if I live too far away, too bad for me, I'll fly.)
Man If I could fly (rocket?) to AUS from the UK in a handful of hours I'd be all over that vs. the 24+ hour flights + connections. Sure it doesn't make sense for all routes but for super long distance I can see it being competitive for some section of the market.
I'd do that too, but I keep my point that it's not for everyone in the same way that a flight is. Babies, old people, pets. They can fly to space (untested for babies AFAIK) but is it advisable? I think that there will be a market for 27 hours long flights to Australia even after starships. We'll wait and see.
But they didn’t with Concorde. There are more first class seats across the Atlantic (well pre covid) than Concorde, but the latter failed to be as profitable, and super sonic business jets aren’t a thing.
But due to noise protection regulation on both sides of the Atlantic, there where not enough profitable routes available to be able to recoup development costs.
They launched people to the space station ok. The max acceleration isn't actually at launch as the rocket is heavy with fuel then - it increases as it gets lighter.
Mass to orbit gives you lots of options: Starlink completed, more telescopes like James Webb but cheaper, a moon base, radio telescope on the far side of the moon, orbital rotational space stations (for G forces), missions to asteroids, Mars, outer planets, are just a few things. Point to point transport on Earth, halfway around the world in less than an hour.
It also opens up off planet manufacturing in a way that can snowball into self sustaining growth. Which IMO is how we're going to mint the first trillionaire.
If this pans out and rapid and full reusability of the starship system is realized - which by all accounts looks more than very likely at this stage its more a question of when.
Elon Musk will be the world's first trillionaire and he also got Tesla's FSD to pull out of the hat.
Well yes. But that's partly because the launch weight was restrained, and the launch cost high. It's a bit unituitive!
The limits on launch weight means enormous costs to remove every single grma they can. This makes the launch cost go down in percent. If thy could just make it 50% heavier they could cut development costs by a lot. They could also build one much faster and allow it to fail constructively where you learn a bunch and then build number 2, 3, 4 with the things you learned. So now you have 3 telescopes instead of one.
Yes. But the telescope cost as much as it did because they needed to origami it into the available space. If you have much more volume and weight you can design a simpler structure which achieves the same goal. Simpler structures cost less.
I’m unsure there’s much to discuss in that specific regard? If you believe in cheap heavy lift and humans colonizing Mars, you agree this project has merit (and the costs and human effort involved reasonable). If you don’t, you see this project as superfluous and wasteful. Is that interpretation inaccurate? It’s somewhat, but not entirely, binary.
From the presentation, development costs will be 5-10% of the Saturn V program (2020 dollars adjusted). Thats a bargain for the capabilities delivered.
What if I believe in government run Mars colonies, but don't believe in private ones like one run as Musk's empire? Am I not allowed a nuanced opinion?
SpaceX are a haulage company: they currently haul crew and cargo to and from Earth orbit (plus a few deep-space probes, and one deep-space car); Starship will extend this further through the solar system (Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc.).
At the moment, their main "destination" is the government-run ISS. There are no off-world colonies (public or private); there aren't even any private space stations yet. (NASA recently funded some private space station proposals; SpaceX made a token effort, which was rejected).
Musk himself has stated that he wants humans to be multi-planetary, and doesn't care who does it; that he would be happy for someone to out-compete SpaceX, since that would mean the goal has been achieved. SpaceX will gladly help governments set up off-world colonies; in fact, that seems like the only feasible way to build them. The problem is the cost was too high, even for government; the point of Starship is to reduce that cost.
The only reason Musk started SpaceX was because the Boeings/Lockheed Martins/etc. were happy to keep prices high; and Russia wouldn't sell him a Mars-capable rocket.
Mars is a big place. If we have the tech to create colonies governments can pay SpaceX for a ticket to get whatever flavour of structure they wish there.
Moon colonies, mars colonies, space stations in orbit for science, space stations for leisure, space stations for industry. Shipyards for building bigger spaceships in orbit. Mining asteroids. Etc.
I am by no means an expert or even enthusiast. Space Manufacturing, New innovation possibility with near zero gravity. New way to harness energy from the sun. Or the real possibility of space tourism.
"It's gonna be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work. You might die." -- Elon's sales pitch for Mars, in his own words.
I wonder if any billionaire (or their children) will be doing the early work. It's an interesting game of "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future.
Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be a disaster. But over the course of 200 years of constant space travel, it seems incredibly unlikely that there won't be some kind of disaster. The question is, how will we react?
I hope we don't give up. And I hope billionaires risk their children alongside the working class.
Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress?
I suppose there's an idea we could apply everything done on Mars to Earth, but like... seriously, what we just took all the prep for mars and just put it in the middle of the Empty Quarter, the Saraha, Antarctica?
People barely want to live in the arctic circle, yet believe that our salvation comes in Mars? I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
The basic idea is to not have all your eggs in one basket. We are one asteroid strike away from losing all human life on earth. Having 2 habited planets spreads the risk. Obviously having those planets in different solar systems would be even better, but we don’t have the technology for that, yet.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Our options aren't only (a) live only on Earth, and (b) live on Earth and Mars and potentially other planets. There is, for example, (c) live in man-made structures orbiting the sun at a distance of 1AU, which is debatedly much more sensible than trying to live on Mars.
Solar sails can get you to anywhere in the Solar system. Not very fast, but essentially free. So a swarm of drone ships with solar sails can transport an almost infinite amount of propellant to your refueling bases from mining sites.
It is much easier to get protected from radiation on mars, than in the outer space. Nobody knows for certain how would childbirth look like in zero g and it's just the one of many problems. Mars is much more hospitable than pure vacuum.
Technically, every structure encapsulating space makes that space "underground" - the distinction between natural rocks or poured concrete as a ceiling is negligible when it comes to radiation protection. Whenever we set up a sunshade, we are protecting ourselves from harmful radiation.
Putting more material between you and radiation by burying into the ground is a good idea, especially when your concrete-pouring capabilities are limited.
Mars is difficult of course, but it does have resources. You can get water, oxygen, rocket fuel, various ores, etc. It's also not a vacuum, and there are places where the temperature profile is vaguely similar to Earth.
None of that is true in space, unless you're thinking of something I'm not, but like another poster has said, none of this is zero sum. The technology developed to try to settle on mars can be devoted to building large, habitable objects in space if people think that's a better plan. We should also have a moon base, etc. etc.
It's more sensible if you plan to keep a bunch of people there with constant supply from Earth. Elon wants to build a *self-sustaining* city on Mars. There isn't any other choice of location, be it man-made, or in the solar system:
- that has enough resources, atmosphere, gravity, water to allow a non-trivial population to survive without help from Earth
- that is hospitable to life
I suggest you watch his previous presentation where he talks exactly on why Mars is the destination, and not somewhere else.
Yes, we are talking about permanent, Earth-independent settlement in space. I didn't mean to imply that the settlements in the man-made structures would be Earth-dependent.
Atmosphere is possible in man-made structures.
Gravity can be simulated in man-made structures.
I don't believe water is particularly scarce, and it is reusable except for when it's used to create fuel.
With the Sun + plants a lot can be done.
Mars, on the other hand, has low gravity and is far away from the Sun.
How many tons would you need to get out of the gravity well before you had enough orbital manufacturing capacity to begin building that sort of thing? I mean, I love the dream, but I don't know how you can make it a reality.
In the video Elon makes an estimate of a million tons to Mars (if I remember correctly) in order to establish an entirely self-sufficient colony there. Building orbital manufacturing would be a different kind of problem, but in some respects it's kind of similar. I suspect it'll make sense to establish a foothold on Mars first (which has a lot of necessary resources and less gravity means you can transition from the planet to orbit much more cheaply) and then maybe use Phobos and/or Deimos as manufacturing hubs for space-based hardware like habitats. Or maybe it makes sense in the short term (before Mars has the necessary infrastructure for big projects) to do manufacturing on the moon.
> live in man-made structures orbiting the sun at a distance of 1AU, which is debatedly much more sensible than trying to live on Mars.
The resources still need to come from somewhere. Either we mine them on Mars, asteroids, or the moon. Mining is a lot easier when you have gravity you can push against to apply force. Rather than move the resources off-body though, its easier and cheaper to use them directly in-situ.
Hmm. With Starship's lifting capacity, that might become a side project. Maybe they could even sling something to become part of the orbital station and continue to Mars
> We are one asteroid strike away from losing all human life on earth.
We're one asteroid strike from losing all human life in the solar system even if you had a bunch of people living on Mars. It would take a very long time to get even a single Mars colony self sufficient. Without resources of Earth supporting the colony it would die out the first time the air conditioner broke.
Putting people on Mars isn't putting our eggs in a second basket. It's putting an egg in a wet napkin on a mouse trap positioned under a precariously balanced boulder.
You have to start building the basket at some point. If you never start working on the colony you'll always have an excuse ("it'll take a long time!", "it'll be too expensive!", "the technology doesn't exist" and so on).
The technology to be self-sustaining won't exist without demand for it, and starting to setup a colony creates a lot of demand.
By that logic we will never leave Earth. Let’s say it takes 200 years to get a fully self sufficient colony on Mars. If we start now, it could be self-sufficient by around 2222. But, according to your logic, we shouldn’t start since the colony won’t be immediately self-sufficient. Instead we should wait until… until when? Assuming it will always take 200 years to make the colony self-sufficient, do we wait until 2222 to start so that it is self-sufficient by 2422?
A 200 year timeline is likely far too short. There's nowhere on the planet a human (or any multicellular Earth life) can survive without an active life support system. Every square meter of living and farming space needs to be enclosed with powered life support. There's no lubricants, easily accessed water, or even raw materials for heavy industry.
Even if Starship was ready to go tomorrow zero percent of any of the infrastructure needed to keep humans alive on Mars exists. The infrastructure needed to let some Martians be self sufficient only exists in artist renderings.
Getting a hundred tons of crap to Mars is the easiest part of the problem. Building a reliable toilet that won't clog and kill everyone or an air filter that never breaks is hard. Having enough food and medical supplies to keep people alive after a crop fails is hard. Building a factory that doesn't need a huge supply of oil-based lubricants is hard. Crowing crops in shitty soil is hard. Shit just building a big sealed structure is hard.
I don't find any claims of colonizing Mars believable because there's only lip service paid to boring infrastructure. Infrastructure can't just be patched in later.
That's not what I said. I do not find any claims of "colonization" believable because there's absolutely zero interest in solving or even realistically addressing the Hard Problems involved. There's little interest in solving the easier but boring problems.
If the toilets on a Starship get clogged [0] the crew can't wear diapers for a year and a half on their way to Mars. In space a clogged toilet has the fun side effect of aerosolizing feces that the crew will then breathe in, likely killing them.
Big talk about colonizing Mars is just talk without any actual movement on important infrastructure. A big rocket is only the first tiny step on a very very long road and itself is not really all that useful.
If you want to make pithy statements about not trying, direct your energy towards everyone fantasizing about Mars colonies with zero intent to tackle any of the Hard Problems involved.
Gonna be interesting to see how many people actually pony up to really take part in that kind of vision.
Are there any economic incentives for colonizing Mars? Asteroid mining makes sense and bases on and around the Moon make some kind of economic sense at least. I don't know how Mars fits into that picture in the 50-100 year "medium" term picture.
Economic incentives include government-funded basic science, mining, tourism, real-estate speculation (i.e. claim a bunch of land while it's cheap), entertainment (sports and movies/TV shows), the ability to do things in a presumably lax regulatory environment that might not be allowed on Earth, and long-term care for those who have disabilities that would require a wheelchair in full gravity but not on Mars, and the establishment of Mars as a more convenient source of food/fuel/raw materials for any human presence in the belt or outer solar system.
A lot of that assumes an already functioning economy on Mars. We're not going to be sending anyone other than the richest people up to Mars in their old age. And for stuff like food and hydroponics you could have that on the Moon which is the natural waystation to the Asteroids. The Asteroids are going to be where all the mining is. Entertainment also assumes an already existing economy. Space tourism is the only thing that seems viable in the short term.
About all I can see is producing methane for rockets in Asteroids and being in a much shallower gravity well than Earth. That assumes having an economy established in the Asteroid belt already though, and the cost of sustaining a colony on Mars is going to be its own kind of high overhead. It may be expensive to ship fuel off of Earth, but the people to support the refinement process already exist.
At some point there will be a flip where a Mars economy becomes self-sustaining, but so far I'm not seeing it during my lifetime. My guess is that we're going to be tethered to the Earth for a lot longer.
(Basic science is also great but that's the kind of things that governments support and its not self-sustaining any more than Antarctica is -- which I suspect is closer to the model for Mars in the next 50 years).
The ability to make methane on Mars is pretty huge, though. If you're mining the asteroid belt and need to refuel your ships, it's a lot easier to ferry fuel from Mars to the belt than haul it all the way from Earth. And methane/oxygen production is likely to be one of the first things we get going on Mars because we'll want our rockets to be able to make return trips back to Earth and we really don't want to haul the extra fuel and oxygen we need all that way.
Most of the economic incentives I suggest don't really start paying off until you have at least some decent infrastructure and a population of semi-permanent residents, though. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but you never know. Once the technology exists, it's just a matter of whether someone has deep enough pockets to make human settlement of Mars a reality. Once someone has a foothold, it gets easier for others to expand on that.
Again though lifting methane off of Earth is expensive, but ships from the Asteroid belt will naturally be coming back to Earth, so refueling around the Earth or Moon doesn't go out of the way. Mars is a detour, and you have to sink the costs to sustain the colony which offsets the smaller gravity well.
I figure that any large-scale asteroid mining operation is likely to employ a fairly complicated supply chain that doesn't ship everything to or from Earth.
Earth would probably continue to manufacture high-value, complex machines like rocket engines and computers and robots. Earth would receive high-value minerals from the asteroid belt like gold or platinum or silver. Maybe nickel or copper. Iron wouldn't be worth it unless shipping costs were really low, aluminum would probably be the same. On the other hand, iron and aluminum might be worth enough on Mars to be worth shipping there. It'd be cheaper than shipping from Earth, anyways. And hauling rocket fuel/oxygen all the way from Earth really doesn't make sense if you can get it on Mars.
Basically, you'd have ships going back and forth between Earth and the belt delivering equipment and bringing back high-value metals, and you'd have another set of ships going back and forth between Mars and the belt hauling fuel and oxygen and maybe bringing back low value metals to be used on Mars. If there are people living in the belt, the ships can bring them whatever else is easier to make on Mars than in space. Maybe food.
It's kind of a weird thought, but I would suggest that a lot of the output of industrial infrastructure in space is going to be used in space rather than returned to Earth. What's the point (you might ask) if it doesn't come back to Earth? Well, people on Earth might for various reasons want to expand their foothold in space, and then once it reaches a certain critical mass those footholds in space become their own thing. Like Europeans coming to America and eventually rebuilding more-or-less what they left behind, but with some differences.
Planning for mars is making the moon shot significantly better. Starship can basically replace the whole complicated and expensive orbiter lander situation with a fast, cheap, reusable craft with a fantastic payload capacity. That craft is being designed and built with Mars in mind. It’s also going to be fantastically useful for other things.
> I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
Quote from my past posts [1] on this point:
> It's impossible to predict what tech can come out of such efforts that will be of use here on Earth in the future. The amount of money going to space exploration is peanuts so I think it's well justified if it has even a trace of potential to improve future of humanity and that has been true historically - e.g. satellites (GPS, weather, etc), medicine (MRI), and whole bunch of NASA spinoffs and more.
> I think SpaceX to date has received less than 10 billion (say 20 to be safe) in total for everything! That's 20 years of research, development, coming up with never done before re-usable rockets, etc.
> People spent nearly half a trillion dollars (not billion) on cosmetic products in a single year! You want to point fingers, point at something you can actually locate. Money spent on space is negligible to the point that it doesn't even warrant justifying spending it.
It’s helpful to remember it’s not a zero sum game. We can do all of that too. The tech for Mars would make it that much easier.
No one wants to live in those places because currently they have a choice. But if our planet becomes irradiated, or hit by a meteor, or suffers a sun burst — all very realistic concerns — then those choices become more limited. And it’s good to have options.
The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses.
Now I'm for walking and chewing bubblegum. But if you believe in opportunity costs and care about navigating that, it feels like the same problem.
Our planet becoming irradiated is actually not a huge problem! It would still be easier to live on Earth than on Mars! An irradiated radioactive hellscape of Earth would still be more survivable than Mars.
(my more nuanced take is that we have so many basic hospitability problems that need solving, and Mars have all of those times 100, so it would be very good if most of those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems more than the logistics of shooting a bunch of stuff into space for long term transit)
"it would be very good if all those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems"
We have like a million PHds telling us what to do about climate change for 50 years, and nobody is listening
"The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built"
And it's 100x cheaper than the Iraq war or 2008 crisis, both entirely preventable manmade disasters. Or to put it into different perspwctive: ISS costs as much as cleanup of 3 oil spills, and we've had quite a few.
The ISS was built largely with hundreds of space shuttle and Soyuz launches over two decades hence why it's so expensive. Starship will be able to put an entire ISS worth of stuff into orbit in a single launch for 1/50th of the cost.
It's not a zero sum game. The space industry employs a lot of people.
Some of the stuff they put into orbit are satellites that literally save lives.
Starship can't lift 462 tons to orbit in one launch and that isn't taking into account the volume needed. It would take more than 1 to get an ISS equivalent on orbit.
Exactly what I was thinking in my head when I wrote that. Although I really should have written it out properly. To be fair mass is probably way more important.
Definitely not in a single launch, since ISS weighs around 500 tons. And I think designs for space stations in starship era would be different(more heavy, but orders of magnitude cheaper to produce), so something like ISS in a starship era might weigh 1.5-2x more(VERY rough estimate), but nonetheless be much cheaper.
Starship itself has ~1000 cubic meters of payload volume, and ISS has ~900 cubic meters of pressurized volume. It's not too much of a stretch to expect >500 cubic meters of pressurized volume in a crew-capable Starship, in which case two Starships would provide a broadly similar amount of pressurized volume in orbit.
Humans are not automatons who you can just point at a different problem than the one they are interested in and expect them to make progress in a similar way.
A Mars colony is an exciting problem for smart people to work on that can inspire them. You can't put a dollar value on that.
> The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses.
Most of that cost was in the cost of launching it (and the inflation in the price of the modules knowing that they are "priceless" and "can't fail" and "we can only build one copy of it"). Further it's all engineered to very fine margins. The more you get your margins down the more cost these things take. One-offs of anything tend to be expensive. One-offs of very tight margin things are even more expensive. There's nothing in the ISS that is especially exotic. It's copper wiring and aluminum pressure vessels.
The ISS was also the first of its kind, not built with cost effectiveness in mind even a little bit, and complicated by being built by so many different parties. A station or other space hab built by a highly vertically integrated company trying to keep costs down is almost certainly going to be much, much less expensive and more capable.
> Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress?
In the late 1500s, why set sail across an ocean for weeks that no-one has ever successfully crossed (that we know of).
Someone would want to do it, and then want to do it regularly, and regularly means commercializing it, which means reduced cost and innovation. Better ships crossed the Atlantic, trade started and so on. Europe (and the world) is richer after the "discovery" of America and Australia, for example.
There are so many 'unknown unknowns' that until we settle on Mars we just... don't know: some mineral on Mars that might be useful for... capturing CO2 somehow? Lower gravity to grow novel crystalline structures that do... something. Basic life? Who knows?
True, and even if everyone were a moral saint the pox would been devastating. But this was not a garden eden, but a very brutal tribal world with frequent ethnic cleansing and enslavements. Hundred thousands of native auxiliaries marched with Cortez to get rid of their Aztec overlords.
So, I think it's worth it for people to go to Mars for exploration, and to build a base somewhere up in space or the moon.
I think we should figure out how to exploit resources in space: asteroid mining, space-based solar power, etc. Even if it's all woefully unprofitable and inefficient at first.
And I think we should figure out how to eventually get another self-sufficient lump of humanity off this rock, but that seems like it could be 150+ years out.
But there's no reason, other than the exploration of Mars itself, to go down the gravity well to Mars.
> I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
It's not like these are really the same resources.
I completely agree with this line of reasoning, which is why I called the fixation with Mars Quixotic elsewhere in the thread. I was discussing this with some friends. Why not just pick some other totally inhospitable environment and try to live there instead? I mentioned inside a volcano lower in the thread. It seems to me you'd get all the same side-benefits of technological development.
Because if an asteroid destroys earth, your volcano base ain't gonna save life as we know it.
Because any such project is going to require herculean effort on the part of many humans, and many humans are interested in colonizing Mars but not so many are interested in colonizing volcanoes.
Your question is basically: why do people care about this thing I don't care about and instead care about this thing that neither I nor they care about.
> Because if an asteroid destroys earth, your volcano base ain't gonna save life as we know it
If an asteroid destroys earth, your Mars base won't save life as we know it either. There's a lot of handwaving in this thread on the technologies required to bridge the gap between Starship existing and self-sustaining life on Mars. Paradoxically, self-sustaining space manufacture/Mars colony will obviate the need for frequent heavy-lift rocket launches.
How is that paradoxical? Bootstrapping a self-sustaining colony on Mars will require getting a massive amount of payload to the red planet. Once bootstrapped, yes that will no longer be required.
Nobody is arguing that Starship is sufficient, just that it is necessary.
> Nobody is arguing that Starship is sufficient, just that it is necessary.
No, it's the yet-to-be-invented tech that is necessary. Your unstated prior is that this non-existent tech will in turn require heavy-lift capacity, and there is no evidence for that. Maybe we can bootstrap space manufacturing off 2 Arianne 5 launches, or 50 starship launches, nobody knows because it's all make-believe atm.
What Starship is good for, is frequent supply runs to a dependant Mars base, with today's technology - but that's nor what people are saying because that's not sexy.
But the utopian end goal is to make Mars hospitable. For Musk a Mars city is not the end goal but the first step. For example one could make a magnetic shield in L1 Mars Orbit. There was a speculative Nasa study (Wikipedia):
> If constructed, the shield may allow the planet to restore its atmosphere. Simulations indicate that within years, the planet would be able to achieve half the atmospheric pressure of Earth. Without solar winds stripping away at the planet, frozen carbon dioxide at the ice caps on either pole would begin to sublimate (change from a solid into a gas) and warm the equator. Ice caps would begin to melt to form an ocean. T
Of course there is much difficulty and unkown unknowns. Maybe this is truly impossible. Maybe this will take a million years. Maybe Mars soil is too toxic for plant growth.
But the upshoot of terraforming Mars is so fantastical, that it is at least worth dreaming about.
There is loads of people who want to travel to mars for an expedition to look for life, study it's geology and see what it looks like at all - however you are right that living consitions would be crap.
I have always maintained that a settlement on the moon makes a lot more sence - fortly you have much better access to space for industry, secondly, help can reach you withing days at any time or you could be in earth hospital withing days if you need surgery.
We have enough land on earth already. Land is not actually the solution to any problem on earth. But Mars is the solution to a potentially big problem on earth.
And the technology to manufacture fuel from solar and nuclear energy, building advanced life support system, advancing the state of rocket technology, allowing much more use of sat technology, massively advancing science planetary/biology/(and more), controlled high efficiency farming, human health science, mobile hospitals and so on, will all be developed and have many applications. Even things like battery technology for this use case will have interesting question to ask and can have impact on batteries on earth.
So if it was literally just the backup to life, it wouldn't be worth it, but its not done in a vacuum.
And its inspiring. A whole generation of engineers all around the world were inspired. And the moon landing did bring humanity together to an extent, many people even in the Soviet Union talked about 'we' landed on the moon.
Seems to me to be worthwhile to push at the very least to a small settlement, and from there you can see if its makes sense to continue.
Let's say someone argued instead that we should figure out a way to establish a human settlement inside of a volcano, or at the bottom of the deep ocean. Couldn't you make all the arguments you just made in favor of doing that as well? What makes Mars any different? Why is this specific Quixotic activity more valid than the ones I just mentioned?
Mars is different because it has a lot of resources, a lot of empty land, it has easier access to space than Earth due to the reduced gravity, and space is really big. Maybe in the long run we'll be able to house more people in the asteroid belt than we do on Earth now. If it happens it'll be pretty far in the future, but it might happen eventually. Mars is a very convenient waystation to make that possible.
Because Mars could be self sustainable. It has water and the temperatures in the right areas are not that hostile. Mars soil can be used for agriculture. There is sun light.
From Mars its effective to launch to Orbit. Its easy to transport and move around on Mars, Supersonic electric flight is very doable for example.
Low density makes super fast trains very doable as well, massive movement of resources on Mars is orders of magnitude easier on Mars then even in deep water.
Who do you know that is fired up about building a base in a volcano?
But gonna have to disagree with GC here and say that I think a self-sustaining Mars base is worth it entirely for having a backup of intelligent life, which the deep ocean base doesn't deliver.
> Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress?
Why do we need to pick?
Also the Earth has limited resources and even of the resources we have, people are already attacking the idea of mining on Earth more and more, even when it's for things like stopping global warming by creating EVs. At some point it's going to be considered downright evil to dig into the ground to pull resources out of it with how things are going. The only alternative will be to pull it out of space.
Let me introduce you to the idea of freedom. You are free to not go. Me too; I have no intention to ever go to Mars. But if some people want to go to Mars, why should I question their pursuit of happiness?
Now that I think about it, we would get real good at settling desert and polar regions with the experience and data coming back from an established Mars colony. We could also learn more about more efficient habitation? Think of all the tech we have developed just for LEO (you know, like those listicles show) and imagine how much knowledge we would convert to use in helping everyday peoples' lives?
The answer is that one solution will fail quickly and will not do as much to pump stock value. The other one will pump your stock shares to the moon, as the market will inflate your companies valuations, by pricing in for the next 50 years, your plans to become the new Mars emperor.
Most people don't want to live in Antarctica etc because what's the point? There's the research, for which people do live there. For everyone else, it's at worst a few days away from comfort, with very little to be gained or lost.
A good comparison would be for settling the Americas. Although they obviously weren't as inhospitable as Mars, it was still a months long trip that was often one way to a destination with none of the comforts of their previous homes. Yet people came and worked to build. There was plenty of land and plenty of resources in the old world, yet we chose to go through the challenges of settling the new world. Should they also have waited to solve all their problems at home and utilize all their resources and land before looking outwards?
It's the same with Mars, plenty of people get bright-eyed at the idea of going to Mars and helping build a colony because it's a challenging task that would give meaning to many of us. No matter how often you say that Earth is more hospitable, the fact stands that if we do succeed at setting up a self-sustaining colony on Mars, we'll be more secure than just on Earth. Those are way higher stakes than living in Antarctica/the Sahara etc.
Hell, SpaceX essentially gets its pick of top engineering talent because of inspiring people towards the goal of Mars. Is that not already evidence that people are interested in going? It isn't like they're making significantly more money taking on the large workloads expected at the company. There are plenty more cushy jobs available at ULA, Blue Origin etc and plenty of technical challenges at all the space startups. Yet SpaceX gets its pick to the point that their technological lead over everyone else is only increasing.
Somewhere around a thousand Americans [1] lose their lives in the construction industry each year. It's not a novel thing for people to die building the future, but Mars would definitely bring some novel methods.
Mars in the first years (probably for decades) will likely be way worse.
Workers will spend all 24 hours of every day in risky circumstances, and the quality of aid will be worse. For example, even if there is a MRI machine, will there be surgeons? A small population simply cannot support a wide range of medical specialists.
> For example, even if there is a MRI machine, will there be surgeons?
100% yes, there will be surgeon(s). Likely cotasked with other roles (medical studies etc?) until the population would get significantly larger. Antarctic missions have performed surgery (and everyone gets their appendix removed before going on an overwinter).
If the need arises, they can get back on earth in two days time or so. I also think/guess their major health risks are of the “you die immediately” kind, not of the “it helps a lot of you get to a hospital within x minutes” kind.
It's not just their sacrifice. They're also sacrificing their children, who had no say in the matter, to have a substantially worse life than they would have had had they stayed on Earth.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that is unprecedented in the history of immigration but it does seem pretty uncommon.
By that rationale, any time people have moved any time since humans came into existence they have potentially sacrificed their children who have no say in the matter. Any move could be to a worse situation.
It’s not a one way trip if you want to leave. They’ve said in previous presentations they plan to bring the ships back for multiple flights, and so there’s an option to return if you want it.
How do the politics of a Mars colony work? Say Elon controls the sole means of supplying the colony from Earth - do the colonists effectively become hostages? What if they mutiny? Will the supplies stop coming? Is this murder? Many questions.
The quality of life on Mars poses the greatest risk to SpaceX's plan to create a self-sustaining city there.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people who will go to Mars because it is a fantastic adventure.
However, i doubt that many will want to stay there for more than 26 months. If too many pioneers choose to return to Earth, the project fails. You need a fairly large number of settlers to create something self-sustaining.
> "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future.
I think the pioneers will go there for a sense of adventure, not for a monetary reward or out of some sense of "sacrifice for the future". There will be enough people who want to go that you can select a great crew from that group, and there is no reason to send people who don't want to or have to be convinced with money.
There are plenty of people out there willing to take the risk. They won’t be the poor being forced into it, they’ll all be perfectly aware and willing.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard him speak. Is he always this awkward? Based off of the 5 minutes I watched, he clearly hasn’t gotten to where he is through charisma and public speaking skills. I’m just wondering if this is typical for him.
Also, a million tons to Mars? If each starship lifts 100 tons, that is 10,000 launches. I think he said launch windows only come around every 2 years. He is either planning on building thousands of Starships or taking many years.
Yeah, he's always like this. See his Neuralink presentations.
He got to where he is through a combination of hard work and luck (a large part of which was the birth lottery), like everyone. Imagine if Woz was intensely interested in building Apple, and had Jobs' judgement.
As far as I know, he's planning on a time frame of 200 years to build a sustainable city. He's also intending on building thousands of Starships, by making them as rugged and as cheap as possible without sacrificing safety.
Most people who achieve massive success are born into privilege. Being able to spend your time studying and getting exposed to cutting edge developments rather than struggling to just survive is a massive advantage.
It's largely a necessary, but not sufficient condition for major success.
People that rise from nothing to achieve massive success are the exception that prove the rule.
Yes, if someone is struggling to survive, that will limit their ability to become a world-changing entrepreneur.
That said, the average westerner is not struggling to survive, and the average westerner does not end up founding 3 world changing companies and amassing a wealth of $200 billion. Not even the average birthright 1%er achieves that.
Its not even that complex. If there was an identical Elon that came one year after Elon, he wouldn't be able to have what Elon has. It's all luck of the draw all the way down.
> Its not even that complex. If there was an identical Elon that came one year after Elon, he wouldn't be able to have what Elon has.
The universe actually did run that experiment:
Kimbal Musk is the younger brother of Elon. He too was born at the right time, the explosion of the word wide web, and made very favorable investments and is presumably filthy rich. But he doesn't have the drive to build rockets.
It is similar to Jeff Bezos brother Mark. Mark Bezos lead by every conventional measure a successful life: high managing career in advertising and at a charity non-profit, wife and 4 kids. But without his brother he wouldn't have a Wiki entry.
People seem to be confusing birth lottery with determination. Working hard is table stakes. But you seem to imply that anyone who isn’t poor can do it, if only they work hard enough.
How about why no idential Elon came the year before Elon? It's not like the idea of powered landing was unheard of, and tech ingredients were there for arguably decades.
The average American is not an unexpected $400 bill away from bankruptcy. This has been debunked countless times. Per the US government's own detailed statistics (BLS), the median household has $1000 per month leftover after all ordinary expenses. That's literally money available to piss away on whatever after all the basic lifestyle expenses, so it will definitely cover a $400 expense.
Americans have a lot of discretionary income. While there is a part of the population that cannot afford an unexpected $400 expense, that only applies to 10-15% of the population, per Federal Reserve studies.
Am American. Did go bankrupt. Bill was $4k. Hospital trip.
You’re quoting the fed and seem a little out of touch with the realities that most Americans face on a day to day basis. I didn’t grow up in a bad part of town. I’m a successful programmer.
I am probably more in touch with that reality than most people here. I have decades of first-hand experience with the economics of being poor in America, and had to dig out of holes much larger than $4k. Never went bankrupt, though I came close once. I am financially comfortable now but I still have a lot of contact with that world, and am familiar with their finances.
The Federal Reserve and BLS data accurately reflects the realities average Americans face day to day in my experience. Individual situations are always somewhat unique and varies a bit depending on where you live in the US, but the statistics are broadly correct.
Also Jeff Bezos was born to a high school attending mom who worked as a secretary and went to night school after she quickly became a single mom - he built a rocket company
I honestly don't understand. If your point is someone who has only worked jobs for minimum wage is never going to suddenly start a rocket company I'd say you're correct. Especially if someone built or found their safety net on their own, I don't think we should begrudge them having it.
How do you think this works? Do you think 'anyone can do it' means winning the lottery? It means working really hard, getting lucky along the way, and being smart - that likely means getting into finance if it's the 80's and early 90's and tech if it's late nineties and aughts. It doesn't happen overnight.
The reality is, though, that you don't have to be born to millionaires to be one of the richest people in the world.
Musk was a co-founder. He joined the company as effectively employee 4. He became chairman of the board after employee 3 (including the two original co-founders) and was the primary designer of the Roadster from that early point. He basically bankrolled the entire original set of funding (around 90% of it).
The settlement just said that they could call themselves founders. Equally, a settlement could've also been reached that said that everyone involved could call themselves "buttholes".
What doesn't change regardless of that settlement is the fact that Musk didn't actually found (or "start" if folk wanna get all nitpicky bEcAuSe SeTtLeMeNt SaYs So) the company, invested a year after it was founded, and didn't become CEO for another four years.
First, there's a difference between bringing someone onboard the day after incorporation and the timeline I mentioned. Second, what are you bringing your friend onboard for? Were you collaborating on this idea with them before you incorporated? Or did you bring them on because you realized you needed more money (eg, Musk)?
Early investor is what he was, along with chairman, then CEO, but it's disingenuous to call him a founder. The settlement you referenced is really just dick swinging.
The legal result of the settlement is that Musk can call himself a (co)founder, and so can Straubel & Wright. Even Eberhard agreed to that.
You may personally feel he's not entitled to the title, but that's just it, a personal feeling. He's literally legally entitled to have this title. Why contradict people on the internet, and say "actually, Musk is not a founder of Tesla"? If anything, it is (right now) disingenuous to claim he is not a founder, given that maybe not all people know the full history and some may believe that he didn't (legally) earn the title.
Legal isn’t some gotcha. He is entitled. But he wasn’t a founder of Tesla.
I think pg would agree. He’s made the distinction in the past, and he knows more about startups than pretty much anybody. You can’t onboard a founder; it’s not a personal feeling, and some legal ruling doesn’t change that.
"he says/ she says". I think pg would disagree. Let's see if he intervenes directly? Otherwise, we can just discard his speculated opinions.
And if we appeal to authority, there's actual evidence that Musk (who knows a lot about startups!) feels he was a founder. So should we believe Musk, until pg says otherwise?
Care to prove your POV? The average people of country like China isn’t struggling to survive. The average westerner — Americans, Europeans, Japanese, is definitely not either.
That's a pretty small group of people to start with.
Apparently there have been only nine people between 1750 and 1950 worth over $100 billion dollars. (Wikipedia, so who knows) Of them, 6 were not born into privilege:
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Stephen Girard, John D. Rockefeller, Carnegie, John Jakob Astor, and Henry Ford.
Including the modern era adds another 9, only 2 of which were not born into privilege - Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos. You could argue definition of privilege and add Sergey Brin in there maybe.
So depending on your definition of privilege and 'massive success,' you might be only just correct, with 10/18 people worth over $100 billion in the last 250 years or so coming from privilege.
I've never seen someone use the phrase "exception that proves the rule" non-ironically. Why is it more than just a class of exceptions? How does it prove anything?
I use that phrase as, we usually elevate exceptional things because they are exceptions. That elevation itself implies that it's something special that goes against the norms (or against the rule).
So, our awareness of a small number of exceptions proves the fact that there is an underlying rule that applies to the majority of non exceptional instances.
Most successful tech entrepreneurs seem to come from more or less his demographics, which is a upper middle/professional class upbringing. I don't think coming from extreme old money generally lends itself to entrepreneurship, there's a goldilocks zone that involves some degree of having to work for a living, having migrated or something along those lines.
I would argue that it doesn't just depend on which country. Being born into a privileged class in a less developed country is often times better than an average family in, let's say, US.
The inequality is much more severe meaning that you might actually have access to more resource and power.
Sure, the type of family one grows up in has a tremendous impact on one’s outcome in life, but Elon deliberately moved to the USA to have access to opportunities Americans have access to. Location matters too.
Honestly, I think this is a big part of his brand, to the degree that I wouldn't be shocked to discover he does it intentionally.
His brand really is the super awkward nerd who's somewhere on the spectrum but technically brilliant. This is part of what creates such enamor for him in the engineering/tech community.
He's the king of nerds, and to a community of nerds who are sick and tired of being led by wellkempt MBAs who don't have any deep understanding of the technology they make leadership decisions for, he's a breadth of fresh air.
I'm not making a judgement on whether this brand is actually accurate of who he really is, but that's true of any brand.
Launch windows for leaving Earth orbit come around every couple years. But most of that million tons can be lifted to orbit and assembled well in advance. It's only a relatively small weight which is perishable -- some food and a few humans.
Yes, he is always extremely awkward. Stumbling over his own words, telling jokes that only he has context for, going into unscripted mini-tangents without much of a point, "ums" 30x in a row, waiting for applause at inappropriate times. An all around zero when it comes to public speaking. Despite me saying all this, I like Elon when he isn't on twitter. I still own TSLA since the IPO and he has made me a lot of money(I doubt TSLA would be where it was without him, even if the products would have been exactly the same). But he still should take a public speaking crash course, and maybe some beta blockers before these events.
I think it's a bit of a hack for people like me: everyone has been taught to sound super-confident, make everything super glossy and slick and over-produced. Almost always it's to cover the lack of original or substantial content underlying the delivery.
Now the more confident-sounding and charismatic someone is, the less I believe there will be anything interesting I can learn from them, and the less I trust them!
> These days, the more confident-sounding and charismatic someone is, the less I believe there is anything interesting I can learn from them, and the less I trust them!
Probably a good metric anyway; if someone puts all their points into charisma, they have opportunity costs in other dimensions (excluding any "natural" charisma that some people may arbitrarily have, to the degree that's actually a thing or not).
Honestly, this is "better" than usual for him, in that he's speaking more smoothly. I think it's coming across worse though. He sounds less enthusiastic than usual.
Settling Mars is gonna be some multi-generational Bene Gesserit long term thinking shit. In fact when he dies I hope someone else takes up his obsession with Mars or bust. Settling North America took decades. It's like that, except you need a minimum tech tree to even just breathe and grow potatoes.
> I think he said launch windows only come around every 2 years. He is either planning on building thousands of Starships or taking many years.
The window to Mars opens every two years or so, but it doesn't need to start at the ground. You can park the payloads in orbit over months or years waiting for the chance to boost to mars. The vehicles themselves are intended to be just shuttles (in the way that the actual Space Shuttle, ironically, was not).
He doesn't practice any of his speeches ahead of time. Too busy. When you hear it that's the first time he's said it, generated right there in realtime. Often he'll repeat something he said in another talk, but when it's the same idea that's hard/pointless to avoid.
How many people in England invested in the exploration of America and got a return on their investment?
And in today's political landscape it seems even less likely you'd get a decent return on investment - the days of high taxes on the colonies to pay for expansion are over...
he was actually comparatively relaxed this time, as if it were his party. also didn't really have much new content and (believe it) none of the prior outlandish ambitions.
>This is the first time I’ve ever heard him speak. Is he always this awkward?
Elon Musk did a Joe Rogan podcast where they smoked a blunt and drank whiskey. Elon went on random mumbling stoner pontifications. It was cringe. It was so bad it made Tesla stock tank.
I love how some folks are like "Elon isn't a real engineer!" and then he starts going on a tangent in the middle of a presser about how flanges are a PITA to seal once you exceed a few hundred bar (just over a few thousand PSI), and how welding improves the plumbing significantly.
Like, what!? That's not how C-suite bigwigs talk. That's primo enginerd banter.
One of the secrets about Musk is that he is actually a much better speaker when he just goes of on technical stuff like that.
The problem with Musk is that when you ask him an even slightly open question, he always basically goes to the what he considers the fundamental answer. That's why so many of his answer are the same and people who know him well can already tell what most answers to most question will be.
However good interviewer can actually lead him into explaining into going into actual detail and ask smart follow up question and his answers are usually very good. The problem is, far to often he is either doing presentations like this with Q/A or he does podcast aimed at general audiences.
The best interviews with him are with people like Everyday Austronaut where he gets to follow up multible time to actually get out really good information.
I wish he would do more interviews like that, where people can prepare questions and be more direct at what they want to learn. Musk comes of much better in interviews like that and its where you actually learn more of the technical information. We understand that reusable rockets are important, but not why the engine doesn't blow up after 5 runs.
Yep, I can really feel the friction from the gears in his head when he's trying to explain something at a general level, or express broad empty platitudes about space, electric cars, AI, or whatnot. That's something I've definitely struggled with, and also why I dig it when he shuts off the filter and starts talking about leaky flanges or deleting some crufty noise-absorbing padding that was the engineering equivalent of the parable of monkeys with a ladder. Like if I wanted to hear billionaires bloviating boring bullet points about business buzzwords, I'd listen to Bezos.
I have no opinion to express on Elon but I will say that I’ve heard non-technical managers lap up stuff like that in meetings with the engineers and then regurgitate it elsewhere.
If I had to guess his technical competence is somewhere in the middle of the distribution of opinions on the matter. I’m sure he’s fine.
Sure but if you ever listen to his longer interviews, in particular those with Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut), it's very clear he has a deep understanding of rocket mechanics, production, logistics, launch pad development, etc. It's well beyond manager-just-regurgitating-stuff they hear. One interview he stops briefly and gets into some nitty gritty about hold-downs on the starship pad or something.
looks more like the case of the manager repeating stuff heard from the engineers discussion.
Lex Fridman asked the questions, was the one that clearly layout the challenges, and kindly enough repeated the answer that Elon Musk was not providing. Meaning its not a problem of "vector space". Humans interpret the world and give semantic meaning to the scene in front of them.
He repeated it several times as Elon Musk answers completely missed the critical challenges, until he was perceptive enough to pick and regurgitate back the examples Lex Fridman was providing. Like the one where a human would not miss the fact that although some children temporarily disappear from your field a vision as you overtake a school bus for example, they are likely to appear in front of you as they will try to cross from the front of the bus to the other side of the road.
The interview is actually concerning, as its basically Lex Fridman explaining to Elon Musk the challenges and points he is supposed to address, and throwing him a soft ball while he was running around as this is simple, easy problem of creating a "vector space".
Curiously he does pick up on hints a bit later, but still concludes and reluctantly goes on to declare the problem will be fully solved by middle 2022... At 1:26:48: https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA?t=5206
He also has a deep understanding of how important government assistance was to getting SpaceX where it is now but that hasn't stopped him from trying to stop others from benefiting from the same.
He shows a lack of rational thought in regards too SpaceX that is sometimes rather worrying. Take, for example, the time he smoked a blunt on camera which isn't exactly what one of his largest customers likes to see in their executives they are entrusting with launching one of a kind national security assets.
I'm glad SpaceX has an actual professional management team to run most day to day operations.
> but that hasn't stopped him from trying to stop others from benefiting from the same.
That's complete nonsense. Unlike others SpaceX has never really attack other space companies. Musk has been supportive of other space companies.
SpaceX busted open the establishment in both DoD and NASA so the contracts are fairly competent, and everybody coming in the industry benefits from that.
SpaceX just recently lost a contract about Commercial Leo Destination but unlike BlueOrigin they didn't release a pamphlet, an army of lobbyist and a bunch of lawyers.
Can you be specific of what actions SpaceX has taken to prevent others space company from gaining government contracts (other then competing for them)?
> Take, for example, the time he smoked a blunt on camera which isn't exactly what one of his largest customers likes to see in their executives they are entrusting with launching one of a kind national security assets.
Something that had basically no impact other then some not really serious slap on the wrist because the military is federal and not state law and they had to pretend to give a shit.
It wasn't the smartest thing to do but to hold that up as some great example about how he is a bad manager is ridiculous for a company that has been as successful as SpaceX.
> I'm glad SpaceX has an actual professional management team to run most day to day operations.
A lot of those manager are engineers that came up in SpaceX. Early on it was basically Elon and his secretary and a group of senior technical team lead that did everything. Musk was heavily in involved in recruitment, supply chain and other typical management things.
He is very capable of doing management work for small or large company but whenever he can avoid it, he doesn't do it, because its not where he adds most value beyond overall strategy.
In a recent WSJ he, Musk, spoke out against government subsidies. I don't mind such subsidies but I do mind when people who benefit from government help want to stop others from doing the same.
This was a case where Bezos wanted NASA to fund it's entire development program from scratch at a cost much higher than NASA ever funded SpaceX's development program. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30297198
You mean when Blue did everything they could to prevent SpaceX from gaining a contract. Blue complained to GAO and lost. Then Blue started a propaganda campaign propagating lies about SpaceX and tried to get is bought politicians to force NASA to change, then they sued NASA.
After all of that, with SpaceX never actually doing anything to Blue, all they did was offer a way better option to the government.
> He also has a deep understanding of how important government assistance was to getting SpaceX where it is now but that hasn't stopped him from trying to stop others from benefiting from the same.
That is false. The only companies he has objected to are ULA which was getting a 1 billion dollar a year retainer (effectively a subsidy) from the US government, which is rightfully bad, and Blue Origin which basically wanted NASA to bankroll it's entire development program with little of their own money spent. SpaceX spends a lot of it's own money on things and then is thankful for the little bit on top that NASA has provided to them for portions of development. In no case that I can remember has SpaceX investment on a project been less than 50%, and it is often 100% but with a guaranteed government customer.
Certainly plausible, though I've seen enough interviews with him talking to other engineers where he can pro-actively engage in a freeflowing conversation to believe that it's far more than mere regurgitation.
I feel like he has a much worse understanding of ML than other subjects. He's not nearly as mathematically inclined as he is engineering inclined and ML is heavy on math.
I think he's more in-depth about the rocket stuff than the Tesla stuff. He seems to exhibit more of the broad sentiments and more manager-esque talk when it comes to FSD.
I don't know how that plays into legal ramifications at all; I'm sure there will be the inevitable "well Elon said it can drive itself and make breakfast and solve P=NP!" but I have no clue if that carries any legal weight and frankly I don't care. He's a bit of a massive douche (no worse than bog-standard billionaires) but he has nerd chops and done a good job of hyping electric cars and space.
Honestly I kinda wish he'd just focus on the rocket stuff and lay off the FSD until it's a bit more mature exactly because of the media and lawyers chomping at the bit.
As someone who has been following him for a long time and as someone who likes him a lot, I feel his understanding of ML and technologies related to FSD to be the worst of his knowledge. He fails to answer interesting technical questions when they are posed to him by audiences in the past. His lack of understanding of ML and FSD make me highly doubt that Tesla will ever achieve it. I still like Tesla and they have revolutionized an industry, but they need to completely end the FSD program and move on with mass production of cool vehicles. It's a boondoggle.
Elon is wrong about FSD being easy and about his approach, and his timeline. If he can be wrong about those things with grace it’ll be fine. I don’t know if he can do that. His track record for admitting he was wrong hasn’t been great.
And any driver facing several years in jail for an accident caused while using the Beta FSD, will engage a proper legal team. Any legal team worth its salt, will immediately subpoena Tesla for documents.
They will present a legal case, that will include past YouTube videos
and Tesla company presentations. They will state that their client was
misled by the company statements, Twitter and YouTube endorsers,
and the contents of the car documentation were minor standard disclaimers.
Contrarily to what many think, most legal teams are actually pretty
smart and astute;-)
Tesla autopilot has already been driving during multiple accidents that killed people. Tesla the company isn’t at significant risk from these accidents or related lawsuits as the driver and thus their insurance is still considered legally responsible.
Further, car accidents in general have relatively low payouts even when someone is blatantly at fault. Even being held responsible for say 10 fatalities per year would be a rounding error on their balance sheet, which is consistent with other industries that have killed vastly more people via things like pollution.
It’s reasonable to suggest human lives should have more value, but when you look at an airplane crash that kills hundreds it’s mostly an issue for an airlines reputation.
Aka people did dumb thing in car, and then died. But again even if they are held either 100% responsible or say 50% the payouts on such lawsuits don’t amount to that much.
"...Thus, Ford knew that the Pinto represented a serious fire hazard when struck from the rear, even in low-speed collisions. Ford officials faced a decision. Should they go ahead with the existing design, thereby meeting the production timetable but possibly jeopardizing consumer safety? Or should they delay production of the Pinto by redesigning the gas tank to make it safer and thus concede another year of subcompact dominance to foreign companies? Ford not only pushed ahead with the original design but stuck to it for the next six years.
What explains Ford’s decision? The evidence suggests that Ford relied, at least in part, on cost-benefit reasoning, which is an analysis in monetary terms of the expected costs and benefits of doing something. There were various ways of making the Pinto’s gas tank safer. Although the estimated price of these safety improvements ranged from only $5 to $8 per vehicle, Ford evidently reasoned that the increased cost outweighed the benefits of a new tank design...
How exactly did Ford reach that conclusion? We don’t know for sure, but an internal report, “Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires,” reveals the cost-benefit reasoning that the company used in cases like this. This report was not written with the pinto in mind; rather, it concerns fuel leakage in rollover accidents (not rear-end collisions), and its computations applied to all Ford vehicles, not just the Pinto. Nevertheless, it illustrates the type of reasoning that was probably used in the Pinto case.
In the “Fatalities” report, Ford engineers estimated the cost of technical improvements that would prevent gas tanks from leaking in rollover accidents to be $11 per vehicle. The authors go on to discuss various estimates of the number of people killed by fires from car rollovers before settling on the relatively low figure of 180 deaths per year. But given that number, how can the value of those individuals’ lives be gauged?..."
The numbers on mass to orbit are fascinating. To date humans have sent 15,517 tons of stuff into space. SpaceX wants to be able to send 15,500 per year with a single Starship, and Elon wants a fleet of 10. That's amazing. That really is "we can have a moonbase now" levels of ambition.
It'll be very interesting to see how and if that's going to work out. There will have to be a lot of actual demand for that launch capacity, and it'll have to build up fairly quickly, else SpaceX may not be around anymore when those payloads are ready. I guess lots of companies could do with some zero-g R&D, but actually building a platform to do this, how long will that take? Asteroid mining seems to be a long way from becoming practical, there aren't that many short-term military launches. What's going to keep them afloat for the first decade-or-so of this? Will they get their costs down far enough to make space tourism viable?
I mean, despite all the violent optimism from the Elon Musk fan base, I'm pretty stoked to see how this will pan out. Historical game changer and within a decade everyone will wear Made-on-Mars space foam sneakers to their annual vacation to orbit? Incremental and boring like, neat, Netflix has its own fleet of broadcasting satellites and Adidas is saving 3% annually due to some R&D they do in orbit? Or will it fizzle out entirely, great tech but arrived too early?
There will have to be a lot of actual demand for that launch capacity...
Demand is often a chicken-and-egg problem. Having the capacity available will go a long way to creating the demand. There are plenty of incredibly wealthy people who could be persuaded to build the first moonbase, space hotel, low-gravity manufacturing plant, manned Earth observatory ... and a practically endless list of things we've not thought up yet ... but they can't do those things now because even if they paid the money there just isn't the launch capacity to do it. Putting the capacity in place fixes that problem and frees those people to start spending.
The demand for cheap satellite internet that Starship can provide is clear. Just look in another thread about Starlink of people complaining that the demand is not met fast enough.
Exactly - to the people saying he speaks awkwardly, I prefer Elon speaking awkwardly and genuinely so much more than Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook giving a perfectly spoken but essentially 100% marketing bs presentation.
Not really concerning. When you are designing a rocket engine that’s what it does before you’re done, it melts and explodes. In fact it’s what all rocket engines do past their limits. If that wasn’t the problem you were having, it would be concerning.
Remember that they are trying to push raptor 2 to even higher pressures, and try to be as efficient as possible. And they want the engine to be rapidly reusable hundreds of times.
I am sure they could run the engines at a lower chamber pressure with massive amounts of film cooling and have it be safe for a single launch. It would still be a very high performance engine by today's standards. 330 bar chamber pressure is just nuts.
Also, if the biggest remaining problem is the chamber melting, that means that they think they have the pumps under control. Which is a major achievement on its own.
As hard and complex as spacecraft are, they seem like tractable engineering problems.
The sheer raw complexity of the human built environment and traffic is very daunting for computing. Calculating orbits and rocket burns seems trivial by comparison.
Once mars settlement gets going, the moons of mars Phobos and Deimos also make for attractive targets.
It might be that once starship works, we do all kinds of things, and it turns out that asteroids work better than planetary surfaces. So the belt becomes the focus of economic activity, and the mars colony is just a novelty kept alive by the Musk Foundation.
Elon Musk's greatest contribution to humankind will be to end war. In a few short years from now, the Reagan era brilliant pebbles will be economically feasible. Which means nobody will be able to keep the nuclear gun pointed at America's head anymore. At which point the US will make Russia and China (and maybe Pakistan and India) an offer they can't refuse: give up all your nukes, please. We'll denuclearize ourselves too, but a bit later.
If you don't like trillion dollar annual defense spendings, here's the cheapest way to get rid of that: make sure you're the only guy with nukes.
In which case, you will stop seeing things like Russia wanting to invade Ukraine.
Link to Common Sense Skeptics channel shredding the whole idea of Starship starting from the rocket to logistics of Mars settlement to bits where even one point means total dealbreaker for the whole idea.
TLDR The whole thing is a wishful thinking at best if not an outright scam.
nothing better than letting the earth be destroyed so that the idea of multi-planetary life has relevance. better future for humanity is have a better earth
What a load of nonsense. Going to space lets us have a better Earth! Even at a simple level, we use satellites to monitor sea level, methane emissions (even identifying leaky pipelines from orbit!), atmospheric levels of CO2, NO2, SO2, etc., vegetation cover, ice cover, and on and on.
Transport is not the main technical issue in making life multi-planetary. For the amount of time Elon spends talking about it, SpaceX spends surprisingly little time on the actual research that is needed for making an actual Martian colony self-sustainable.
That'd be so great if Musk would apply his might to help us (his fellow humans) solve our current problems instead of inventing a future for the 0.001%...
Some people have to conform. You've got to wear a tailored suit, you've got to sound slick, you've got to have your message clean and correct. But that's the point. It's because you're not exceptional so you have to meet the standard signals of being bare competent. But you take a generational talent, and he can sound however he sounds because it's obvious he is what he is and just being himself is the best thing he can be.
He can suck at all these things but you know he's one of a kind. Or maybe you don't think it. But it doesn't matter. There's enough people who do. And they'll listen.
I may not agree with all of his ideas, but I find his speaking style just fine. Honestly, I prefer someone who reaches for words but says what he means to say.
Totally agree. I like his style a lot, it's a normal conversation, he is who he is and it's honest. But every time he speaks someone has to point out how he's not the greatest presenter, even if he presents the most amazing new things.
If it can actually launch multiple times a day without any refurbishment, it will simply totally break space travel as we have known it. This engine makes everything else possible.