I gave up on this Elon-deranged nonsense after the paragraph in which he demonstrated his profound ignorance of orbital mechanics and the rocket equation, because I’m at an AIAA conference all week and don’t have time to properly fisk it, but have at it in comments.
This needs to be saved for posterity and future mockery.
And I love how he cites his own previous work as authority. What is that word? Dogma. Not to mention the ticks that give away the fact he used AI to write it. He could at least do us the favor of cleaning that crap out.
Oh! Refueling in a vacuum is just as dangerous as on Earth, maybe, according to Thunderf00t or whoever this guy is.
Should someone bother to explain to him what LEL is and how and why LEL (and UEL) works? Naah, he can google it.
Good point. Esp. if you consider “propellant” transfer as sequential single ops. One for methane, one for oxygen and never simultaneously. The risk in vacuum is more pressure change issues. Actually the biggest issue could just be plain ordinary leaks during transfer and how that may or may not effect vehicle stability.
I love how the peanut gallery believes they know and understand all these issues unlike those actually getting paid to work on them…
Unless you have a concentrated stream immediately proximate of fuel and oxidizer, you will never meet the lower explosive limit in a vacuum. Some good up-front design and layout of oxidizer and propellant tankage and plumbing could preclude the overwhelming majority of potential explosive failure modes.
Propellant and oxidizer leaks in vacuum should want to spread out and approach zero concentration, I say don’t do anything to trap it, if it leaks, make sure it has a path to fly free. You aren’t burdened by being surrounded by oxidizer and the dampening effects of an atmosphere like you are at sea level.
Leaks definitely spew. And everything in orbit that does acts like a rocket. Combustion or not.
Garbage like this makes it harder to have real discussion about real concerns. Even further off the reservation (in the opposite direction) than the Starship will do it all worship.
Using the term “worship” puts you in the same category. You might as well just say “fanboi” and het it over with.
I wouldn’t call you a fanboy. More of a kibitzer.
“Only paid subscribers can comment on this post”
LOL… good choice Will……
The Doctor is IN… 5 cents please…
No groupthink going on there, nosireebob!
He’s “A Climate & Politics Journalist who is pissed off that the world is burning, corrupt and broken, yet no one in power seems to care.” from the bio on Substack.
So you know where he’s coming from and just how well sourced his stuff is.
Reduce the cost by 200%?
Who is this guy, Jim Cramer’s neighbor?
No soup for you! 🙂
You all ridicule him, but he is not wrong. After the IPO, people like him will be listened to by those in power. They took 50 billion dollars from Elon in a dispute at Tesla. Do you think this will be any different? You are outnumbered and out-gunned by these pencil-pushers. They know little about rocket engineering, but they can compare promises and results, and they know when the two don’t match. And they will now control much of the money. Laugh at his incompetence in your field of expertise, but your industry finally repeated Apollo 8 after 57 years. He will demand results.
“your industry”?
I didn’t know any of the commenters here were Members of Congress.
Reduce the cost by 200%?
Thanks for playing, go home now
After the IPO, people like him will be listened to by those in power.
This is my biggest dread. Often wonder if taking SpaceX public now is premature. The other dread I’ve always had is SpaceX agreeing to contract under NASA for Artemis/HLS. One could argue that has already de-railed Mars to a large degree. But personally, I think that moon first was probably inevitable as a proving ground to Mars. But why tie yourself to NASA’s goals and limitations at the outset?
Guys like Lockett are quick to point out that SpaceX can’t generate enough revenue on its own, given the costs of Starship/SH without either bamboozling either the government or the public or both. That’s the cynical take.
Another take is the Seymour Cray one. Where the attempt to achieve a break-out technology comes at such a large operational cost that the existing corporate structure cannot support it. Until the bridge / breakthrough is reached. There is some interesting parallels in my mind to the EDA -> CDC -> Cray Research -> Cray Computer evolution and what is happening with SpaceX. At least having been through the observation of that evolution harkens to mind a little of what is happening at SpaceX.
Doing an IPO to raise money is fraught with peril. People pay their money and expect to have a say from the back seat.
“Another take is the Seymour Cray one. Where the attempt to achieve a break-out technology comes at such a large operational cost that the existing corporate structure cannot support it. Until the bridge / breakthrough is reached.”
Yeah. That clearly seems to be where Elon’s mind arrived in the last several months.
“Let’s start with this revelation. Reuters reported that, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings, the company has spent more than $15 billion on Starship so far. That validates my previous estimate that Starship “costs are close to $10 billion, if not significantly more”. ”
“Now, in our current crazy times, that might not sound especially expensive, but it is. For some context, Falcon 9 cost just $400 million to develop, and the initial budget for Starship was $5 billion. So, Musk has already blown the budget more than two times over.”
So, Musk only spend 400 million for two launch sites, and ships to catch them, to develop Falcon 9 {and Falcon Heavy}
It seems to me, normally it costs about 400 million to build a rocket launch pad.
It seems it should cost quite a bit of money to build the biggest rocket launch ever build and a launch tower that can catch a rocket.
And then we got to talk about the infrastructure in quickly build the rocket ever make, at a speed only similar to Saturn V rocket.
It should be noted that that figure only covered the initial Falcon 1.0 development work. It’s estimated that the total cost to get Falcon 9 to reusability — that is, up to Block 5 — was more like $1 billion. Falcon Heavy cost another $500 million or so.
Which, of course, is still impressive. It would have cost NASA several times that amount to achieve that (as a NASA study conceded), if they had even had the willpower and political support to attempt it.
But as you rightly say, Starship is a *vastly* more ambitious architecture. It is a super heavy lift rocket more powerful than anything ever built, designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, built and operated at scale, employing orbital refueling for deep space operations, with variants up to and including crewed upper stages that can land on planetary bodies. It now entails two gigantic factories and five massive launch pads at three locations in two states, to say nothing of all the involved ground systems and propellant/oxidizer manufacture. This is really a Manhattan Project level undertaking.
That’s a massive ask, and the idea that you could do it all for anything remotely like Falcon 9/Dragon costs is just ludicrous.
I demand an apology for sending me to that site. 🙂
“A Climate & Politics Journalist”
Pffft! Some of us actually work in the environmental field and think Starship is going to be a big farking deal 😉
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5226/1
Take-away: NOx generation will place a hard-limit on re-entry mass, Lunar ISRU and atmospheric harvesting can greatly help mitigate, need to bootstrap a cis-lunar economy sooner rather than later.
I was actually researching the effects of the exhaust and my research led me there.
I ran into Lovett’s work before. He had a similar whine after Test Flight 9 last year. He was claiming it would take 33 propellant launches to get a Starship to the Moon.
I’d like to see the source he used to derive that number.
Whatever he used, its bound to be obsolete anyway in the context of Starship V3, which has almost no commonality of parts with V2. The new V3 Raptors alone are said to be saving up to 38 tons of dry mass.
If it takes 33 propellant launches to get a Starship to the Moon.Elon will do 33 propellant launches to get a Starship to the Moon.
It won’t. The 33 launch number is just a lazy construct of a strawman. The drones will lap it up uncritically and he knows it.
It used to be that the test of a prophet was whether or not the things they predicted came true. Now it whether can keep blathering on and hope everyone forgets your previous failures. They said (including this guy, I’m sure) the same things about Elon back when he was designing Falcon 9 and look who is leading the world in all time total launches. They the same thing about NASA back in the ’50s and ’60s. Who you going to believe and believe in, these guys or the people who are actually doing it.
Eh, apparently that’s obsolete.
Look at what happened to Paul Ehrlich after all.
Or Malthus.
Oh. It’s Will Lockett.
I think he just cuts and pastes these Elon hit pieces now.
I’m no engineer but I will be staying at a Holiday Inn Express next week. What I do know is the Elon has launched 100′ s more rockets than any of you.
We are closely approaching Mr. Musk launching more than everyone else collectively, ever…
Same argument philosophy as before. Point out the lack of achieving the next stated goal, while ignoring the achievements of the past, continuing to move the goalposts.
It’s called pulling an Oler.
My first thought when I saw this thread.
The last decade has not been a good one for the “Musk is a mirage” crowd. The next one is going to be so much worse.
AOC hardest hit….
Oh, yeah, big time. There was point within the past few months when Elon’s net worth increased by a half-trillion dollars in a matter of hours. I would be fascinated to see AOC attempt to point to the legions of poor people Elon must certainly have stolen stuff from on a pillage and rapine run that must have rivaled Santa on Xmas Eve, but in reverse.
There are things, Dear Ocasio, undreamt of in your philosophy.
$15 billion?
Just a thought experiment; how much do you think SpaceX could make if they folded Starship now and just sold Raptor 3 engines?
What if SpaceX scaled the Falcon to use a Raptor?
I love these people trashing Musk’s companies. They do this to TSLA regularly. I bought back in at 380 on March 26th. Close today is over 417, just shy of 10% in under 2 months. At this rate, I’m going to be passing Crenshaw and closing in on Pelosi numbers.
Picked up planet labs at about 3.60
I saw the most amazing thing in a parking lot:
A Tesla which had a “No Musk” sticker ( the word Musk with a circle and slash) over the “T” emblem.
The Musk hatred on Arse Holica is so intense I’m beginning to think negatively of anyone willing to take their paycheck. Doing so makes one look like a comsymp.
Berger and Clark certainly stand out from most of the rest the AT regulars – especially the poisonous Gitlin. I figure they’re good enough at their jobs and have sufficient personal followings that they can resist the pervasive groupthink miasma that characterizes most of the rest of AT’s output.
Neither Berger nor Clark is a Republican, but the two of them nevertheless remind me a bit of a line I read in a story decades ago in which a character was asked what it felt like to be the only Republican at a Democrat meeting. “Like the only kernel of corn in a barrel of rat shit,” was the reply.
Berger often seems like he’s just editorializing about something sourced to “a former NASA official.” And doesn’t Clark’s story about the Russian satellites sourced to “a retired general” seem like a national security violation on the general’s part? Well. Now someone from Arse will come here and threaten to sue me.
One of the things that make Berger the best in his business is his very large stable of “snitches” in both OldSpace and NewSpace. One of the requirements of maintaining such a stable is to use them with some regularity – even if current circumstances don’t make what they have to say terribly relevant. I make allowances for Berger’s having to maintain source morale by putting their contributions into print once in awhile.
Nothing the mysterious general vouchsafed seems to constitute a national security violation. There was a lot of speculation, but not much that was directly declaratory.
Arse won’t sue you – that would cost money. They didn’t sue me when I called Beth Mole a liar some year’s ago. All they’ll do is ban you for life from commenting.
I’d like to see the snitches dealt with. I think grand juries are unconstitutional, but in this instance, and so long as they are there…
Obviously, actual spies and agents of foreign nations need to be dealt with when they get their fingers on stuff they aren’t supposed to have. But Confidential Informants (CIs), as the police refer to them, are often useful. Journalistic sources fall within this ambit – the obvious exceptions being leakers with agendas, especially when what is leaked is fiction. Whistleblowers revealing misconduct are a positive good.