SOXBLOX

I still say any long-term colonization scheme by a company like SpaceX is doomed to failure. It would be a HUGE net loss that would A) Force Elon to shell out Starshiploads of cash to maintain or B) Force the colonists themselves to finance the voyage, infrastructure, etc. Starlink, once complete, shouldn't take many flights per year to keep running, due to the massive payload touted by SpaceX. This means it spends a lot of time sitting around doing nothing. This, coupled with the need to maintain the maintenance capabilities, leads to a problem like what Electric Boat experienced; paying smart people to twiddle their thumbs until the rare time they're needed. This makes it more efficient (more efficient, maybe not cheaper; there's a difference) to just use a smaller LV, like Falcon. It's either this, or pull a market out of thin air in a matter of years. Ain't happenin'. What besides Starlink will fly on this?

They want minimal infra because it allows them to launch from anywhere-ish. This keeps our adversaries guessing. And no, you are quite wrong on how hard it would be for, say, China to spot and track SS. BMEWS, or the Chinese version thereof, could find it seconds after it appeared, and fire a shot from a system like a small version of GBSD. More resolution from orbital cameras is hardly necessary; 8m is past the point where aperture increases make headway against atmospheric interference. So no, I don't see a vast military potential for Starship. Even if the military could use it, it is only useful in war, when corporations are essentially forced to cut their profits to nigh-zero or appear to be capitalizing on the suffering of many, many people. This tiny market would last only a year or two, at most, due to the way even a near-peer conflict would be fought.

Starlink will be a market, but not the way you think. Once those starlink sats have died and become hypervelocity impactors, they will have to be removed in order to de-Kesslerize Earth. I wonder what launch vehicle could pull that off... Oh yeah,... Starship, coincidentally made and flown by the same government -subsidized corporation that made the mess in the first place. And also coincidentally, because not all the space trash up there is SpaceX 's, then it will be perfectly justifiable to pay SpaceX to remove it. Difficult to see, you say? I presume you mean me, but I'll ignore this. If Starlink is proves itself to be so wonderful, then it will naturally create competition. Competition launched by other companies, of course. If there is no other competition, they run into anti-monopoly regulations. Do you think rich, prosperous millionaires and billionaires want to leave their mansions and coastal resorts for a highly regimented community with strict laws living in a fragile tin can, again, in muscle -destroying low G? Not likely. Not that I hate SpaceX, but 100 years from now, i think whoever invents a mass-production technique for C nanotubes will be laughing at Elon's plans to colonize Mars with a steel tube.

I certainly trust Boeing a lot less than Lockheed. Lockheed is still very reliable, though. They've managed to stave off most of the internal corporate bureaucracy which is dampening the capabilities of the brains at Boeing to innovate. Definitely don't knock these guys; they've been pushing the limits of aerospace for the number one aerospace customer, the American military, for the last 80 years. They appear to move slowly only because they can't waste taxpayer dollars. Congress is ruthless in its spending cuts (absolutely not a political comment, just a fact) and will crush them if they don't know exactly what they're doing. As for the Space Force, they're looking for a small, cheap launcher which can launch unpredictably using minimal infrastructure, i.e. any convenient air base, during a near-peer conflict. I would guess that this doesn't apply to SS. SS would also make a very juicy target for ASAT weapons. That would mess up the economies of reusability a bit. As for the launch costs of Starship, we cannot possibly have any hard numbers yet, seeing as how they haven't actually built and flown it. The aerospace industry has a time-honored tradition of running into unexpected technical problems (read: bigger costs), and something as novel as Starship will likely see more than its share of gremlins. As for tourism, ahhhh... Yeah. Not a very sustainable market by my guesses. But who knows...

And as for the actual colonization of space, the first step is to make people want to leave Earth. That is, they must want to trade blue skies and zero-cost breathable atmosphere for health issues in low or zero G, dusty Mars, and life in a cramped tin can. In that case, it won't be us uber-rich first world Americans going. Probably the best way to make people move to space is to nuke not Mars, but Earth. That's right, about the only thing which could force a mass exodus would be a full-scale nuclear exchange. After which, by the way, there would be no Hawthorne, CA. Next, you need a place to go. Building this is entirely out of the reach of whole nations, much less small companies like SpaceX. Gravity ring stations in cislunar space built with SS launches? Oh please. Get realistic, people. This isn't Star Trek, no matter how hard you shout.

What I mean is that there are no missions for Starship to fly. NASA isn't about to fund anymore JWST-sized scopes, and certainly not any planet-imagers, in the near-future. The NRO is quite content already, and would much prefer to launch on proven launchers. Gateway is the only conceivable destination outside of low-earth orbit, and it may not even be built. Launches to specialty orbits are so expensive only because the current launchers are so limited; Starship would eat up the very small amount of demand there is, and would fail to make money regardless. Five sats per launch? Congrats, you just cut the price to a fifth (or less) of the original. As for colonizing Mars, Starship could *maybe* do it, but it would be losing money all the way. Keeping even an unrealistically tiny Earth-to-Mars supply chain open for any useful duration would rapidly bankrupt SpaceX. There's no money being made by a Mars colony for the first few years at least, it just eats cash. A 100 ton payload is impressive, but serves no practical purpose. What serious endeavour requires this launch vehicle?We could switch the electric grid to solar, but we don't because the effort would be a net monetary loss. We could build a maglev train system covering the continental United States, but we don't because there is no profit to be made on any realistic timescale. Even if we had all the necessary tech to put a colony on Mars today or in the next decade, we wouldn't unless there was a real economic incentive to justify the necessary effort. Elon Musk is no idiot, but at heart he is a businessman. When Starship continually fails to make money, he will retire it. Furthermore, flying this thing with crew would be risky. When it fails (and statistically it will surely fail, being so complex) and 100 civilian passengers die on it, then what? Could the Starship program, or even SpaceX itself, recover? It would provide a massive boost to all the other launch providers, that's for sure. Many SpaceX fanboys don't realize it, but ULA has enormous resources behind it from its parent companies, Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Both are aerospace and defence tech giants, with access to tech far beyond anything SpaceX has developed. If they put together a Skunk Works style team, they could build an equal or better launcher, and do it faster and cheaper. They haven't, and won't for the foreseeable future, mainly because it isn't a solution to a problem anyone is serious about solving. So, until there is a viable economic incentive for colonizing space or using super-heavy launchers, Starship is an answer to a question nobody is asking. By the time that question is asked, and there is a market more solid than "It's cool, so of course people will fly on it", SS will be obsolete, and rusting in a museum somewhere.

Perhaps one could design the ship so that the engine could fire prograde for the first 50% of the flight, and then point retrograde for deceleration while still maintaining the forward facing magnetic scoop. Worst-case, one could use cascade vanes...

I dunno. I'd love to see either of them. Those plus a new fuselage cross-section type would make a killer DLC, though.

Someone's been on Atomic Rockets! Great post, man! I certainly wasn't considering a pure matter-antimatter drive concept for those reasons and more. A much better use would of course be AM catalyzed fusion, which is what I believe we'll see in KSP2, if we do get antimatter.

So the devs say colonies will produce "advanced fuel types". Of course that is where we'll get our mH, but what else will they produce? I'm thinking that the torchdrive will at least be antimatter catalyzed. How feasible do you think antimatter propulsion is, and do you think it will appear in KSP2?

The Moon, for sure. Plenty of water, and the proximity to Earth is a huge boost to its potential. It would probably be used for mining of water and construction materials to supply gravity ring stations or O'Niell cylinders in cislunar space. Mars, on the other hand, well... It isn't suited for much that would be useful in near-future terms. Better destinations are probably Ceres, floating colonies on Venus (strictly because of its strong gravity), and Callisto.

Ugh. Starship again. What would we launch with it? Does it have any use? I mean, I'm all for colonizing space, but this isn't the way to go, in my opinion.

Absolutely right! The bombs would each require an internal containment system, making them incredibly complex and bulky. And it only takes one failure...

Clouds!?! Metallic Hydrogen!?! NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN SPAAAAACE!?! *bounces up and down hysterically*

Sent a Comsat Block II constellation to Minmus, pulled off an orbital rendezvous (my second ever) and getting ready to build MOAR BOOSTERS!!!

I busted a gut when I read that! The #%@&#%@ idiots! [Snip]

Cyπep pokot! But seriously, AM pulse units have to store the AM for long durations. This means that they're bulkier than -simple- nukes. Just go with AM catalyzed fusion instead.

Saw Starlink a couple weeks ago; counted something just over 50. Cool at first, but very disruptive to astrophotography. I would much rather use a small number of large sats which are reliable enough to deorbit after their service life ends, but no, Mr. Musk must have his Starlink. Nevermind the other seven billion people on Earth who would like to see the stars properly... I guess Elon is a Kesslerizer.

Fantastic! Can't wait to see it, then. Thx!

Heh. Rask and Rusk are double. Oops.

I don't think they'll move the launch site off the equator; it would be tricky for beginners. It will probably be on the east coast of a continent. I hope they use roughly the same map, whatever else they do. The current one has three, maybe four, good locations for a launch site on the equator with lots of ocean to the east; they are the desert to the west of the KSC, the Korea-shaped peninsula to the east, just across the bay which contains the island airfield, and some spots in the Crater Sea, waaay to the east of KSC. Although we can't entirely rule out an inland launch site (privyet, Baikonur Cosmodrome), I don't think the devs would use one for KSC itself. With the addition of multiplayer, I think the other locations like Baikerbanur and Woomerang will get reworked as full launch sites as well.

Yaaaaaay, ULA! Can't wait to see Vulcan fly! This is probably total flamebait, but I like Starliner better than Crew Dragon and Atlas and Vulcan better than Falcon.

But, I found this. In the cinematic trailer at roughly 1:58 we see a ship apparently decelerating towards a moon. I focused on the ship, and from the radiator arrangement and spherical fuel tanks, I believe it is the ship shown in the next scene, from which the lander departs. Looking at the nozzle, we can see some trusswork with, perhaps, beam emitter units pointing in at the nozzle. Maybe it's a small Daedalus, but I don't think so. The deceleration is too similar to the Epstein drive in the Expanse. I'm very confident these clips are our torchdrive. It looks similar to the ICAN -II from Atomic Rockets. (Engine List 3, ACMF) Given that we're getting the Orion, I don't think this antimatter drive is out of the question. It would be a good fuel for colonies to produce, and would form the very late-game drive hinted at by the devs.

I'm wondering what the torchdrive will be. Nate Simpson said it would be the craziest engine on Atomic Rockets. That could mean the NSWR. Thoughts?

Ah, no. Perhaps you're thinking of negative mass? Negative mass-energy is an entirely hypothetical concept. As it's mass is negative, a force which pulls normal matter would push it, and a force which pushes normal matter would pull it. It would also generate antigravity. But antimatter has positive mass-energy. You can tell because it produces positive mass-energy (gamma ray photons) when it annihilates. It looks kind of like this: x+x=2x Negative mass- energy would annihilate with any positive mass-energy (even normal antimatter) to produce...nothing. They would cancel perfectly. Like this: x+(-x)=0 And no. You cannot extract enough energy from any system to propel yourself faster than light and therefore, backwards in time. It requires an infinite amount of energy to do so. This would also cause the establishment of a preferred reference frame, thereby breaking special relativity. It would also overturn causality. That is a VERY big no no.