The military wants a C-130 payload anywhere in the world in 1 hour. Military up the wazoo in contracts. Militarization of space is inevitable, they'll want bases up there. If the payload costs are true for starship, they'll put big ones up there.

Starship will represent a total paradigm change in space superiority on economics alone. I'm surprised China and Russia aren't loudly complaining about this. It would enable an actual space fortress to some degree. 10 billion dollars for a 1000 tons of hardware in space? Um, that's less than an aircraft carrier.

An aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons...

As stated, space tourism will be HUGE. If 5g/ticket is true, I mean, who on hackernews wouldn't go on that trip? Even if 1% of people in the world take only one flight that in our lifetime that's 80 million people.

How many people want to do the Red Bull parachute from space? I would guess: A LOT.

Just wait for the private Starships. Hey they should be cheaper than megayachts. Show up at starport, anywhere on earth in an hour.

My biggest dream: starship payloads to get a moon-launched 1.5 million ton Project Orion pulse nuclear ship. That is serious equipment payload to do real asteroid mining. One heavy metal/rare earth metal asteroid will pay for that round trip.

But really, I'd argue we just need to enable:

https://space.nss.org/technologies-for-asteroid-capture-into...

Why fly it out of the gravity well? Need material? It's out there. A bit hard to catch, but it's out there.

Um, China is pretty vocally going after Starlink which is part of what makes this financially feasible, so it's not like they are doing nothing. And not to be all conspiracy theory but their complaint sure is being amplified on the interwebs. I think their bigger issue though is it's going to be a whole lot harder to hide things in they want to do in orbit with so many satellites up there all of a sudden.

"Just wait for the private Starships. Hey they should be cheaper than megayachts."

Any space rocket can turn the whitehouse, the Kremlin or 10 Downing street into a crater withing 30 minutes, with minimal chances of air defence to stoping it. If we start handing out starships to random shady conpanies registered in tax heavens, 9/11 will look like a peacefull day in comparison

You're not wrong, but a private 747 could probably pose a similar threat to your stated targets, but who knows if they actually put in a worthwhile air defense after 9/11.

Submarines also. Today

Sub marines can't turn the Downing Street let alone Washington DC into rubbel. Rockets launched from submarines can. No one but nation states have this capability today.

You mean ballistic missile submarines? Do we sell them to random rich people?

Umm, what is the CO2 cost ? Oh I forgot, the world is burning up, but it's buisness as usual... I do appreciate the discussion, though , it's justsad to see a lack of concern for real existential worries...

You're talking to a diehard Anthropogenic GW proponent, at least 20 years.

Space will be rounding error on suburbia in emissions. At this point it's necessary because population and resource consumption growth has exceeded Earth's footprint by quite a lot. We need people and resources moved to space in the long run.

The military sucks as a funding source morally, but it is as big as you can get as a practical/politically achievable one. Where else can you get a trillion dollars? We need asteroid mining, space habs, launch loops to get humanity to space.

GW has to be addressed through urbanization (centralize people in cities), electrification of transport, artificial meat, synthfuels for long haul transit, alt energy for power gen. I'm not saying we'll make it with those, but at least all of that is somewhat underway.

Consumer culture seems to be defraying birth rates. So while consumer monoculture is bad in many ways, if it perversely constricts population growth then it's good. Kind of like if the oligarchs effectively starve everyone of money needed to have big families... it is perversely good for the environment.

But you're talking to someone who's political alignment is "despotic environmentalist".

> they'll want bases up there

They'll be highly expensive and highly vulnerable targets. You can't armor a space station.

That's why you capture an asteroid... link at the end of the post. A million tons of rock is GREAT armor.

Traditional naval theory is that you can build a battery onshore 10x bigger than the one on a battleship. Things change when you are in space though. Missiles have to escape the gravity well. Lasers have to get through the atmosphere. Sure it's expensive to get up there, but if you have space superiority, you do have certain advantages.

Not with that attitude...

if I had 5k to burn I'd get a nice ebike, the view is fine from down here, thank you

You can’t really get better than starship with the current chemical rocket technology. The reason is simple: the Tiranny of the Rocket equation. Starship exists just because of Raptor (2). An incredible engine, the first full flow engine to ever fly and that should be capable of about 230t of force.