I imagine the price of getting mass back down from orbit would bump your cost up a bit right?

Even if Starship delivers everything promised, I doubt orbit would be within reach of wage earners. Similarly we could afford to pay for a ship to drop a few tons of rock off Guam, but going to the bottom of the Mariana trench and returning alive would be a different kettle of fish.

To me it seems if we see orbital success in the next 5 yrs, mass production of starship thereafter and SpaceX sticking to their Earth-to-Earth transport idea - this seems plausible. Airliners developed about as quick, but then again its a far harder environment - it's nice to dream.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0

(edit rambling on about the wrong system)

Seems potentially a bunch quicker than current air transport (~12 hours)?

I could see potential US Army interest in this concept. I think they would want the Starship to land horizontal rather than vertical for rapid disembarking though. I.e.: A ramp drops from the nose cone or similar. That doesn't seem very feasible.

While that's a good point, there are some situations they can't really pre-stage in without that in itself causing serious problems. Taiwan springs to mind.

So if some magical way is developed to have Starship land and offload it's entire cargo in <super short time>, before it's shot out of the sky, I wonder if that would be useful. Perhaps even as part of an effective deterrent strategy?

Starship, "Ironclad edition". :)

We have pretty much instant communication already in the form of email.

I think astronauts usually go through very rigorous testing and training. And I'm not sure that is something we can engineer ourselves out of.

3g is low enough that most humans shouldn't black out, even without training.

I'll also point out that professional astronauts are expected to remain functional for the entire assent (including emergencies, where g forces might peek much higher), which is not required for passengers.

I remember reading that the Titan 2 pushed so hard that even the astronauts, who were pretty tough test pilots back then, were happy when the engine finally shut off.

For example, the space shuttle uses it's wings (and body) to generate quite a bit of lift and spread the reentry over a much longer period. the g-forces during re-entry. It's 10min at 1.7g.

Though that's from LEO. Apollo came in directly from the moon at a much higher velocity, resulting in ~7g; For the Apollo missions that never left earth orbit, reentry was more like 3.5g.

A space ship aiming to carry untrained passengers will pick designs and mission profiles that are within their passengers abilities to withstand for both launch and reentry. Apollo picked a design and mission profiles with 7g reentry acceleration because they knew their trained astronauts could withstand it.

As for abort.. it's only limited spikes of high-g you only need it to be survivable for the passengers, while the pilots need to be able to control it.

I couldn't find published numbers for reentry.

I know it hits 2.5g for a second during the final flip maneuver, I suspect they have engineered it to hit about the same during reentry.

> When it comes to the G-Forces being pushed on you, many roller coasters have peak G’s at or above these limits. Most people are probably familiar with the different rides at Walt Disney World so let’s use those for examples. At EPCOT, Mission Space is a centrifuge-based ride where you go through a simulated launch and landing on Mars. The sustained G’s on that ride is 2.5 G’s, close to how many G’s New Shepard will experience during launch.

> For the descent, Blue Origin says you must be able to withstand 5.5 G’s, if you ever rode Rock ‘n Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you would have experienced up to 5 G’s during the initial launch of the ride.

Epcot Mission Space (the "Orange" version) is pretty intense as it's really sustained G-forces, but manageable. During the ride, you have to reach in front of you to press some buttons, and that's when you feel the G-forces most. But for SpaceX/BlueOrigin, passengers do nothing.

Rock n Roller Coaster itself for the peak G is done by kids, not a big deal.

I loved it.

That night, hours later, as I lay on the floor of my friend’s bedroom (it was a sleepover), trying to fall asleep, I still remember feeling like the room was spinning. I never went back on that ride.

I didn't like it all that much. But what scared the hell out of me was when, on descent, the brakes malfunctioned. This caused the gondola to go screaming backwards past the platform where the next riders were lined up, fly through some butcher curtains and go crashing into a padded wall in a hidden cinder block cell at the end of the track.

We all sat there for a minute pretty stunned, and then some goofy employee came running out and jumped up on the front of the car. "Whoops! That wasn't supposed to happen!" He said. "But I have some great news for you! Who wants to go again??"

And of course, all the kids cheered.

Until it stops

People who apparently don't have motion sickness are funny, I know proactively not to go on things like that

A physically fit person can probably live normally at 2g all day with no problems other than feeling tired af until you get used to it and all farts being dangerous.

Don't get me wrong, Shatner has worked hard to keep himself in shape. And he didn't get to orbit. But if you keep in shape (and are rich or famous) it may be an option.

Forces depend a lot of the specific vehicle. The space shuttle peaks at 3 G, I've seen numbers from 3.6 to 4.5 (again peak) for Crew Dragon on the way up, 3-5 on the way back. Soyuz seems to be 4 on a good day and 10 on a bad one, plus the momentary forces during landing.

Since we put anyone willing to pay a few bucks on carnival rides that sustain (!) up to 3 G for minutes, and the profile can likely be adjusted at the expense of reduced payload capacity, I don't expect this to be a big problem.

Hopefully, SpaceX will set up some kind of excursion package where you get a Starbase tour, a primo front row seat to a launch and a limited edition T-shirt. Forget Taylor Swift tickets for >$1K when Starship can literally rock my world.

We might be less than 50 years out from Starship or similar launches being as boring as a plane taking off or a train passing by.

I'd even lay 50%-ish odds that they'll do back to back payload launches in 30 days or less by the end of next year. That'll of course depend on things going very well over the next few months so they manage to get a Starship to orbit and back on the ground at the launch site this year.

I don't think going to "fake space" for a minute is really going to be interesting by the end of the decade.

What is this referring to?

Not sure what you're referring to as "fake" here. LEO? Is the ISS fake space? If Starship fully succeeds it should make trips to and from the Moon and Mars.

Knowing speed won't be able to tell you whether you are suborbital (but it will tell you if you are on an escape orbit). However knowing your periapsis (elevation at lowest point in orbit) will tell you whether you are suborbital. It's only at the point where your periapsis is close to your apoapsis that speed is actually useful.

Any metric other than periapsis will require 2 components to describe that the orbit isn't suborbital. Periapsis only gets away with it by implying that the second component is at least as high up as it is (apoapsis is always higher). The other useful metric would be velocity (speed + direction) but while that's something you can easily and immediately measure, periapsis & apoapsis (aka height) are far easier to visualize.

That applies to the suborbital flights conducted by Blue Origin and Virgin today, but not Starship which is orbital class.

$180k for a massive house (by U.K. standards). Seems like a bargain

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2937-Queen-Rd-Clendenin-W...

That’s the cost of a typical deposit in the U.K, doesn’t look rundown or anything.

Also about the point of being unaffordable, your first listing basically doubled since the last sale a few years ago, so in relative terms things aren’t looking too good. The second one’s estimate seems to have gone down recently, which tbh in this environment makes me think there is something very wrong with the house or the area and I would research the crap out of it before even considering looking at it.

Hell is most of the US you could buy a trailer and some land, bit of solar and batteries, build out a cesspit and start building something piece by piece.

Of course you can’t be 20 minutes from Times Square if you do that. But 100 million people want to live in Manhattan, and they can’t all do

Why not take a vacation there? Looks like there's a regional airport in Thomasville only a 30-minute drive away, but it looks like it's too small to serve passenger planes. You might need to fly into Jacksonville FL, and drive ~2 hours from there.

Forget tourism, at that price beaming solar power back to earth approaches viability.

In a speech to USAF in 2019, Musk said SpaceX's out of pocket cost per launch could be "maybe like $2 million," which would be about $20,000 per ton.

Adjust numbers for inflation accordingly.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1571540353978859526

See also this tweet clarifying that fixed costs are expected to exceed marginal costs:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1328770804222468097

"looks like marginal cost of launch will be less than $1M for more than 100 tons to orbit, so it’s mostly about fixed costs divided by launches per year"

Not trying to nitpick you here. Just hoping to correct some of the confusion that results from playing Telephone with secondary and tertiary sources.