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SpaceX just caught the booster of the Starship rocket, launching a new age of man made space exploration.
Despite this getting relatively little news in the mainstream media, I am convinced this development marks the beginning of an entire paradigm of space. The cost of kg to orbit should now go down about an order of magnitude within the next decade or two.
This win has massive implications for the culture war, especially given that Elon Musk has recently flipped sides to support the right. Degrowth and environmental arguments will not be able to hold against the sheer awesomeness and vibrancy of space travel, I believe.
We'll have to see if the FAA or other government agencies move to block Elon from continuing this work. If Kamala gets elected, I worry her administration will attack him and his companies even more aggressively. This successful launch, more than anything else in this election cycle, is making me consider vote for Trump.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree with my assessment?
I'm not sure if anybody asked this yet but why does the mechazilla need to catch it? Instead of just landing like the Falcon 9? Is it the size?
Been asked in this thread https://www.themotte.org/post/1207/spacex-starship-live-reaction-space-on/259100?context=8#context
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My understanding is that there are a couple considerations. First, the studs used for catching are much lighter than legs used for landing. Lighter weight for the landing components means more payload.
The other part is that the engines produce blast shockwaves which reflect off the landing surface and back into the engines, causing stress and potentially damage. Catching the rocket well off the ground prevents this.
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The cost should, but the price might not. The first orbital boosters to ever undergo a powered landing or be reused were the ones for Falcon 9, and the second orbital boosters ever to undergo a powered landing were ... the SpaceX successor to Falcon 9?! They're literally more than a decade ahead of nearly all their competition. The only thing I've seen at the same scale as Starship is a Chinese concept that's at the "powerpoint presentation" stage, and even in vaporware form they're only talking about starting testing in the early 2030s and regular use in 2040.
And just like SpaceX are still selling $70M Falcon 9 flights even while their internal marginal costs are likely to be down to ~$20M, I bet they'll feel free to sell Starship flights for something like $150M (for a full, 10x the F9 payload, granted), even if they ever actually manage to get its cost under $10M, until they get some real competition.
The biggest question among their competitors is New Glenn, I think. Blue Origin got started earlier than SpaceX without yet reaching orbit, seemingly progressing at half the pace ... but they now have a rocket nearly ready to launch, something like 4x more powerful than F9, for the same price. If everything works as planned and they can manage to ramp up the cadence then I could definitely see SpaceX prices being pushed down to that level too.
A profit maximizing monopolist increases production and lowers prices when their marginal costs decrease, the same as in a competitive market.
Yeah, but how much a monopoly lowers those prices depends on how the elasticity of demand varies with price, and I'm not sure what they can count on there. Over the past few years they've managed to double their number of commercial+government launches in part by being the cheapest option around, but still the majority of their launches are now Starlink. Bezos wants to put most of the Kuiper satellites up on New Glenn, and China's putting the Thousand Sails constellation up on Long March, and all the other satellite constellation plans out there are for tens or maybe hundreds of satellites, not thousands, so there's not a big external market in the wings that they can sweep up.
They can probably keep Starship busy with more internal payloads, which will be great for them, since they've got a more powerful Starlink design waiting on Starship because it's too big for Falcon, but this doesn't affect their prices to others. To have incentive to cut prices they need the cuts to essentially create new markets. New markets would be awesome if they happened, I admit. The first "12 universities design a nanosat and we launch the winner" programs started up shortly after I left undergrad, which was awe inspiring, and at Starship costs we could afford "1000 high schools design a nanosat and we launch the winning 100" instead. But that only scales so far, and most markets with lots of room for growth are very speculative. The one obvious growth market right now is high-bandwidth low-latency communication, but Musk+Bezos+China seem to have that sewn up already.
On the other hand, prices here aren't determined by a spherical monopolist, but by Musk. He actually seems to be serious about the cities-on-Mars thing, and Starlink seems to be lucrative enough to pay for it even if he doesn't maximize profit from other customers, so it wouldn't be completely out of character for him to just lower short-term profit margins speculatively, on the theory that even if the short-run demand elasticity isn't there it's more important to create new markets in the long run.
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Monopolies do not always charge maximum price. If one person wants a product at $100 but 20 people want it at $10, its better to charge $10 (as long as marginal costs aren't eating that additional $100 in revenue). Of course, that means you need more customers at a lower price. And I think Elon starting up Starlink is a sign that he lacks customers. I'm not sure where that leaves us.
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Yes, it was cool as fuck. I’m sorry I missed it live. I don’t know about price per kilogram, but this is instantly recognizable to the layman as something out of science fiction. Here’s to a new generation of space ops.
No, this means next to nothing for the culture war. Most people are not supporting their team due to a calculated future trajectory of humanity. They are assessing the personal economic impact, the respectability of their social circles, the overall sense of security. Rocket milestones are remarkably insulated from all of those in the short term.
I’d say it remains a shockingly gray-tribe issue. Degrowth is (thankfully!) not as influential as you suggest. Climate activism remains strong, but oddly technocratic, even as it incorporates the trappings of idpol. See the NSC’s Call to Action. Meanwhile, most of the right wing doesn’t care unless the topic can be linked to American exceptionalism.
Which brings us to Trump. I would argue that he has personally dragged the Republican Party further from laissez-faire, libertarian politics even as he has enacted some of those policy goals. The niche which was, in 2010, occupied by Tea Partiers now hosts outright populists and social conservatives. This election is a referendum on any number of social, economic, and personal-conduct issues before it’s about the future of space exploration.
Please don’t vote for Trump on the basis of Musk’s political drift.
Predictions: I do not expect the Biden admin or the Harris campaign to speak out against SpaceX. The latter might snap at Musk, but it will be for his Twitter remarks, not for anything about space exploration. I particularly do not expect the FAA to “block” Elon, especially since Flight 6 allegedly got approval already. Neither a Harris nor a Trump admin will move against private space companies, Musk or otherwise.
The Biden administration is suing SpaceX over its hiring having disparate impact to asylum seekers.
Haven’t those already been dismissed?
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/spacex-walmart-court-wins-imperil-dojs-immigration-bias-probes
I’m sure the DoJ appealed, but I can’t find anything newer than April.
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According to Musk, they're explicitly prevented from hiring migrants due to Federal ITAR rules, which means they're being sued by the Feds for obeying a Federal law.
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Anecdotally, I showed my wife the video of the Mechazilla catch yesterday. She was blown away at just how awesome it was. Previously, her opinion of Musk was "He's that billionaire that bought Twitter so he can troll people." After watching the video, she commented that if Musk was going to do amazing things like that, he gets a pass on all the Twitter trolling he cares to do. And she's not particularly "into" space flight and technology, it was just the sheer awesomeness that captured her attention.
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I believe that inexpensive space-flight may actually be beneficial to the environment, insomuch as it allows us to re-locate endeavours with adverse ecological impacts outside the environment.
The long-term environmental damage caused by StarBase may very well be literally less than nothing!
Obtaining rare earths in a place where the toxic lakes the size of Delaware don’t matter would certainly be a benefit for the environment. If we can stop being retarded about building nuclear uranium supplies might be worth it too.
But I’m unclear on the economic incentives behind space travel. Mars and Venus are the most terraformable planets and would still require centuries worth of government subsidies. Without FTL(let’s say heim theory turns out to be true, or there’s a breakthrough that develops a working Alcubierre drive, or someone figures out how to build a krasnikov tube) there’s no shirtsleeve environment out there, so people don’t want to live there. You might wind up with the equivalent of oil rigs in space but I doubt you’ll have major colonies.
Couldn't we also find this stuff on the moon? Why not the moon? I would presume every crater has something interesting at its center. It just seems like the most obvious place to start but I rarely see it mentioned or discussed.
I'm not super up-to-date on all the latest space exploration talk, so maybe someone can give me the tl;dr.
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I will point out here that lithophile elements are literally the worst things to get from space as far as relative difficulty of mining them goes. Atmophiles are found in much-greater quantity in the outer system. Siderophiles (which include literal gold) are far more accessible on asteroids because on Earth they sank into the core. But lithophiles (which include rare earths and actinides) are strongly concentrated in the crusts of planets; Earth is a great place to find them, only matched by other rocky, differentiated bodies (which have notable gravity wells and frequently atmospheres greatly increasing the expense of sending stuff back).
Ok, sure, bad example. But there’s resources(uranium, osmium) and industrial processes(titanium smelting) that genuinely make more sense in space once costs come down. Just that those economic justifications aren’t good reasons for permanent habitation.
Uh, uranium's an actinide (and thus lithophile), the thing I just said is highly concentrated in Earth's crust (see e.g. here for Sol System vs. here for Earth's crust; note that this somewhat understates the effect because both are normed to silicon being 10^6 and silicon is mildly concentrated in the crust compared to undifferentiated rocky bodies/epically concentrated in Earth as a whole compared to icy bodies). Sorry if that wasn't clear.
The yellow region in the second graph is the highly-siderophilic elements (plus tellurium), which are strongly depleted in the crust, and indeed osmium's one of them.
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Wrong. The human will and imagination will make it happen. As we advance in technology this will become easier and easier.
First Mars, then the stars.
Ok, but terraforming Mars takes what, 100 years minimum? Who's going to keep funding going for that for 100 years when it definitionally doesn't earn a return?
I guess there could be a structure such that running oil rigs in space requires taxes to fund a terraforming project. But whoever those taxes get paid to has every incentive to iron law of bureaucracy those taxes into conferences in the Bahamas about current thing in terraforming.
You could fund the terraforming of Mars by leveraging the equity of the total value of the theorized real estate.
In other words, a mortgage the size of a planet.
Except that, even after spending trillions in Terraforming Mars, you'd end up with land worth less than land than Earth due to extreme cold, proximity to amenities, ability to grow things, etc. No one but crazy rich people would want to live on Mars until Earth becomes largely uninhabitable.
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That would be the ultimate carbon offset scheme. Excuse me, I am setting up my extrasolar carbon credit synthetic swap. I will be messaging you all from my carbon neutral space mansion soon enough.
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Gonna be extremely funny if building stuff on Mars and then shipping them all the way to Earth ends up being cheaper than shipping them from somewhere on Earth due to the longshoreman union and the Jones Act.
LMAO. "We can easily imagine colonies on mars with a significant industrial base as well as regular transit of materials from Mars to Earth, but breaking up the longshoremen union and repealing the Jones act? That is beyond the realm of science fiction."
Wouldn't SpaceX rockets be Jones Act compliant anyway? They are built in the US, owned by a US company, registered in the US, and (in so far as they are crewed) crewed by US citizens.
The idea that wet Jones Act shipping between Miami and Puerto Rico costs more than space Jones Act shipping between Starbase and a US Mars Colony is scarily plausible. So is the idea of angry longshoremen trying to fix this problem by picketing Starbase and being zapped with Elon's latest death ray.
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I agree. Long term if we continue to grow our population and live at a comfortable level we just need to go to space for minerals anyway.
Environmentalists who are anti-space really aren't thinking ahead. Or they're degrowth lunatics.
I have seen some IMO reasonable arguments in favor of some environmental limits on space development. I don't think the idea that there is some value in completely untouched wilderness is completely crazy, but I'm not sure where I'd draw the line. I'd definitely be opposed to defacing the Earth-facing side of the moon, for example.
One thing about Mars I particularly want to preserve is the possibility of checking for lithopanspermia. There are a limited number of locations in Sol system capable of checking that hypothesis.
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