Hacker News Reader

Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

You can also land on the other side of the planet within... I want to say an hour?

I must admit, that's the usage scenario for Starship that I don't particularly see much benefit in. I may well be short-sighted, but given how far away from cities the launch centres for these things would need to be, it strikes me that traditional travel infrastructure suffices.

Now, the US military, on the other hand? Starship as a somewhat-disposable space truck makes a lot of sense. Then it comes down to how cheaply SpaceX can manufacture the things.

If I'm paying for a space tourism joyride, I would definitely be extra thrilled if we took off from California and landed in Fiji within the hour.

Presumably, since I'm stinking rich to begin with, I'd have a fancy resort booked there for the next week.

I agree it's not a replacement for commercial jet flights.

Well, this raises the cost of capsule reuse because of transport back to the launch point.

Why not also have a launch facility at fiji? You could even book a return trip.

I imagine the geopolitical efforts involved in coordinating to allow passenger ICBM launches at major cities in the industrialized west is on the same order of the effort involved in designing and building starship itself.

You make the mistake of assuming the uber-rich want to get to Fiji as soon as possible, when in reality they would rather spend the 8 hrs in their private Gulfstream in a cocaine fueled orgy while the pilot does barrel rolls and loops. Flying is one of the few times that the Uber rich can really disconnect and be alone and relax, why would they want to get to Fiji in an hour in a super stressful flight?

Yeah I don't think it makes much sense, at least not for a long time. Odds of a plane crashing are on the order of 1 in 10^7. On the other hand, it was a major accomplishment that the Falcon 9 was able to perform 100 successful missions in a row. Rockets have to be safer by many orders of magnitude before they move from the realm of thrill seeking to commercial travel.

I am more concerned about nuclear war as a result of mistaken identity since it's the same technology used to launch ICBMs.

Not sure why you were downvoted - for sure, we have alert systems these days so that test ICBMs and rocket launches aren't misinterpreted by foreign actors, and we would in any future where there were tens, hundreds, thousands of launches a day - but as-equally, it would be a lot easier to mask nefarious intentions in such traffic.

Irrespective of nukes, I shudder to imagine what the impact of an out of control de-orbiting Starship would do at ballistic reentry over a populace... .

Ballistic free path is 45 minutes. A single LEO is 90 minutes, no place on Earth is more than a half-orbit distant.

A ballistic point-to-point tragectory is an orbit which intersects the surface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com