SpaceX: Starship Will Be Going To the Moon, With Or Without NASA (behindtheblack.com) 110
schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: SpaceX is going to land this spaceship manned on the Moon, whether or not NASA's SLS and Orion are ready. And even if those expensive, cumbersome, and poorly designed boondoggles are ready for those first two Artemis landings, SpaceX is likely to quickly outmatch them with numerous other private missions to the Moon, outside of NASA. It has the funds to do it, and it knows it has the customers willing to buy the flights. The news comes from a detailed update SpaceX released today on the Starship lunar lander. Here's the section where SpaceX "made it clear that it sees Starship and Superheavy as its own space effort, irrelevant of NASA": "To return Americans to the Moon, SpaceX aligned Starship development along two paths: development of the core Starship system and supporting infrastructure, including production facilities, test facilities, and launch sites -- which SpaceX is self-funding representing over 90% of system costs -- and development of the HLS-specific Starship configuration, which leverages and modifies the core vehicle capability to support NASA's requirements for landing crew on and returning them from the Moon. SpaceX is working under a fixed-price contract with NASA, ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs. SpaceX provides significant insight to NASA at every stage of the development process along both paths, including access to flight data from missions not funded under the HLS contract.
Both pathways are necessary and made possible by SpaceX's substantial self-investments to enable the high-rate production, launch, and test of Starship for missions to the Moon and other purposes. Starship will bring the United States back to the Moon before any other nation and it will enable sustainable lunar operations by being fully and rapidly reusable, cost-effective, and capable of high frequency lunar missions with more than 100 tons of cargo capacity."
Both pathways are necessary and made possible by SpaceX's substantial self-investments to enable the high-rate production, launch, and test of Starship for missions to the Moon and other purposes. Starship will bring the United States back to the Moon before any other nation and it will enable sustainable lunar operations by being fully and rapidly reusable, cost-effective, and capable of high frequency lunar missions with more than 100 tons of cargo capacity."
Ok Elon (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not one of musk's enterprises would survive without the tens of billions of government aid.
the pedo guy supports austerity for you, but has nothing against soshalism and government largess dumped on his garbage companies.
Re: Ok Elon (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Ok Elon (Score:1)
The only tax break SpaceX ever received was from Texas in the form of an incentive to build a new facility (specifically, what is now the largest PCB manufacturing facility in the world) there. Which is much more of a quid-pro-quo than anything else. Texas doesn't have income taxes, though they do have some pretty hefty property taxes. Think about that. That's really the extent of it.
You guys keep confidently making all of these vague assertions about subsidies SpaceX has supposedly received, yet you can ne
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Can you be more specific about what SpaceX funding you consider a "government handout"?
As far as I'm aware, all the money SpaceX has received from the US government has been payment for services: delivering cargo/astronauts to the ISS, putting military satellites in orbit, etc.
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Re:Ok Elon (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a personal anecdote, so take it for what you will. My current FSD actually self-drives today and has been for a very long time. It'll take me from my driveway to my work parking lot and back home without a single intervention. To get to work, I drive through country roads, city streets, and 2 highways. One of which is the busiest highway in North America.
I drive to work every day (M-F) and I can't stress this enough: I can't remember the last time I had to intervene . It's navigated road construction, the odd garbage truck stopping with no notice to pick up garbage bags on the side of the road (every Thursday morning around 6am), other drivers making last minute multi-lane changes to get to the highway exit, even drivers who brake check because they don't like the Cybertruck. I have a Model S too and have never been brake checked in that so *shrug*. It's deviated automatically from the regular route when it's detected there's standstill traffic somewhere along my route and then driven me home, again no intervention needed from me.
I've driven through fog, heavy rain, and unlit streets. My experience with FSD has been as flawless as I can expect. Of course, that is not going to be true for everyone, but when is anything every universally true when it comes to a persons experience of technology?
Re:Ok Elon (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ok Elon (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm running FSD v13.2.9 and waiting for v14.x to be released, which is coming hopefully soon-ish. I'm not in major rush though for reasons you'll see below.
I just got the v14 upgrade a few days ago, and it's a mixed bag. On the plus side, it now handles parking, as in I give it a destination, it drives me there, goes into the parking lot, picks out a spot and parks in it, all with zero human input or intervention. On the negative side, I think v14 needs a little more compute horsepower than my 2025 Model S has. I used to have a 2020, with previous-gen computer, and as FSD got more capable it actually degraded a bit, becoming indecisive and occasionally "stuttering". With the new car that went away entirely. I was very impressed. With v14, in the new car, it's began to get indecisive and stutter again. Not often, but it happens. I think this is a result of the model not being able to complete its processing quickly enough, because it doesn't have enough compute.
I'm hopeful that they can refine and optimize v14, though, to fix that problem. Other than that, and the fact that on the country roads where I live it always wants to drive too slow (the roads are small, but the speed limit is 45 and everyone drives 50-55, while the car is clearly not comfortable going over 35-40), it's extremely good.
Re: Ok Elon (Score:1)
other drivers making last minute multi-lane changes to get to the highway exit, even drivers who brake check because they don't like the Cybertruck
Every time I see slashdot or reddit posts saying cybertruck drivers are douchebags, they almost always include material about how they'd like to put notes on or vandalize them, cut them off, flip them off... I'm always reminded that the douchebag in the encounter isn't the one in the truck.
While I don't own a cybertruck (it's the exact opposite of what I prefer in a commuter car) I've never met someone who owns one that is an actual douchebag. I've met plenty of progressives who are total douchebags though.
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It used to bother me but as long as they're not doing anything dangerous, I just feel sorry for them. It must be hard going through your daily life getting so upset for reasons you probably can't articu
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I'll believe it when Teslas can actually self-drive like you promised.
Elon's ability to implement "viable" self-driving on our roads is a multi-faceted issue that has fuck-all to do with SpaceX's [forthcoming] ability to to get obscene quantities of hardware up* into orbit.
*Dropping it back down into the Moon's gravity well is trivially easy by comparison
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Getting it to land on the Moon is relatively trivial. Getting it to land safely is as hard as reusable space craft, but different in many ways.
OTOH, its been done several times, so the expertise exists. (OTTH, remember that some have landed and tipped over.)
I wouldn't count it a safe trip, Not the first few times he does it. And presumably it needs to be a round-trip to count as a success.
Re:What are the legal implications? (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA and the US government don't have exclusive rights to going to the moon. If the US government somehow ban them from launching they could just as easily launch from a different country out of the reach of the US.
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...would be quite a feat to liquidate those 500 billion....
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Chicom? Are you stuck in 1976? I'm sure you think it makes you sound edgy and trendy, but really you just sound stupid and racist.
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Unless the U.S. slaps export controls on its technology.
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Does not matter where he intends to build it if his technology is export controlled.
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They're going to struggle to find a country
You're kidding, right? I can't think of a country in Latin America that wouldn't jump at the chance, and the majority of them are much nicer places to live than frelling Texas.
Re: What are the legal implications? (Score:1)
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National Pride.
Even if NASA decides to send SLS/Artemis to the Moon instead of backing SpaceX Starship, they will not deny Musk the launch authority. Being able to claim the first private manned mission to the Moon and back is American is a big deal.
USA #1
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Every launch from any organization, private, corporate, government, military, hobbyists, alerts the FAA ahead of time, it's a routine procedure that functions even when Congress is not paying staffers. Most of the heavily used launch sites are no-fly zones 24x7x365 anyway as well as most of the military launch sites. This is not a new concept, the procedures have been in place since at least the early ICBM launches of the 1950s. I'm not sure why you think that it's somehow going to limit SpaceX from goin
PR (Score:4, Interesting)
At first I thought "no they won't", because why would you bother with the Moon if NASA's not going to pay for it?
Then, I thought that NASA has already paid for much of it, via the segmented nature of the HLS contracts, and even if Starship HLS doesn't line up with Artemis 3, you might as well run the mission if you've got the hardware. Ops and fuel costs relatively little.
Then imagine the PR boost to the first private company that lands people on the Moon and return them safely to the Earth. :D
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Re: PR (Score:2)
"I am going to pretend I didn't understand how idioms work, nor common English vernacular so I can bitch about musk."
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Chinese Bot.
Re: PR (Score:2)
It's literally in the SpaceX mission statement. It's also not publicly traded, so there aren't any activist investors or hedge funds that can suddenly pick up a large stake and demand a deviation from that mission, like what happened to southwest.
Re:PR (Score:5, Interesting)
Not true. The radiation levels on the surface of Mars are around 230mSv/yr. The radiation levels in Ramsar, Iran, are 260mSv/yr. That's not because Iran has been doing all kinds of weird dirty things with nuclear material, that's just the natural background radiation level there. Want to know what issues they have living in such a high radiation area? Absolutely nothing. It actually has a *lower* cancer rate than the average. Our preferred model for determining how much radiation is safe for nuclear workers assumes that there's a linear relationship between how much radiation you receive, and how likely you are to have negative effects. It assumes that that's true no matter how spread out the dose is. The model says
- If one person receives a dose of 1kSv, 50 people will get cancer.
- If 1,000 people receive a dose of 1 Sv each in one second, 50 people will get cancer.
- If 1,000 people receive a dose of 1 Sv each spread out evenly over the course of 100 years, 50 people will get cancer.
- If 1,000,000 people receive a dose of 1mSv, 50 people will get cancer.
- If 1,000,000,000 people receive a dose of 1Sv, 50 people will get cancer.
It's a clearly, ridiculous model that doesn't in any way represent reality. In reality, you need to tie an individual's dose rate, and total dose to their risk of health issues. When you do that, you discover that below about 60mSv of radiation exposure health outcomes are actually better than baseline. The amount of radiation that we have actual solid evidence causes problems is 100mSv in a single exposure. That's. far far higher dose rate than anyone on Mars would experience
All that is to say, the radiation levels on Mars certainly are elevated, but they're not elevated to the point where our body can't handle it. The dose rates are low enough that it's likely people will have absolutely no ill effects, and may even have some small health benefits. If there are issues, there's a really easy way to deal with it - build your shelter underground.
There are some problems potentially with the trip *to* mars where radiation levels are around 1Sv/yr. Of course, we do have solutions for that. The steel sheet on the outside of the ship alone will attenuate radiation levels by about 10%. Wrapping the water storage around the outside of the ship, assuming a 20cm thick layer of water, around the ship, you're going to get attenuation of around 87.5%. With just those two, we've reduced the dose rate to around 100mSv per year, which... guess what... Perfectly fine.
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Don't confuse the anti-space crowd with facts, their brains start leaking and then family members have to clean up after them. They're almost as bad as the anti-nuclear nuts.
My wife grew up in Puno, Peru, at 12,600 feet altitude, where most of the air molecules in the atmosphere are below you already so there's pretty much no protection from cosmic rays or ultraviolet light. There's a fairly high background radiation in the area, and quite a bit of cyanide in the water. What do most people die of? Heart
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Another thing to consider is that we are making rapid progress in terms of treating cancers. We are basically learning how to hack the human immune system to enhance its error correction abilities against genetic damage.
By the time we are regularly sending people to mars, it's not unreasonable that we will just have such good cancer treatments (or treatments for all sorts of genetic damage) that the effects of the radiation can be mitigated therapeutically.
It's like how explorers used to be at risk of scurv
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We're not talking about just one mission to go the moon with that overpriced toy that's blown up multiple times. When going to the moon with it, you also have to add in all of the support missions for supplies to get to the moon. Think of all the possible bad PR for failures in those separate missions. The public just watching an empty starship blow up has started to give them problems.
Now imagine the PR if anything goes wrong and causes a fatality, or worse, multi
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Oh, good grief. When the Gemini 7 were taken to Cape Canaveral to view a launch the NASA PR flack proudly told them, "This is the spacecraft that's going to take you to orbit." The thing blew up on the pad in front of them, none considered dropping out.
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SpaceX / Elon are OVER 3 years late for the 2022 goals. Why hasn't SpaceX been forced to explain why it is wasting taxpayer money?
People keep digging back to the 1950's and 1960's to justify SpaceX blowing up roc
Re:PR (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe he thinks there will be a market for tourism.
Starship is a long way from landing on the Moon though. Far enough out that it's probably safe to assume that Elon has no clue what he is talking about, and even if he does by the time it's ready his priorities may have shifted.
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I'm not clear why people think the only reason to go do something is if there's the possibility to get rich (or in Musk's case richer). Whatever happened to going somewhere "because it's there"? I'd happily climb aboard Starship for the trip even if I knew it was only one-way.
I agree that Musk probably doesn't know the exact details of the project, but that's what he hires extremely competent people for.
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NASA really hasn't paid for much of it. The HLS contract was for $4.5bn, of which, NASA has paid out $2.6bn so far. Starship development has so far cost somewhere around $10bn, so NASA's funded maybe a quarter of it. That said, you're right that SpaceX will do it for PR alone. They're trying to get to Mars. The problems you need to solve for that are a superset of the problems you need to solve for the moon, so they're going to be solving all the problems for the moon anyway. They'd be mad not to go t
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The Moon has very little in common with Mars, so there's no great reason to going there first. There's no atmosphere so landing is different, the surface dust is extremely abrasive, it's an entirely different environment for propellant production, the gravity is about half as great, etc.
About the only real benefit is that you're only a few days away if something goes wrong, rather than a few months away on Mars.
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So? I'd go if it were one-way. I'm always shocked that so few other people would.
Re: PR (Score:4, Insightful)
How likely do you think it is that NASA can fly an emergency mission to the moon, and back with extra passengers, on short notice?
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On any notice.
Re: PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Your estimatations are honestly way off. It takes NASA aproximately 3-4 years to build a single SLS, which is the only ship they have that can reach the moon with humans. They'd need 2 to send a rescue mission, due to the limitations of Orion's reentry, and that's assuming the Starship only has 3 people on board, which it has capacity for many many more.
So... chance of NASA sending a rescue mission to the moon? 0%. Literally 0%. There's no way they can do it. The only ship able to rescue a stranded Starship crew on short notice would be another Starship.
As far as xplodeship... Yeh, they've had a couple of failed launches recently. They've also solved the problems with them. They've got even more fixes coming in Block 3. Specifically, the problem was caused by a leak in the plumbing in the "attic" - area above the engines, but below the tanks, that you can think of essentially as a giant manifold. They've figured out the vibration issues that caused the leak, and changed the flight profile so that those vibrations don't occur. They've increased the capacity of the purge system that forces any leaked gasses out of the area. They've redesigned the plumbing that had the issue to not resonate in the same way. Version 3 eliminates the attic entirely, and mounts the engines directly to the bottom of the tanks. They've now had two consecutive successful launches, and reentries. I see no reason to think that next year they won't be able to get a pair of ships fully into orbit, and test docking, and fuel transfer between ships. Once they've done that, the only thing left to get to the moon is to nail the landing, which, frankly, if SpaceX can't nail landings... I have no idea what's going on.
Re: PR (Score:3)
What a lot of people don't realize about starship is that literally every single mission has been intended to stress test the vehicle in order to find out what its limits are.
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There are literally thousands of sensors scattered top to bottom of every SpaceX craft measuring pretty much every damn thing that can be measured. Musk once called his cars "computers with wheels", the spacecraft makes a Tesla look primitive in comparison.
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I think the biggest concern I have with Starship right now is that the dry weight appears to be very high and they haven't proven rapid reuse. If they had either a good mass fraction, or had a stack with proven rapid reusability (at this point, just not having tiles falling off) then they'd have wiggle room to trade one for the other. But at the moment they don't have either. Of course there will be a lot of optimisations they can make, but countering that they might have to add a lot more weight to get rap
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I think it's pretty hard to argue they haven't demonstrated rapid reuse. They've demonstrated that they can land, and reuse their booster, in later cases with very minimal refurbishment. They've demonstrated that they can land their ship. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be able to reuse the ship. There's still an open question about the quality of the heat shield, but it's clear that it is improving rapidly with each flight, and is likely very close to being "good enough". The most recent shi
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Imagine the PR boost if Elmo was to send his ass to moon on the first flight. No wimpy sending lessor mortals, c'mon Elmo, get up there. After you solve the radiation problem, send your ass to Mars. Write soon!
irrelevant of NASA? (Score:1)
Irrespective...
To quote inspector Fowler, "You'll find the King's English will serve you just as well, provided you can use it properly."
Re: irrelevant of NASA? (Score:3)
Potato, tomato.
Drop tanks (Score:1)
Re: Drop tanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Absent a vast launch-it-all-in-one-go rocket, you would need to assemble the (full) drop tanks onto the main thing, so you would need to solve the boil-off and making-a-connector problems anyway. At that point it, topping up one vehicle may look easier.
Ouch!!!!! (Score:1)
. And even if those expensive, cumbersome, and poorly designed boondoggles are ready for those first two Artemis landings, SpaceX is likely to quickly outmatch them with numerous other private missions to the Moon, outside of NASA.
Ouch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's a pretty witty and funny insult (:
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I'm not familiar with that claim.
Did someone order a million robo taxis?
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https://www.thedrive.com/news/... [thedrive.com] “Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road,” said Musk on October 21, 2019. “
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Was he successful?
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So, it seems like he underestimated.
Robo taxis must be harder than he thought.
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They go there all the time already, did you somehow miss that? Or are you confusing SpaceX with Blue Origin?
Payload: Elon in a Spacesuit in a "new" Roadster (Score:1)
Fly him to the moon, let him die among the stars.
Nuff, said .. except this conspiracy theory Elon Musk was replaced by his evil clone Evil Elon, the real Elon Musk (dead) sits in his old Roadster en route to Mars.
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NASA was literally created to give Nazis a job.
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Cue the music... (Score:2)
Cue the music to the Alice Kramden project...
"To the moon Alice..." https://youtu.be/0P84NiVGJsw?t... [youtu.be]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Along with "With or without you..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Or maybe they can fake it again (note sardonic tone...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
JoshK.
Stop Elmo! (Score:2, Funny)
Elmo must be stopped! Nationalize Elmo! It’s anti-fascist to nationalize!
- Elmo monopolizes 90% of the entire world’s space cargo by weight, and capitalistically charges less!
- Elmo demands fixed priced contracts instead of cost plus! That’s inequity! He should milk the contracts and support more workers! Donate to NGOs!
- Elmo is lazy! Freight overhead will be 90% lower than standard tech (next gen Starship) - and is currently 50% lower (Falcon). This “efficiency” is an excuse
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Your anonymous inner soul is SO kind, eloquent, and beautiful! Feel validated!
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That is so clever, artful, and friendly! Thank you for the wisdom!
Friendly PSA (Score:1)
The parent is BRILLIANT!
Sure, we all know Soyuz tech costs more, but it’s conveniently single use!
And, most importantly, we must not fund deceptive free speech, blind-justice loving, capitalists!
A dangerous wave of fascism is upon us!
Elmo, Sweden’s Kristersson, Japan’s Takaichi, El Salvador’s Bukele, Poland’s Tusk, and Argentina’s Milei are fooling the uneducated!
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The kommi-con parent is green with envy of his betters,
We all know USA tek is expensive, but it's our golden nature,
We must fund deceptive free-speech or gag all the SJWs liars,
A dangerous wave of neo-Stalinist nonsense is upon us.
Cartman (Score:2)
Screw you guys, I'm going to the moon.
The Moon?...teh BFR hasn't made it into orbit yet (Score:2)
sure, ik it will soon.
just sayin' tho.
Elon Musk, One Way Ticket (Score:2)
Pardon my skepticism, but (Score:2)
The release speaks of Starship capabilities in the present tense.
They have yet to complete a single orbit.
They have yet to refuel in space.
They have yet to tour a habitable version of Starship.
The Crew Dragon spacewalk was a dog head out the window.
They have yet to land Starship upright tail first on land.
Also sounds like Hadden from Contact - Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
The parallel efforts sounds good, but what happens when resources get scarce?
Does he short his vehicles or NASA
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> They have yet to complete a single orbit.
> The point of science fiction is to understand humanity, not to have the speedy shiny things.
Exactly! Why aspire to “shiny things”? That’s mindless! It doesn’t solve anything!
Better to skip past the naïve incrementalism of The Little Red Hen - and go straight to Das Kapital.
After all, it was a waste of time to invent fire, agriculture, and indoor plumbing.
but will it be (Score:2)