CatastrophicFailure

Bring along some of my ashes, will ya?

*@Dman979 disappears in a puff of logic and leaves thread unlocked*

No, man, you haven’t. You’re still not getting what I’m saying. But whatever. This tangent is becoming toxic so I’m done. Time will tell.

And the entire P2P concept is “extra capability.” Someone sitting in a meeting probably threw the idea out randomly and it just stuck.

Because you’re thinking NYC <—> Sydney. I’m thinking LA <—> Shenzhen. SpaceX already has a footprint at the port of LA... and China is already cool with rockets falling out of the sky.

Bruh, I was pointing out an example, a very specific reference case to demonstrate my point that you keep avoiding. There are no doubt, like @mikegarrison pointed out, many other examples out there in this niche market, and that there is money to be made. Especially when one is trying to edge into a market dominated by other, much larger, players. Like, for example, RocketLabs. They’re not competing with ULA or SpaceX, they’re going after the underserved market of smallsat launches. And by all accounts at this very early time in the game, it looks like it’s paying off. SpaceX couldn’t compete in the cargo market shipping volume like UPS or FedEx, but targeting a niche like outsize and high-priority cargo and moving it faster than anyone else can even hope, yeah, that might just work. When they can send CT machines to China in a fraction of the time with demonstrated reliability and safety, then maybe they can consider a serious play for moving people. Lots of today’s big players got their start by targeting niche markets. I will continue to remain... optimistic until there is a concrete reason not to be. I don’t disagree. I’m a lot more skeptical of this thing than SpaceX’s other schemes. But if they can make it work, along with all the obligatory minutia, customers will come. First they have to get past the whole “only exists on paper” part, followed closely by that meddlesome “not exploding” part.

Code red! Code red! Launching emergency snack resupply... oops... forgot to check staging...

She says the “small end” with CT imagers is 1x5m, 2000kg, without packaging. Its basically a ginormous toroidal magnet that doesn’t really disassemble.

You seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing, then. My comment stream has been directed at this: To which I’ve provided several very concrete examples of how there is a market, it’s not unique to the one part of the industry I happen to be a little familiar with. It’s these unusual, high-priotory shipments that are going to be the driving force behind SpaceX’s early foray into P2P transport, long before people or volume cargo, because it is going to be more expensive than current shipping methods. If it works at all. But this is how I think it will likely begin. RocketLab Electron.

As I’m fond of telling a certain editor of mine, sometimes the greatest courtesy you can do a person is to tell them what they don’t want to hear. Listening to the stories and experiences drifting around this thread, it never ceases to amaze me how happy I am to be done with that phase of life. Even tho I left it nearly 20 years ago, I’m still so happy to know I never have to deal with grades or classes or arbitrary academic rigamarole ever again. I love learning but I always hated school.

Well, one reason is dangerous goods that can’t be combined with other shipments, so probably not the best thing to have on a rocket, there. But yes, the other would be time-specific transits that necessitate a dedicated truck instead of standard linehall. Indeed, it does take years of funding and months of planning and a major construction project to install or replace a complete system. So you really don’t want your system to bog the whole mess down. In a very concrete example of this, a couple years ago the entire Port was shut down for weeks (because politics ), Nothing was getting in or out and freighters were just piling up in the Sound. This caused my wife all sorts of headaches because she simply had no other option. It’s not a simple matter to find space on another ship at a port hundreds of miles away. Now, a rocket with a 30 minute flight time to China making dozens of trips a day... even if it’s expensive, that starts looking attractive when your thing is still sitting in line on a truck. You miss my point. Which is, there is a market for fast-transit like that, even if it’s expensive.

Relevant stuff first:

And this is the other side of the equation that will need to be worked out. Convenient, isn’t it, how the whole P2P concept just happens to synergize so well with Musk’s hyperloop idea, isn’t it? Granted, there’s a lot of regulatory and logistical hurdles to be worked out, but it’s a chicken or egg sorta thing: there’s no impetus to reform regulations and logistical bottlenecks because there’s no transportation system that could take advantage of it because there’s too many regulatory and logistical problems. It’s not uncommon, right now, for my wife to basically have to rent an entire truck for a single unit because it absolutely has to be there right now. It’s also not uncommon for a customer to have to wait weeks for a unit because it simply won’t fit on an airliner and has to go ocean freight. These are just two examples, from one small segment of the market. My dad, who works in aerospace and has been doing this longer than many people on this forum have been alive, could probably come up with pages and pages more. And both shippers would be more than willing to pay. The market is there, if the system can perform as SpaceX projects. This is a simple engineering issue, once again chicken-or-egg thing. But the shipping crates my wife has told me about for some of these systems are pretty dang impressive in what they can do to mitigate full on “crap it fell off the forklift” moments.

@sevenperforce My very specific example is an ultrasound machine. Too big to fit in a standard cargo plane, weeks to get anywhere by sea. Knowing a couple people in the shipping businesss, there is definitely a market for high-speed, high-priority and outsize cargo. Whether P2P BFR pans out or not remains to be seen, but if it does work even a fraction as well as they’re saying, the market is there. It’s not about the money savings, it’s about time. And time is money. If they can make the entire system work as quickly as they’re saying, I think customers will line up, even at a premium price.

And a load of high-priority, outsize cargo that absolutely, positively, has to be there today.

Possible... or did @Just Jim perhaps take inspiration from...

Putting it mildly. Tho an interestin takeaway from the article, which doesn’t seem to be quite right, apparently TESS will be the last new Block 4. I would have thought they still had at least a couple in inventory still to go thru. Like, what about the next few Vandy launches & such?

Delayed from the 24th.

*reads a few posts up* And you did take the time to learn the rules, right?

Tell them if they see any weird talking green orbs, running and screaming is a perfectly rational response not that it would do them much good at that point.

Shotwell has said they’re going to do initial BFGrasshopper testing out of Boca, but just that will probably require pretty minimal support hardware.

You’re far more persistent than I. By now I would have sent some ginormous, overbuilt rocket that cost 10x what the contract pays, given up, cancelled the darn thing and then crashed stuff into the VAB for an hour.

What they're doing is evolutionary, not revolutionary, like all their other advances. Standing on the shoulders of giants, to borrow the phrase.. They aren't groping around blindly with unknown materials in untested applications. Recognizing this is not "fanatical" , it's looking at the big picture... with a dose of optimism. You can be a skeptic if you want, that's fine. Optimism is much more fun. They also aren't exactly Gradatim Ferociter-ing, like with Falcon Heavy, are they? What with their big expensive tool in a makeshift tent at an unbuilt factory, no doubt with more in the pipe... this speaks to me that they have confidence in that they're doing and that the development is more-or-less proceeding as expected. ElonTime notwithstanding.