Thread

SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today

304 points · 367 comments · geox

fakwandi_priv · 1790601680 · focus · HN ↗
I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
1. varjag · 1790601961 · focus · HN ↗
  For all very real SpaceX achievements there's certain Musk fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour people on the idea of becoming multiplanetary species.
  1. themgt · 1790603265 · focus · HN ↗
    Speaking as a crab in a bucket, for all the very real WorldX achievements there's a certain Muskcrab fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour fellow crabs on the idea of leaving this bucket.
    qzw · 1790603634 · focus · HN ↗
    What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?
    KyleTheDev · 1790603858 · focus · HN ↗
    Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.
    It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
    delichon · 1790610755 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of us black pilled crabs want to fix the bucket but feel that the hole punchers are winning.
    KyleTheDev · 1790611222 · focus · HN ↗
    Crab bucket, but it's us forcing people to invest in making earth nicer instead of destroying it for momentary profit. We could call this movement 'Human Earth'.
    rtkwe · 1790604135 · focus · HN ↗
    The biggest issue is the whole idea of colonizing Mars or anywhere else as a backup runs into a couple major issues. 1) These backups are going to be extremely dependent on Earth for supplies because the alternative is replicating a tiny version of the whole planet's industrial base which will only make economic sense if transporting goods between these locations is extremely expensive, which is something that makes setting them up in the first place also prohibitively expensive. 2) Any technology that makes Mars/Space/etc survivable also makes it possible for an Earth based civilization able to survive basically any calamity up to the death of the Sun.
    soco · 1790604477 · focus · HN ↗
    I bet an underlying thought is that we crabs will have to finance the entire Mars colony adventure through taxes and incentives and subsidies and whatnot.
    leoc · 1790606140 · focus · HN ↗
    There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.
    Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: <a href="https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
    There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
    pigpop · 1790605328 · focus · HN ↗
    To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.
    To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
    rtkwe · 1790607103 · focus · HN ↗
    The point on the first is the offworld colony is not a backup if it cannot be self sufficient and requires critical materials from Earth. Colonies like Australia also weren't meant or built to be self sufficient, they were extractive, extending the military reach of the British Empire and bringing in resources to make it rich. If the goal is a "backup" civilization it needs to be self sufficient for a long period to allow it to "restore" to Earth...
    > A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
    That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
    > Guarding against another global pandemic is another
    This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
    > being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
    This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
    pigpop · 1790611513 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not saying it wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own. I don't see that as an argument against it, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago after all. I don't think restoring civilization to Earth is a primary goal either. The primary goal is having a technological civilization survive the destruction or fall of the one on Earth. If a Martian colony is sufficiently robust and wealthy enough to send physical aid to Earth after a disaster then that's great but if it can only look after itself then its still achieved its purpose.
    Global economic collapse due to an asteroid or nuclear war might not cause human extinction but it would mean a very large regression in our technological capacity. That could endure for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe we would never fully recover, people argue that point based on all of the easy to access resources having already been exploited though I have more faith in humanity's ingenuity. The role of a Mars colony in this scenario isn't to send iron ore to Earth, it's to maintain high technology and continue moving forward.
    The risk of a pandemic becoming interplanetary is much lower than the risk of international spread. Travel between Earth and Mars is necessarily constrained by their orbits with a window opening only every 26 months. Most travel would likely be uncrewed cargo and when people do make the trip there would be strict quarantine measures taken (this is already done with current crewed launches to orbit and there is established history of immigration being subject to quarantine). Most importantly, the trip to Mars takes much longer than the incubation period of any disease likely to cause a pandemic so the disease will have run its course by the time the ship reaches Mars and they can decide what to do at that point (at the extreme they may resupply it and send it back but that's probably not necessary in most cases).
    rtkwe · 1790616774 · focus · HN ↗
    > wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own
    My concern is the incentives and economics that make it possible for them to exist, principally (relatively) cheap launch and transit costs, preclude it ever being economical to invest the resources required to ship say modern chip lithography equipment out to the new colonies rather than them continuing to buy them from Earth. Or the alternative, they get treated like pre-revolution US colonies and are intentionally kept dependent by restrictions on imports and tech exports in order to provide a market for the mother civ to sell into. And this time instead of being in a verdant land full of resources the colonies are on baren rocks dependent on the mother country for critical life support supplies so the capture and dependency are magnified and much stronger.
    pigpop · 1790631978 · focus · HN ↗
    I guess I just don't see the need to ship something like a modern chip lithography machine? When the colony is first getting established they don't need to be making 2nm chips, there's only so much of that equipment that they would want for their own uses and they could get by without it just fine. There's something like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for equipment that they would want from Earth starting with the most essential equipment for building habitation, power generation, growing food and extracting and recycling oxygen and water. Mars is a frontier not a new subdivision so the people who would settle there need food and shelter instead of laptops and TVs. Even after basic needs are met it would make more sense to figure out how to produce all of the tooling and manufacturing equipment you need locally instead of trying to ship everything, that's what self-sufficiency really means: you can produce not just the end products but all of the raw materials and machinery needed to create those end products. That's not to mention the biggest reason to make everything locally would be that it has to work in Martian gravity, there are a lot of manufacturing processes that would need to be redesigned for that. I don't deny that they would be dependent on Earth at first but there isn't any way around that since the whole idea is to move part of humanity from Earth to Mars. That doesn't make independence impossible though.
    I don't really see the point in arguing against it. If a private company and private individuals want to try to colonize Mars then what does it have to do with anyone else? You can't cling on to their legs and scream "don't go!" It all just seems to be in the same vein as that famous headline saying man will never fly.
    rtkwe · 1790642573 · focus · HN ↗
    That's the level of tech the colony will need to replicate if it's going to be truly self sufficient for anything other than short periods which it would be to fulfill it's purpose as an actual "backup" in the situation it's trying to restore a broken earth it's going to need chips to put in all sorts of things. For a tiny example look at how long the shockwaves of minor delays in chip availability from various floods in Taiwan or the Suez blockage have caused issues and imaging them just not being available.
    Yes it wouldn't be the first step on establishing them but it is the kind of things it would need to be truly self sufficient. Chips are in practically every thing today already, it's a critical supply component to do anything other than simply surviving.
  2. qzw · 1790603309 · focus · HN ↗
    I was all for going multi-planet until I realized the second part of the plan was “and fuck the planet we’re on now.” I’m afraid the second part is coming along much faster than the first.
    indoordin0saur · 1790603807 · focus · HN ↗
    How is that the second part of the plan?
    pavlov · 1790604226 · focus · HN ↗
    Their plan calls for inaction towards issues that are making this planet increasingly worse for humans.
    baggy_trough · 1790604512 · focus · HN ↗
    Like pioneering the first excellent electric car?
    pigpop · 1790604520 · focus · HN ↗
    Elon is the world's biggest stan (who is actually doing things rather than just talking about it) for solar power and electrification of transport, how is that a call for inaction?
    indoordin0saur · 1790606906 · focus · HN ↗
    A funny thing I like to do with people like this is point out the fact that Elon has perhaps done more than any person in history to get humans off of fossil fuels. And then when they sputter in disagreement I always like to ask who they'd propose instead. If they have any answer at all they inevitably give the name of a person who just demands that someone else do something (e.g. an activist or media figure), never actually someone who has put their time, effort and money into building a better system.
    sensanaty · 1790610654 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, I guess if we ignore the fact that he's spent and continues to spend unfathomable amounts of money on politicians who are very publicly pro fossil fuels and climate change denialists, and does shit like opening data centers powered by the largest gas generators on the planet.
    nancyminusone · 1790611610 · focus · HN ↗
    Tesla makes batteries and battery powered cars, which are indifferent of energy source. They do make some solar panels, but are a minor player not even in the top 10 by shipped capacity worldwide. But chineese companies like LONGi Solar and JinkoSolar aren't "one guy" (even though they ship 50x what Tesla does), so I guess they don't count.
    qzw · 1790612150 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok I’ll play, but you’re not going to like the answer: Xi Jinping. Putting aside all the valid criticisms of China under Xi, the scale at which they’ve embraced electric car and solar energy puts anything Tesla has done to shame. We’re talking more solar and wind capacity added in one year than the U.S. has in total. And China has done more to lower the cost of solar panels and batteries than anyone else while dominating global production. None of it would be possible without an intentional national policy.
    indoordin0saur · 1790617310 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice job. Best answer I've heard. I think Musk is still a better candidate for fighting global warming, as China has also done an enormous amount of polluting, burning of coal, etc. But I'm not really sure how it nets out. It could totally be that Xi's the most culpable for polluting the planet, rather than saving the planet.
    maxglute · 1790619394 · focus · HN ↗
    Rough napkin math: current annual PRC solar output lifetime production displaces / prevents 40billion barrels of oil. ~100mbd per day... i.e. basically GLOBAL oil usage. So every year, PRC solar printing enough solar to replace 1 year of oil use over their life time (assume 20% capacity factor / substitution method / equivalent work efficiency). For reference global LNG is 70mbd, global coal 100mbd equivalent. PRC industry scaled at producing 80 billion barrel equivalent of solar (not enough battery scale to absorb right now)... i.e if there's enough demand / ability to adopt PRC can basically produce enough renewable to eventually displace 2/3 global fossil use if demand steady (it's not). If one attributes solar industrial policy to Xi, like this stupid game to play but if were to play it, Xi's renewable industrial policy alone will prevent doubling of global fossil use at current adoption pace. This just solar, excludes other renewables and eventual nuclear export. The net is extremely easy, global energy demand increases as billions develop, and PRC is almost solely responsible for making sure high % of generation is renewable and not fossil, on global scale.
    TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.
    indoordin0saur · 1790630501 · focus · HN ↗
    > TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.
    Ehhhh, I'd say he's not in some league of his own. Xi is also industrializing with fossil fuels and China became the planet's largest producer of CO2 under his leadership and he's been outsourcing dirty industries abroad, particularly to Africa. I'd give more credit to people lower-down the totem pole in China, who are leading the charge for clean energy such as Wang Chuanfu, but he's very explicitly following in Elon's footsteps.
    It's also a little wild to discount pollution already produced in previously unseen amounts while crediting to them hypothetical future reductions. Last year China had it's highest CO2 emission ever, and even with solar it's possible that their CO2 output will increase.
    maxglute · 1790643061 · focus · HN ↗
    He literally sets / signs off on industrial policy, others follow, This not malaria/polio/smallpox where one can attribute credit and proliferation to X team, and Y policy. PRC aggregate renewable spans 100s of sectors and programs etc, only sensible for credit to flow up to the big man. If one wants to split hairs, can also credit Hu who did indigenous innovation and renewable act, but execution and magnitude increase in industrial capacity expansion realized under Xi. Like literally no one else has stamped and enable industrial policy across sectors to displace current/future emission on order of magnitude of PRC renewable. World power demand is going to increase magnitude via simple 50% percent of world developing... MIC2025 essentially single handedly shifting future curve towards renewable from fossil. Teslas will never displace more emissions than whole of PRC renewable/ev etc. Elon simply is not in the running for global scale renewable adoption and emission displacement. No one is.
    > possible that their CO2 output will increase.
    Immaterial if CO2 increases, only useful geopolitical metric is historic per capita emission relative to development level and PRC is low for country blasting through capex heavy capital accumulation phase, i.e. PRC setting standard for low relative per capita emission development. Xi 2012-2026 did ~30% global emissions, ~10-15% global historic for ~20% of population. As long as PRC stays under 20% global historic and maintains above 50th percentile development (use whatever proxy indicator, per capital income PPP etc), they are under emitting / developing efficiently relative to energy use. AKA PRC developing more for less unit of emission. The alternative is not developing which frankly stupid argument/position. For reference US/Europe ~45% historic emission for 10% of global pop. On balance PRC currently grossly under emitting vs historic developmental baseline.
    Dig1t · 1790605596 · focus · HN ↗
    Assuming you are talking about climate change: isn’t Tesla doing more than anyone to electrify everything and help fix the problem?
    The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.
    qzw · 1790611198 · focus · HN ↗
    I believed this at one point as well, but that’s not happening anymore. Tesla became what it is while leaning on generous electric car rebates that drastically reduced prices of their cars (especially when leasing), not to mention the millions in carbon credits that other car makers paid to it that was basically another subsidy. Then once Tesla achieved economies of scale and paid off the early fixed costs, he no longer supported subsidies for electric vehicles. That’s pretty classic pull-up-the-ladder-behind-you behavior. The net effect is a drop in overall electric car growth and the scaling back of electric car development by many of Tesla’s competitors.
    Dig1t · 1790642515 · focus · HN ↗
    His competitors already have economies of scale, they are incumbent carmakers that build tens of millions of cars every year.
    Volkswagen has a market cap of 40B, why do they need to government subsidies to build a new car?
    If you truly care about wide-scale EV adoption above all else, why not advocate for opening up western markets to Chinese EVs? The availability of a 10k EV would do far more for adoption than giving taxpayer money to billion dollar megacorps.
    qzw · 1790608805 · focus · HN ↗
    Spending 100s of millions to help elect people who believe that climate change is not real, and who enact policies to delay and roll back what little the U.S. has done to reduce emissions.
    imtringued · 1790677546 · focus · HN ↗
    Elon Musk's idea to colonize Mars isn't to build the most efficient in-space architecture. It's to brute force his way with one way trips to Mars using a massive amount of reusable Starships to repeatedly refuel another Starship that is poorly adapted for inter-planetary travel.
    The "rocket CO2 doesn't matter" argument is based on the fact that nobody has reusable rockets right now, so the fuel expenditure is bounded by the cost of the rocket. Elon Musk wants to switch that equation on its head. Meaning e.g. $100 million launch costs no longer means $10 million fuel costs and $90 million rocket costs, it now means 5x $10 million rocket costs and 5x $10 million fuel costs, i.e. 5x more fuel used with the same budget and that fuel is going to emit CO2.
    One Starship launch produces 3500 tons. Now repeat this to 1000 Earth to Mars launches. That includes at least 10 tanker launches per ship. Meaning at least 10000 launches per year. That equates to 35 million tons of CO2 for something that has no direct benefit to earth.
    If he scaled down his Mars colony ambitions to 10 Earth to Mars launches per year people might turn a blind eye to it.
  3. aaron695 · 1790603481 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.