SpaceX Starship will be 500 feet tall to prepare for Mars missions, Elon Musk says (video)

[Admin]

Just weeks after Starship first reached orbital speed during a spaceflight in March, SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlined what the company wants to do with future spacecraft for Mars missions.

SpaceX Starship will be 500 feet tall to prepare for Mars missions, Elon Musk says (video) : Read more

 

[Laz]

excessive superlatives; starship as it stands is problematic with the physical forces during launch,: it destroys it's own launch pad, scattering debris far and wide, the noise is harmful and damaging, and what about the carbon emissions ? a few test launches (failures) to develop the program....at what cost ? Do we need this ? What do we need to go to Mars for ? colonization ? go colonize Antarctica instead- it's far closer and far more habitable in comparison.

 

[billslugg]

What you need to do is to become a "credentialed investor", go over the counter and buy some SpaceX stock, then float a stockholder proposal at the next annual meeting. Keep us appraised.

 

[orsobubu]

The goal of 2026 for the year of the return (or, according to some, the conquest) of the moon, already postponed many times, seems unrealistic to me; still having to demonstrate the permanence in orbit, the refilling, the recovery of the first stage, the functionality of the starship capture mechanism upon re-entry, plus countless other critical issues... while 2025 is indicated as the year in which a few solutions will be carried out for the first time. Nasa also declares that it intends to see many missions completed successfully before starting artemis 3 (which is still a bit strange, given the vaunted success of the first attempts of many key apollo technologies on the moon, moreover 55 years ago), and this adds a whole series of problems of validating mind-boggling new systems in such a hostile environment. Nasa itself has postponed its objectives countless times - albeit much more limited - in view of artemis 3, such as the suits, the insertion of orion and starliner into orbit, etc.

 

[orsobubu]

excessive superlatives; starship as it stands is problematic with the physical forces during launch,: it destroys it's own launch pad, scattering debris far and wide, the noise is harmful and damaging, and what about the carbon emissions ? a few test launches (failures) to develop the program....at what cost ? Do we need this ? What do we need to go to Mars for ? colonization ? go colonize Antarctica instead- it's far closer and far more habitable in comparison.

This martian base project is truly absurd, i believe it is technically and economically impossible, extremely dangerous and cause of enormous waste of resources; the basic philosophical and political economy idea is correct, in the sense that to prevent the collapse of the capitalist production system and the advent of social revolutions, a method to indefinitely increase the production of surplus value is absolutely necessary, given the limitation of terrestrial resources and markets, and this is why musk insists on the millions of workers on mars, the brain implants to make man competitive with machines, the robots equipped with artificial intelligence. But even if we want to accept this metaphysics of the end of history and therefore deny the social progress of the human species and its production system (which i absolutely do not accept), these methods seem completely utopian and indeed dystopian to me. There would be much more feasible alternative solutions such as the construction of moon or orbiting space bases or in any case close to the earth-moon system, using self-replicating nano-machines etc, or the attribution of full civil and property rights to humanoid automatons if they are to be used as a reservoir of capitalist surplus value. O'Neill's famous book is enlightening in this regard, and postpones the possibility of further interplanetary expansions of the human species until a community of space inhabitants has been well developed and will consider it within their physical and psychological reach. About antarctica, there is really something strange about the bans instituted for common people regarding the free exploration of those lands; much more critical and at risk ecosystems, such as rainforests, do not benefit from this treatment at all, and are actually destroyed forever at crazy rates. However, the flat earth conspiracists (a theory that i do not support in the slightest) have interesting theories in this regard, and in any case i don't think that a free market exploitation of the antarctic will ever be allowed, perhaps for reasons that cannot be revealed.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

If humans don't manage to kill ourselves off by the time Antarctica has melted enough to be colonized, I am sure it will happen. Greenland much sooner.

 

[HobartStinsonian]

There are huge problems to overcome before landing any long-term presence on Mars, or on the moon. Basic engineering: how much weight can the soil support? No idea? You can’t rely on any ship remaining level, not sinking down, until you get this figured out to high reliability. Second issue, what will the effect be of spilling fluids onto the soil to its compressive strength? Consider the soils have been dessicated for billions of years. Then a small spill of water or oil soaks in next to a structural support that sits on that soil. No idea? I bet the impact will be huge and devestating. Will Elon experiment with soils before they land a 500-ft Starship on that soil? The first equipment on moon & Mars needs to be heavy soil-excavating, and heavy mobile cranes. We’ll need to know how to make concrete-like foundations. And how deep do they need to be.

 

[Rob77]

excessive superlatives; starship as it stands is problematic with the physical forces during launch,: it destroys it's own launch pad, scattering debris far and wide, the noise is harmful and damaging, and what about the carbon emissions ? a few test launches (failures) to develop the program....at what cost ? Do we need this ? What do we need to go to Mars for ? colonization ? go colonize Antarctica instead- it's far closer and far more habitable in comparison.

While I agree with all the problems you have mentioned I firmly believe we still need to advance beyond our own planet. Obviously wont happen in our life time but we have a naturally driven curiosity - I'm constantly reminded about JFK speech - why go to the moon?
Saying that, there's another drive too, part of our human nature - a big ego to be the "first". I believe Elon or at least SpaceX wants to be the first to Mars.