ThatGuyWithALongUsername

Yep

Until one of them inevitably blows up and they can turn around and modify a starship they've already built and continue testing instead of having to wait a few extra months to build another one.

Well... Mk3, Mk4, or Mk5. He's mentioned all of them (?). So yeah, I'm guessing that's what's up with that. Also ramen that the even numbered Starships in Florida are kind of in competition with the Boca Chica odd numbered Starships. So Mk1 and Mk2 would both do 20km, if they succeed then Mk3 and Mk4 would make orbit, one of them would be first depending on the team. Mk5 if one of them blows up. But I'm still confused... they need the booster for orbit, right? Didn't Elon say they wouldn't build those until after Mk3 and Mk4 are complete? Wouldn't that provide a few solid months of testing Mk3 and Mk4?

Maybe the heat shield could double as a radiation shield? Or is it still better to use the tanks (engine facing sun during cruise?) Don't think that will really be needed though. Thing is, there IS enough room for extra shielding. It's not technically optimized for mass like you suggest, it's optimized for maximum payload thanks to refueling. Basically, it can take 100 to 150 tons to Mars no problem thanks to refueling. As for volume, the pressurized volume is larger than that of the entire international space station. I think you can fit some shielding in there and still have ample room for several months habitation (not for 100 people, like Musk keeps suggesting, but that's because I don't believe they'd reach that number for anything outside Earth's SOI anyway, that's probably for the even more future 18m version IMO)

Something somehow enabling FTL travel without any need for that maybe-impossible negative mass stuff. Or maybe something that creates negative mass somehow. I don't know. Or, alternatively, since this really sounds like it's drifting towards the Forum Games section: Only one? In that case, a force that can create more forces.

I think Bigelow is actually doing this with their B330 for the moment. I don't it's a good idea- if I wanted a 2d, limited albeit high resolution image of space, I could just pull one up at home. I don't think that would be considered acceptable, it wouldn't look convincing enough. It would certainly kill off most possibilities of space tourism. Also it causes problems with my plan to send as many flat earthers into space as possible, they could still say it's CGI Jeff Bezos mentioned that once, oddly enough that's where I heard it first Isn't that penetrating the surface, though?

What about windows? Sounds picky, but probably important for crew mental health.

Ooh, you gave me an idea, how about this: Take a CREW variant and make the same modifications. Launch it into orbit. Hey, you can even go a bit past LEO with some tankers. Then send up crew, drain the tanks, and make the whole thing a giant "wet lab" space station. Plenty of room for long-term experiments.

That's kinda what I was saying though about the riskiness and the Boeing comparison- I agree, we will have to see whether they're successful at this. And yeah I guess I did discredit the shuttle a bit, but just because it wasn't successful doesn't mean that something else can't be. With Shuttle, it *was* designed for this capability from the round up, but it didn't really get the chance to be developed with it available immediately, like Starship might. Or might not. And that might not really even be true. I guess it depends on how you look at it. Anyway, the point was supposed to be that the shuttle as still developed very differently from Starship, in either case, so comparing them is still difficult. And I didn't mean that more flights cost less, obviously, but the capability to have more flights means you have less to do between flights- in order to do rapid reuse, you have to pretty much only be paying fuel fuel and quick inspections (the quicker the inspection, generally the cheaper). So, yeah, more flights doesn't mean lower costs, but rapid reuse does. As for Starlink, honestly the only way I can see global high-bandwidth internet not being successful is if someone beats them to it or they charge too much. For people in rural areas, this is one of the only real options, so there's certainly demand. And everything Elon says is crazy. He just tries really hard to make them true. Realizing what he's saying is crazy doesn't stop him, it just slows him down a few years, lol. At least that's how it's gone so far. Psssh. Landing rockets on a barge. That's ridiculous.

Flight 9 date and details:

Thanks for tolerating my perhaps overly optimistic rant. As for your comment: oh, ok (still kinda odd that it isn't mentioned on the mission diagram on the website, but I'm assuming someone ran the numbers)

For some reason I went on a minor rant on Starship after reading through some of these. Yes, that is a link to a space blog in my signature, and yes, this probably should just go there, but no, I'm lazy and that thing's been dormant for like a year now. Well... here's what I think about all this. Warning, overall opinion on the system as a whole below: Starship, whether it will be successful or not, is unlike any other rocket in history. Thus such things like cost, reliability, and flight rate cannot be compared to any other rocket. The thing is, this is the first vehicle ever designed from the ground up to be rapidly reusable. Yes, I know the space shuttle existed, but it wasn't rapidly reusable, even if it was supposed to be. With Starship, you can just double-check the engines and heat shield, refuel it, and relaunch. If they can't do that, Starship is a failure. so, if we're assuming that Starship is far enough into development to launch people, then we have to assume it was successful at this. Here's the thing: launching Starship is quick and inexpensive, so they can test it many, many more times than a regular rocket. Elon mentioned in the presentation that the system is capable of multiple fights to orbit PER DAY. They also said they would be basically trying to churn out a bunch of Starships while testing. So, here's the thing: Even with something more realistic for analyzing test data like 1 flight per weekday, they can test their system and iron out reliability problems hundreds of times in a single year. and this is why it's expected to be reliable- the airline-like reliability would be expected because of airline-like numbers of flights! If a plane only flew, say, 20 times a year, you wouldn't know if it was all that reliable, would you? This is also why all the other deadlines are so ambitious. Development can go a heck of a lot faster when tests can be done a heck of a lot more often. DearMoon, for example, doesn't even require any orbital refueling, (ok apparently it does but they can test that too) so all they need is the crewed Starship and they can send it on like a dozen trips around the moon before anyone goes anywhere in possibly less than a year. The other question of course is cost. This is a lot of flights. But that's of course the other place where rapid reuse comes in handy: costs. Costs will be much, much smaller than what we're used to. This is why they need a lot of money for this- not just the development cost, the cost of hundreds f test flights. But fortunately, they have a payload for most of these test flights: Starlink, as well as other commercial missions. So cost will not stop them from doing hundreds of lights, in fact, doing hundreds of flights will stop the cost from stopping them, if that makes any sense. And of course the argument that Starship is overbuilt for many of the things it does is true, but irrelevant. It doesn't matter how overbuilt it is for the task, it's cheaper and more flexible than anything else. Yes it has fins, but it can still land on the moon for the cost of only like flights, which isn't that much. Something that is built solely for the moon can't take advantage of this rapid reuse as often, and therefore would have much higher development costs and less flights to offset those, so it isn't as good as it sounds on paper. With Starship, unlike any other launch vehicle ever, it isn't about mass efficiency all the time, but rather operational efficiency/flexibility. Yes, again, rapid reuse is objectively an utterly insane and crazy goal, and perhaps an unrealistic one, but it's kind of the most important thing that Starship has to do to do, well, anything. Cost, reliability, safety, and ability to do interplanetary missions (tank it up quickly) all depend on Starship's seriously rapid reuse capability. If this does not work, Starship does not work. It's obviously not going to be easy, otherwise it would have been done before, but it is necessary, and Elon wants to get to Mars pretty badly, so they're certainly not going to give up on this any time soon. Either they'll fail hard or they'll change everything in the industry. Not much room in between when you commit to such huge risks like this. But Elon wants to go to Mars, and they need this radical change if hey're going to do so. Will they do it? Well, obviously they're doing a lot of things differently with Starship already, but we can't really know if these differences will be successful. Only time will tell. It's going to be some seriously exciting next few years as we figure out which one that's going to be. Do I think it will work? Well, I don't know. I certainly hope it does, but it's hard to even talk about "hundreds of launches per year" while sounding realistic in any way. So, we'll see. So yeah, safety is no problem if anything goes anywhere near planned. We just have to worry about how well reuse works, and if that woks, everything else does too IMO.

Obviously in a bit of a speculative way, of course, but clearly some thought was put into this- refueling should work in all these places.

Yeah, I think 20-30 at best to Mars is more realistic, but maybe we're talking about the 18m one. This tweet, for example, *does* say "ultimately." Even though it has a picture of the 9m Starship,, that may be what they mean. Also, I've just realized... power generation hasn't been addressed all the way since the original 2016 ITS, as far as I know. What happened to the solar panels? Did they switch to fuel cells?

Look a bit closer- there is a honeycomb texture, at least on a couple of the renderings: I think it's also fair enough to assume that there's enough detail on the heat shielding that this is how much shielding the ship is gonna have- no more, no less. And personally, I was happy with the renders. No, they didn't answer all my burning technical questions, and that was disappointing. But they looked so darn cool! And you could, for the first time, unlike any previous renderings, compare them with an actual thing that was right there! To me, the whole presentation just screamed "yes, this is happening. We are doing this" and that was amazing. Mk1 makes for an amazing prop, I guess, even if it isn't finished or built the same way. And yeah, legs are a bit worrisome. But if they land precisely enough I think it will be fine. They just... really have to choose their landing sites carefully, maybe. And build a proper concrete pad as soon as possible on any planetary body they happen to visit. That being, said, those legs combined with that crazy flip definitely makes me think that at least Mk1 or Mk2... probably won't make it at one point.

*like* Also, with the higher melting point of steel and the multiple bolts, it's entirely possible that even if a tile does get cracked in flight, it would stay bolted on and the stainless steel could take the heat. Also, willing to bet that there's some work being done towards making the inspection quicker- maybe even to the point of using fancy equipment to just do a "quick scan" of the entire heat shield, instead of manually inspecting every single tile up close, but I really, really don't know enough about how that might work- I'm just imagining that with all our computery advances since the 1980's, surely that could help speed it up somehow. Also, some questions: Where are the header tanks? There's a window at the nosecone, but they aren't in the tanks? And are the grid fins on the booster still made of solid cast Titanium? Because that's a lot of Titanium.

Not quite as long if you launch and refuel *from Mars.* Elon has talked about setting up fuel depots everywhere once, so that makes it sound like the outer solar system missions might not launch from Earth, but rather have supplies sent to Mars, refueled, and launched from there with crew missions also launching from Mars. IDK though, and I don't think it actually shortens the trip that much, but it could help, especially if you refuel in Mars orbit. He also mentioned destinations past Mars to be Ceres, Callisto, Ganymede and Titan, all of which, fairly particularly it seems, have water ice and carbon dioxide or carbon something. So maybe it could even launch from Jupiter or something.

Funky music time

I rewatched the 2018 presentation and on the first Q&A question I noticed that Wlon actually mentioned the 6 legs/ 2 fins design being built now but went with the other one instead for what really sounded like solely aesthetic purposes. Just an interesting note. Shows that this design- minus stainless steel- isn't new. Note you can clearly see the landing legs in this picture!

No, that would be weird and gene editing hasn't advanced that far yet. *like for a bunch of posts I am too lazy to quote*

So? What makes you think they won't just add those Raptors before going to orbit?

Thanks, but I didn't find this, someone on the NSF forums did. And you CAN'T like the cute dog picture?! That is just evil!

Oh, ok, so the sides are uneven- I definitely see it now, I just assumed the slope would be equal. So yeah, you're right. Should have read the forums a bit more. Meanwhile, I just found this on the NSF forums: What's that black thing on the side you ask? Well... this is quite possibly the most SpaceX thing I've seen in Starship yet: It's a Tesla model S/X battery. Two of them, actually. (comparison from exilon on NSF forums) They are literally powering their rocket... with a car battery. This is insane. In all the best ways.

Oh, I see. But again, not sure this isn't just a chine.

Wait, how does this tell us we're looking at the windward side? And for that matter, how do we know those are canard mounts and not just raceway protection or something?