So for ~ the cost of one SLS launch spacex could put more into space that all of history.

At this price points this low for mass to orbit it starts being reasonable to forgo technologies like super light materials, and reclaiming every molecule of water you bring up. You can build payloads for super cheap in a conventional terrestrial fashion and ignore the weight.

> So for ~ the cost of one SLS launch spacex could put more into space that all of history.

Could they? I think they still have to prove they are able to deliver that kind of cadence at that price point. They aim to get there and I hope they do, but spaceflight being as fiendishly hard as it is, I wouldn't take their marketing claims as fact just yet.

You're right, all this assumes the marketing material is an accurate description of the furure. Sprinkling in a dose of reality we must conclude that with maybe only two launches ever, SLS will turn out to cost much much more per launch.

You could use waste water as propellant

This is similar to the coversation of only having 128k memory forcing extremely tight programming vs multiple GBs of memory where you can do whatever you want and put recommendations on your users to have a minimum amount of memory.

Just because you can be lazy doesn't mean it's the best way.

Depends on your definition of "best". Programming for 128K takes massive skill. Having multiple gigabytes allows more people to participate, and to prioritize other attributes than "low memory", typically faster and cheaper. So you get say a better UX, with better error handling, for less money.

Which one is "best"? Well depends if you are skills & money rich, or skills and money poor. Clearly both are best, depending on what you are optimizing for.

Up to now launches have been highly optimized for weight. Optimizing for other priorities (like cost) will change the rules of the game.

">Programming for 128K takes massive skill."

It does not. What it does not tolerate is mediocre level which seems to be taking over the world lately.

To program simple things, maybe not. But if you are trying to do something complex then having a severe memory limit adds one more area of complexity to the process.

If you can remove areas of complexity then you are doing three things: 1. allowing mediocre people to accomplish the same goals as used to take skilled programmers, largely by throwing hardware at the problem (this seems to be the source of your complaint) 2. letting skilled programmers accomplish the same task in less time (again by throwing hardware at the problem) 3. making even more complicated things possible for skilled programmers

I certainly see the value in your complaint about things like the Slack app using Electron to make the UI easy to build (at the cost of my hardware performance), but that is a business optimizing for costs, rather than trying to optimize more for quality. Please assign the blame where it belongs.

Concur. I've done some programming for a platform that gave me way less than 128k to work with, and it's not rocket science. In some ways it's a hell of a lot easier than, say, web development.

It just forces you to be aware of certain things that are tremendously wasteful of memory and cycles, but which don't matter on "modern" hardware.

And by "don't matter" I mean "do matter a whole bunch, but your particular contribution to the problem is likely to be small enough that it won't help much if you spend the time to do it right, so why bother"

Under that assumption, modern software would have a better UX and be more reliable than the software written "back then". And from my experience it's the exact opposite - modern software, like Slack, is not only slower and less functional than old counterparts, like IRC; it's also much less reliable.

> it's also much less reliable.

The software, or the service? Because IRC is not typically associated with tremendous reliab...*

* User has quit due to excess flood

Both. "User has quit" doesn't seem to happen in Slack, because Slack doesn't report stuff like that. But the problem goes deeper - Slack often fails at very basic functionality, like failing deliver messages until much later or duplicating them. It's helloworldware with a lot of marketing money to pretend to be a technically sound solution.

Why isn't IRC much more popular?

Because it turns out to be a colossally chatty and stateful protocol in an era of stateless mobile devices. Plus it's not HTTP... the rule at the network layer these days is basically "80 and 443 are open; every other port is good-luck-to-you."

OP's assertions it was more reliable are assuming a very static network. Modern protocols (Slack included) are far, far more reliable on a highly-unreliable transport layer.

Not true. Or rather: in theory what you are saying would be true, however in case of Slack it simply doesn't work: Slack handles unreliable transport worse than IRC - IRC never dropped or duplicated messages; you could reconnect to IRC client under a tmux session from anywhere and it would do the right thing.

> you could reconnect to IRC client under a tmux session from anywhere

That would actually be a pretty decent solution if it could be automated on a mobile device: run the IRC client in the cloud and then have tmux auto-reestablish every time it gets its connection dropped while the mobile device moves around.

I'd have to see it in action to be confident that a continuously-dropping-and-reestablishing tmux won't drop incoming messages or double-send though.

People (like me) have been doing this for over two decades now. It's quite well tested :-)

Excellent! Do you have a link to a write-up on how to set it up?

No business model, I think - and thus no money for infrastructure, further r&d, and marketing.

For sure, but the best way to program say, a game, now definitely is not to go to the same lengths as people went to on the original Nintendo.

There is a happy medium between using Unity and hand tuning every line of assembly.

I don't think the software analogy works super well. In the case of software there's been a real performance loss over time as code became generally less optimized. In the case of space hardware or space stations, not having to use ultra-specialized materials means a potentially huge reduction in cost, which will enable plenty of new use cases. Space will become hugely more accessible as launch costs and space hardware costs both go down tremendously. Nobody is really losing here, except maybe the slow, bloated, old school space industry.

The lazy way broadened society's access to computing which has had all sorts of positive knock on effects.

Elon is banking on low launch costs creating lots of demand. Whether that pays off has to be seen: for conventional satellites the launch cost hasn't been the biggest factor by far, but we are now seeing more satellites that profit from low launch costs (mainly earth observation and internet services), and there are at least some projects in the pipeline for things that make sense to manufacture in space (like optical fiber). But demand takes time to materialize, and SpaceX has to somehow stay solvent until then.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the demand will be there.

At $2,800/kg, I'm curious enough to start looking at options for a _personal_ satellite. It's unlikely that would be viable, because the cost of the communications and stationkeeping hardware would be prohibitive. I'd be interested in sharing space on a "F/OSS" orbiter of some type, but I've not seen any projects that would make such an idea viable.

At $100/kg... I'd figure it out, if only to say that I'd done so. At that price I'd be trying to figure out a way to stream video from a microsatellite of orbit, de-orbit, and re-entry just to show the couple of "flat earthers" I know what's obvious to the rest of us. Let them pick the camera and lens so they can't fall back to "It's a fisheye lens!".

In all seriousness, though - at $100/kg, you'll see all kinds of entities trying things that have never been practical before just to see if they'd work.

NASA used a commodity CPU for their Martian drone, so just start there. See what an RPi4 or something could do. If it works for any amount of time at all, then it's a success. If it lasts the entire duration before re-entry, then it's a resounding success.

If launches are that cheap, just keep throwing junk up until you find out where the line for good enough is.

With launch costs 100x lower than historical norms, there is plenty of space cargo that becomes economically viable. I don’t think SpaceX will have any trouble filling those launches. I am surprised there isn’t already a venture fund dedicated to funding space startups so that they can exploit Starship economics.

While I don't know of any dedicated space funds off-hand, there are hundreds of venture funds that dabble in space endeavors: https://signal.nfx.com/

SpaceX ought to start their own venture fund to fill their vehicles with things.

How much of that space cargo is payload ready for a vehicle that hasn't been finalized in design yet? How long does it take to fit that cargo into that ship once it is finalized? Able to meet the 3x/week launch schedule?

It's obviously just a stat to make it sound impressive, but it is just totally impractical. I could easily say that with a launch every day, that capacity could be met in just 6 months! Fuck, with a measly 2 launches a day, we could do it this quarter!! Stats are sometimes meaningless, and when they are coming from this particular individual, they have to be taken with rather large grains of salt.

They're averaging 1x a week with Falcon 9 which requires throwing away an upper stage and Merlin engine each time. So yeah you "could easily say" whatever you want, but this hot take that SpaceX is just talking bullshit like any rando internet commentator is getting a bit old.

Averaging 1x a week is not the same thing as 1 a week.

The bullshit quotes coming from Musk are what's getting old. People calling him out on that bullshit is not the stale part. His rhetoric is getting quite boring.

It is ridiculous, and I think people latch onto the per kg cost as we can all visualize what a kilogram is. But you can't just say "mass is cheaper now" and then put 100 customers on one launch. If any one of them fails, it affects everyone, just as it does now. It takes 2 years minimum to develop anything new for space now, and in joint missions everyone delays everyone else constantly. It takes at least a year to get a license to communicate to a spacecraft. SpaceX has hundreds of requirements for its customers and has a 2 year schedule from discussing those requirements to launch, just like every other provider. Longer of course, for multiple customers on one launch.

Making something lightweight but stiff is one of the easier problems to overcome. And yes, you can use a raspberry pi in space, but even SpaceX won't let you connect a raspberry pi to an antenna actuator (for the radio you don't have a license to operate) and a simple battery, in a mission with a hundred other customers and let you say "well the launch cost is cheap so I don't care if it fails".

Sure, things can be made better through standardized carriers, AWS ground stations, etc, but Starship will not be a gamechanger overnight, at least not for any small player.

I have a feeling eventually we are going to drastically reduce that cost - either through just making something similar to Starship cheaper or with some new weird hybrid launch system. For non human capable launches (no worries about high g-forces for example) some type of system that just never stopped moving but went to space and back and orbited the earth continuously could be interesting. Imagine like a space plane thing that temporarily "lands" on a runway like thing that is also a giant magnetic accelerator but never actually slows down all that much. Of course we would need to find a way to reliably LOAD the damn thing while it is going that fast but I can't see that being impossible. Most of the systems we are designing now are general do it all systems - they have to be suitable for both people and other payloads.

SpaceX will certainly have a ship called the ESS Jimmy Carter --> Which, just like the submarine, will have the ability to capture a satellite pull it into bay and fiddle with it...)

But it will be launched as a service to "recover space garbage" but really it will be a satellite capture program..

The guy has hundreds of billions of dollars in assets so he could pay the bill himself. There are some easy things to fill launch capacity at that scale: fuel (especially methane), water, scaffolding, and inflatable modules for pressurized work (habitat, service, storage, hangars, etc). The play is to be the biggest landlord in space.

Wow! Cheap! Each Space Shuttle launch was at least $500mm. And we still don't have anything that can go to orbit with the same versatility -- without the Space Shuttle Hubble would have been disabled ages ago. So much for the rocket people...

How much CO2 does each launch emit into the atmosphere?

A lot, but it doesn't come near a primary pollution source (and would have to get far past Musk's wildest dreams for frequency before it got near becoming one).

I mean, he made $120 billion in 2021, so sure why not.

Isn't the Earth going to run out of mass and shrink away to nothing at this rate?

I can't tell if this is sacarstic or not but I decided to do the math.

Mass of earth: 5.972 × 10^24 kg

Launch capacity per year: 15,500 tons

Years to get rid of earth: 385,290,322,580,645,161 years.

I think if we every have to worry about this it becomes more a question of where are we going? And do we have enough carbon to cycle for fuel to do this.

I didn't account for the decreased gravity over time as you chip away at the planet. Woops!

Over that time span you should probably account for the 48.5 tons of material that falls to Earth annually as well.

Gravitational binding energy of Earth is about 10^32 joules, so you'd need to pump that much in to dismantle Earth. The entire solar output reaching Earth is about 10^17 Watts, so it would take 10^8 years to dismantle Earth without leaving it if you could capture every Joules as it entered the atmosphere

On the other hand if you could capture the Sun's entire output - not just that arriving at Earth - you'd have enough energy to do it in a week or two.

Wouldn't the reduced mass of the Earth's sphere of influence be reduced over time, thereby reducing the energy required to launch subsequent payloads?

Yes, there's all sorts of odd things that would happen with rotational energy too, hence you don't need as much as if you calculated it based on lifting 1kg at a time from the earth's surface. You'd need about 10^32 joules. If you didn't account for that you'd need about twice as much energy, which is about 10^32 joules.

In theory you could simply vaporize the earth with antimatter, converting it to energy, rather than trying to disasemble it. That would produce far more energy than the gravitational binding energy, so unless you happen to have a planet sized lump of antimatter around you'd have to generate it with more than 10^32 joules.

Yes

Also worth noting that the Earth receives about 43 tons of new mass every day, mostly from meteorites. Coincidentally, this works out to 15,695 tons of new mass every year.

Are we going to run out of some chemical elements?

You might be interested in https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

> Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?

That’s like saying having hundreds of airplanes in the sky at all times is an an insane amount in 1930.

Well, if price of BTC 2x’s he can pay that tab pretty easily. No reason for him not to.

And that much starship launch volume is invaluably more than the rovers or whatever they’d be bringing up. Quick & dirty reliability test for the world to see, launch turnover times, etc