An unprecedented space event, and it's happening soon:
Elon Musk lost his claim as having the most powerful space-worthy rocket when NASA blasted its own mega rocket to the moon in November.
But the SpaceX founder could win back the title with his company's next big project. Starship, SpaceX's skyscraping rocket and spacecraft, will launch on its first mission soon. During the test flight, the colossal booster will separate about three minutes after liftoff and land in the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal filings. The ship will fly in space around Earth at an altitude of over 150 miles, then splash down off the Hawaiian coast.
This will be a crucial demonstration of hardware that NASA is depending on to get humans back on the moon in the next few years. And, if successful, it'll mean Musk is one small step closer to realizing his personal dream of building a city on Mars.
UPDATE: Apr. 9, 2023, 12:54 p.m. EDT SpaceX stacked Starship at the launch pad and plans to have a rehearsal this week, "followed by Starship's first integrated flight test." Musk tweeted April 9 that the company is ready to launch the rocket, pending approval of its Federal Aviation Administration license. A launch attempt this month is looking more and more plausible, with an FAA operational advisory plan indicating SpaceX is targeting Monday, April 17.
[...] Perhaps surprisingly, Starship won't lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where most space fans are accustomed to watching historically significant launches.
Instead, it will take off from Boca Chica, Texas, at SpaceX's own spaceport. Eventually, the company will launch the rocket from a site under construction in the outer perimeter of the famous Florida pad that shot Apollo 11 to the moon.
"Their plan is that they're going to do a few test flights there," in South Texas, Nelson said. "Once they have the confidence, they will bring the missions to the Cape."
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2023, @03:28AM (1 child)
Basically this is government pork and I think it can done better with private capital alone, rather than propping up failed socialist ideology with overpriced fire crackers.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 14 2023, @07:43PM
You must be thinking of the SLS boondoggle.
SpaceX development is in fact (almost) entirely privately funded. The government is one of the many customers for their launch services, but the R&D is almost all privately funded from their own profits. And Starship is designed to be a vastly cheaper and more capable replacement to the Falcon 9.
As for colonizing Mars - that's all SpaceX. No government has any interest in the proposition. NASA wants to eventually send a manned scientific mission there, but that's an unfunded long-term plan for after they have an industrialized moon base up and running. They're not funding anything Mars-related except probes.
There are a few things related to the Lunar Starship variant that NASA is contributing to R&D for, but keep in mind that the only reason SpaceX won those contracts was because they were the only ones who offered a viable lunar lander at a price NASA could afford. Boeing, etc. were asking for vastly more money for a vastly less capable lander.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Nuke on Friday April 14 2023, @09:59AM (8 children)
FTFA
This is while the average person is starting to find even food and accomodation on Earth is becomming less affordable. Musk himself has claimed* a cost of $2 million per launch including fuel, and regards that as a good figure; but we must factor in that he is a salesman with a history of telling lies, and is talking about a brief LEO trip. But even if we accept Musk's low cost and his ludicrous fantasy of 100 passengers at a time, that is a $20,000 ticket. His idea of what an average person can afford is way off-target.
The reality is that Musk enjoys spending his billions on vanity projects.
* https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-passenger-cost-elon-musk.html [space.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 14 2023, @02:58PM (2 children)
https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/saving-and-budgeting/articles/what-is-the-average-american-net-worth-by-age [usnews.com]
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-american-net-worth [businessinsider.com]
The average net worth of an American homeowner is over $1 million. The median net worth of an American family is much lower though, about $121,760.
Want to lower housing prices a bit? Have thousands of retirees sell their homes to pay for a ticket and hut on Mars, where they will DIE in DISCOMFORT. Except maybe the lower gravity will feel a little better.
$2 million per launch and $20k are some of the most optimistic estimates. If you don't buy into the Mars plan, other areas would still see benefits from launch costs going down by an order of magnitude or more. Think a space station that is 10x larger for the same cost. The ability of Starship to refill in orbit would allow it to increase delta-V, meaning shorter trips for larger space probes sent anywhere in the solar system. For reference, Europa Clipper will take 5.5 years to reach Jupiter on a Falcon Heavy for $178 million.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday April 15 2023, @09:08AM (1 child)
In my link, Musk is talking about one launch, not a trip to Mars, one-way or not. He is therefore talking about a short ride, possibly with an Earth orbit, like the space "tours" taken just for the thrill such as William Shatner's (for which he did not pay). A trip to Mars would require one of Musk's starships to pause in Earth orbit and be refuelled there from several other tanker starships before continuing to Mars. The tankers themselves will have required a launch from Earth, with the cost, fuel and everything else involved.
Ignore Musk's near-future Mars colonisation bullshit, peopled by a million B-Ark telephone hygienists, soap salesmen, and runaways who can afford $20,000. Musk is too intelligent to believe it himself, but it is typical of the stuff he announces for the satisfaction of seeing his devoted followers believing it. The first human expeditions to Mars will be manned by a handful of professionals such as engineers, scientists, and doctors, and I doubt that will be within decades.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 15 2023, @03:07PM
Yeah, I saw the mistake afterwards. Although if that ticket cost ends up being $500,000 (including supplies and Mars home), that's still within the reach of retired people who liquidate their assets.
Fortunately, I mostly care about the cost to launch to LEO, and the multiplier for refilling to send a probe on a fast trip to orbit Eris or something.
If the capability is good and cheap enough, someone may pay their way to Mars. We have one billionaire, Jared Isaacman, paying for expensive Falcon 9 + Dragon missions that are comparatively uninteresting.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2023, @05:40PM
What makes you think he's spending his billions?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Immerman on Friday April 14 2023, @07:23PM (3 children)
And?
A few things to consider:
- It's very likely to be a one-way flight, so it's not like there's any reason not to liquidate all your assets to go. Even a "quick" there-and-back scientific mission would involve spending something like 3 to 9 months each way in microgravity and extreme radiation, with the remainder of the 26-month minimum round trip time in Mars low gravity. It's very likely anyone exposed to that is going to take years to recover enough to be comfortable on Earth again, and may never recover completely. Plus the cancer is likely to take decades off your life.
- Anyone with skills that would be valuable enough that they'd actually want you on Mars, probably already has an income pushing six figures, so $20k will be easily achievable. Heck, even with a median ~$45k income that shouldn't be too difficult to save up - just live in similarly austere conditions here on Earth for a year. A huge portion of our population manages to survive just fine on less than $20k per year. And if you can't handle that, then consider yourself having dodged the bullet of spending the rest of your life living like that on Mars.
- If there's demand for relatively low-skill labor, then there will almost certainly be an option to pay your passage the same way so many early American colonists did - indentured servitude. If I remember right 5-10 years of servitude was the going rate for passage to The New World. It's not like any terrestrial nation has jurisdiction on Mars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2023, @11:35PM (2 children)
Shhh. You're getting very close to saying the unsayable there. Any Mars colony is going to be a de-facto eugenics program. They won't be taking morons or weaklings.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday April 15 2023, @07:31PM (1 child)
Sure, but lots of things humans do at a society scale are de-facto eugenics program.
Agriculture. Income assistance. Medicine. Capitalism. Anything that affects who prospers and who starves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2023, @09:11PM
Not to the same extent, and those all occur within a society. There is going to be no crossbreeding between the superior types who go to Mars to start a glorious new defect-free species and the welfare degenerates left behind. Even if they initially take sperm and ova to increase genetic diversity, you can bet those will also be carefully selected.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 14 2023, @06:54PM
"Perhaps surprisingly, Starship won't lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida"
Ah, yes. I was totally expecting Starship's maiden orbital flight to occur from the place where there is neither Starship, nor a completed Starship-capable launch facility, rather than the Boca Chica facility where they've been doing all the work for years.
Who writes this garbage?