> Have you seen the GPT-4o videos? I don't know how anyone can watch those and believe that vision e2e self-driving vehicles are somehow a long way off.

Because chatting and driving a car are two entirely different problems?

>So maybe he set it back two months. Maybe.

So you didn't follow it at all? Because multiple government agencies were considering blocking them full-stop for an extended period of time after that disaster. So "maybe 2 months" was their absolute best-case scenario.

https://www.tpr.org/environment/2023-04-27/photos-spacex-is-...

>He also came up with building it out of stainless steel

And you know he was the one who personally came up with that idea... how? You work at Space-X? Or you've just read a couple press releases where he took credit for it?

Elon has a long history of taking credit for other people's ideas. And I'm willing to bet whatever you'd like to risk that one of the engineers at Space-X suggested using stainless steel, not Elon.

I'm pretty sure if I knew I could never lose a dime of my billions of fortune I'd be working on teleporters, warp drives, and time machines. People would call me a genius because I could pay for the press. Musk isn't a visionary, he's just a rich nerd throwing money at really cool things other visionaries imagined before he was born (all of his companies were ideas other people already had been working on; 100%), and then failing upwards when it doesn't work out.

>The Musk companies usually have a layer that protects their bottom line from their boy king.

Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.

(If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.

Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)

> SpaceX was claiming it would take five Starship launches to store enough fuel in the depot to perform one lunar mission (which is innately strange considering Apollo did it in one launch on a less powerful rocket, but that's not even the point here)

Apollo was disposable. Starship is not. Apollo could thus max out payload at launch, which Starship cannot do design or fuel budget wise.

The Apollo paradigm was for literal moon shots. Starship and Artemis are more about building infrastructure.

> according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission

That is not NASA's position. Folks at NASA and SpaceX disagree around the boil-off rates. Everyone thought about it. We just don't know what it is. We should have a preliminary figure next year, and a final-ish one within two or three years (after the first vehicle's boil-off characteristics are optimized).

But yes. There are major engineering challenges in-orbit propellant transfer could raise that could require going back to the drawing board. Hence why I flagged it. Given that's something humanity has never really done, it seems like a fair risk to take given the upsides.

(Note, too, that in present designs Starship must function as a launch vehicle, spacecraft and fuel tank. That's not required long term. Well-insulated orbiting fuel depots start making sense rather quickly if you have <$1000/kg launch costs.)

Please provide a reference showing that NASA thinks that Starship will lose 3/4 of the fuel, and there is no way to fix it.

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjWCEFioT_Y

Conclusions:

* Standard Starship is probably good enough for HLS

* Simple coatings and/or a specific orientation makes things a lot better

> But according to NASA, SpaceX has failed to adequately account for cryogenic boil-off in their plans, meaning that they expect it will take about twenty Starship launches per lunar mission.

According to one person at NASA. There's disagreement on the point.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/what-nasa-wants-to-see...

"[Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA's Human Landing System program] suggested the range in the number of Starship tanker flights for a single Artemis mission could be in the "high single digits to the low double digits." Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has suggested the company is looking at expanding Starship's capacity with larger propellant tanks. This could help reduce the number of tanker flights."

There's a lot of unknowns. Falcon 9 versions saw significant performance boosts over the generations; we may see the same with Starship.

If that's the case, what is the issue with the Engineering and Manufacturing teams of Boeing, Blue Origin, Arianne, etc, etc? The role of a leader is to end deadlocks. All these companies have plenty of talented people, and they often have huge egos, personal agendas, various constraints, some lack resources, some squander them, etc. A leader understands where the problems are and decides. The "buck stops with him". He doesn't do the work himself, but being able to say "you are right, and you are not" is hugely consequential. By comparison, Jeff Bezos seems totally incompetent to lead a space company. Why? Not because he cannot be a good leader, he obviously can. But because he did not put enough personal energy to understand in details what the problems (technical and otherwise) at Blue Origin are, so he can eliminate the deadlocks that make that company unproductive.

Without Musk there would not be the breathtaking booster catching happening today, according to his biography:

"Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth.

It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it."

A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?" After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?"

https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/phot...

So your whole point is that SpaceX are late on achieving the future.

Yes. Everybody knows.

With SpaceX we’re late getting there. With Everyone else the timeline is never.

I’ll take late over never 10 times out of 10.

Musk is frequently wrong with his timelines. That’s not a surprise to anyone. Even he has joked about his often unrealistic optimism with timeframes on multiple occasions.

But I mean, most of us here are probably the same. Most CEOs I’ve worked with are quite poor at time estimates too. Come to think of it, I’ve never met a single human who is good at it.

The problem is often unknown unknowns that you had no way to predict. I once had a project delayed by months due to a rare bug in the .NET CLR that just took a really long time to track down. I don’t know much about rocket science, but operating at the edge of known science and technology presumably has some difficult periods...

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

If Elon Musk plans to land on mars in 2026 and he actually does it in 2046, you know what the history books will say:

Elon Musk launched the first mission to Mars in 2046.

Nobody cares about delays.

That is still a lot of word for no substance beside vaguely quoting two articles you probably found with a 1min google search

If you are an engineer or even have half a brain nothing prevents you from doing a more in depth analysis, make a blog and post it here.

Right now not only are you a naysayer but you are even putting on hacker news commenter the burden of defending your point.

If we listened to naysayers like you we wouldn't have ever moved out of caves

So Starship+Superheavy have about 4.6kt of propellant which should mean about 1kt of methane. That's about 2.5kt CO2 per flight which yields 2.5mt CO2 annually for 1000 launches. The US releases around 4.4Gt CO2 annually so you end up with around 0.05% of US emissions. I actually thought it would be more so I hope I didn't miss an order of magnitude somewhere. Quick search says US airliners release less than about 200mt annually so you're looking at less than 2.5% of that. Annually about 850 million people fly in the US so if you imagine a Starship flight having 100 passengers then in some weird way flying with Starship is maNe about 200 times more CO2 intensive than flying with a plane.

Now high-altidude effects would increase the greenhouse effect of these emissions by some factor I don't know. At the same time a large amount of fuel is actually burned by the booster at below airliner altitudes. Another mitigating effect is that some of this methane could be produced renewably.

I haven't heard about Ozone depletion from spaceflight except for the case of reentering Aluminum burning up. Well this wouldn't be an issue with Starship flights.

So you know overall, let's just give it a lot of conservative margin and imagine we are looking at about 10% of the US airline or 0.2% of total US greenhouse impact. That is on the scale of a whole new industry, yes, but if you can imagine a world which has attained a sustainable rquilibirum surely you can also imagine one which has a bit of margin left? And this is only for the US!

What do you gain? Three of the points I mentioned have potential direct benefit for people.on earth: asteroid mining, L1 solar shield and brilliant pebbles.

Asteroid mining "for profit" also means that the economy profits, unless you believe that capitalism doesn't work. I read that less than 200t platinum are produced annually. Say your asteroid mining crashes that economy. I found some figure of 20kt of CO2 for each ton, so 4mt in total. That is more than your 1000 launches emit! Now my calculations are of course wrong but it seems plausible that the orders of magnitude could match. So you should definetly consider that your asteroid mining operations might stop other mining operations from happening which reduces your greenhouse impact.

Then you have the solar shield. It is certainly possible, although of course difficult and has some risk. But it's good to have a backup plan, no?

I replied with some guesstimations to the other comment, I would be curious to hear what you think.

I don’t think airliners use Methane?

You're interpreting it okay.