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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

It’s helpful to remember it’s not a zero sum game. We can do all of that too. The tech for Mars would make it that much easier.

No one wants to live in those places because currently they have a choice. But if our planet becomes irradiated, or hit by a meteor, or suffers a sun burst — all very realistic concerns — then those choices become more limited. And it’s good to have options.

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The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses.

Now I'm for walking and chewing bubblegum. But if you believe in opportunity costs and care about navigating that, it feels like the same problem.

Our planet becoming irradiated is actually not a huge problem! It would still be easier to live on Earth than on Mars! An irradiated radioactive hellscape of Earth would still be more survivable than Mars.

(my more nuanced take is that we have so many basic hospitability problems that need solving, and Mars have all of those times 100, so it would be very good if most of those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems more than the logistics of shooting a bunch of stuff into space for long term transit)

"it would be very good if all those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems"

We have like a million PHds telling us what to do about climate change for 50 years, and nobody is listening

"The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built"

And it's 100x cheaper than the Iraq war or 2008 crisis, both entirely preventable manmade disasters. Or to put it into different perspwctive: ISS costs as much as cleanup of 3 oil spills, and we've had quite a few.

The ISS was built largely with hundreds of space shuttle and Soyuz launches over two decades hence why it's so expensive. Starship will be able to put an entire ISS worth of stuff into orbit in a single launch for 1/50th of the cost.

It's not a zero sum game. The space industry employs a lot of people.

Some of the stuff they put into orbit are satellites that literally save lives.

Starship can't lift 462 tons to orbit in one launch and that isn't taking into account the volume needed. It would take more than 1 to get an ISS equivalent on orbit.

The pressurized volume of Starship is larger than the pressurized volume of the ISS. I think that was what was intended to be conveyed.

Exactly what I was thinking in my head when I wrote that. Although I really should have written it out properly. To be fair mass is probably way more important.

Ok, so like 5-10. ISS took 40 assembly flights, with 36 being expensive space shuttle flights ($54k/kg).

Definitely not in a single launch, since ISS weighs around 500 tons. And I think designs for space stations in starship era would be different(more heavy, but orders of magnitude cheaper to produce), so something like ISS in a starship era might weigh 1.5-2x more(VERY rough estimate), but nonetheless be much cheaper.

Starship itself has ~1000 cubic meters of payload volume, and ISS has ~900 cubic meters of pressurized volume. It's not too much of a stretch to expect >500 cubic meters of pressurized volume in a crew-capable Starship, in which case two Starships would provide a broadly similar amount of pressurized volume in orbit.

Humans are not automatons who you can just point at a different problem than the one they are interested in and expect them to make progress in a similar way.

A Mars colony is an exciting problem for smart people to work on that can inspire them. You can't put a dollar value on that.

> The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses.

Most of that cost was in the cost of launching it (and the inflation in the price of the modules knowing that they are "priceless" and "can't fail" and "we can only build one copy of it"). Further it's all engineered to very fine margins. The more you get your margins down the more cost these things take. One-offs of anything tend to be expensive. One-offs of very tight margin things are even more expensive. There's nothing in the ISS that is especially exotic. It's copper wiring and aluminum pressure vessels.

The ISS was also the first of its kind, not built with cost effectiveness in mind even a little bit, and complicated by being built by so many different parties. A station or other space hab built by a highly vertically integrated company trying to keep costs down is almost certainly going to be much, much less expensive and more capable.

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