Thread

1. paulus_magnus2 · 1790605967 · focus · HN ↗

   Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.

   -- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay

   -- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2

   -- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO

   -- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.

   -- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin

   -- the design is validated - things will work

   -- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job

   Caveats

   -- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc

   -- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit

   -- cooling will have to be

   -- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works

   [meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.

   It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?

   [edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?

   1. geokon · 1790656075 · focus · HN ↗

      The issue is that there is ultimately a limited market for having access to space. SpaceX's business model is premised that if you make access cheap enough that there will be a market for multiple launches a day. But to me demand seems very finite? You can make it 10x cheaper or 50x and it sort of doesn't matter.

      There just isn't much to do in space. You have:

      - Telecommunications.. Can scale only so much. Starlink is cool. Compared to Iridium it's way way cheaper. But demand is .. modest? It seems to only beats fiber on the ground in special situations

      - Telescopes looking up. This is limited by science budgets that aren't going to change much.

      - Telescopes looking down. Those people have infinite budgets and already have all the satellites they'd want. If you're not in NATO then can't depend on SpaceX anyway - so they're not capturing that market.

      - Tourism. Vomiting for several hours in zero-G will be a thrill for some for a bit, but I don't see this being a huge industry. Maybe on par with basejumping or something.

      - Mining.. seems impractical scifi.. premised on wanting to build huge structures in space - but again, for what goal ultimately?

      It's sort of like if you made access to Antarctica 100x cheaper. It'd be great, but it's hard to imagine it's going to suddenly open up a ton of demand.

      But I'd love to hear counter arguments :)

      1. paulus_magnus2 · 1790661042 · focus · HN ↗

         Indeed SpaceX is boiling multiple oceans at the same time and betting the timing will align.

         -- SpaceX is building a starship factory, not just starship. The market won't deliver enough demand, they need to create their own

         -- V3 Starlink constellation targets 100k sats. With 50 sats per flight (100t to orbit) you need 2000 flights to build constellation and then 400 flights per year to replace sats after 5y lifespan.

         -- There was that idea of ballistic human travel but this is unlikely to materialize

         -- There also was solarsat/powersat where solar power is beamed from space and if you massaged your math the right way the numbers were ~promising

         -- AI saves the day. We "need" 1mln AI sats. That solves the demand and justifies the spending. for now

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