SpaceX's First Starship Launch Tomorrow

In a way, the ideals are part of the compensation package. SpaceX don't have to have good work conditions because people want to work there. The same way the video game industry has bad pay with bad work conditions because there's a steady flow of people wanting to make games, even if only as a tiny cog in a massive machine. Or how teachers or nurses are paid poorly, because enough people want to do it anyways.

Which isn't supposed to be an endorsement of any of this. Ethically it's very questionable, but it is a logical outcome in our flavor of capitalism.

I think it's pretty clear what that something is too. a) pushing people to question assumptions and continually try new things to cut costs and improve performance, b) slave driving employees in exciting industries where you can get away with that.

Part of that is refusing to IPO, and still wanting to grow into new areas that revenue doesn’t yet support

> Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money would not have gotten to that point.

FTFY: Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money into significant achievements ...

Musk might not hit his target time tables. He might not deliver everything he plans to. But he still delivers things other entities have yet to match, or took a serious amount to time to match.

Investors, and people who care about his projects, don't care about him keeping every promise. They care about results. If a CEO and his team get motivated by impossible time tables, then let them motivate themselves with impossible time tables.

(Counter example? FWIW, any benefits of his foray into Twitter are not yet clear to me.)

It does seem crazy wasteful but in the end they are far more cost effective than more traditional companies like Boeing. Signing off on these original programs took incredible bravery but by now investors should be punishing companies that timidly launch once every five years.

Not only a rich benefactor, also someone who can inspire and convince others. SpaceX has gone through multiple financing rounds, the last one in January raising $750M at a valuation of $137B.

> They start super scrappy, quick to iterate, build and throwaway hardware quickly. But then are experts of transitioning into a sustainable late stage development within the regulatory bounds of a highly controlled industry.

I wish something like this could happen in software, too.

I have worked in a a couple regulated industries, and in all cases the firm's decision to impose the same level of governance at all levels of the software value chain was a horrible impediment to innovation. After a certain number of iterations of having to do governance reviews of spikes and PoCs that were going to be thrown away regardless of whether the idea worked, any developer who values their own time will eventually settle into avoiding true prototype and PoC work and instead dive straight into writing production-bound code from the beginning.

I've wondered if we could get more innovation and more quality by allowing rapid iteration (without all the paperwork) during early development and prototyping of an idea, followed by a complete and in-depth review, documentation and certification of the final design and implementation as part of preparing it to ship to production.

I think that motivation plays a great role.

"We are going to fly to Mars!" attract different kind of engineers than "We are going to eke out 5 per cent more growth for our shareholders!"

Most publicly traded corporations fall into the latter trap: find some cash cow and milk it endlessly so that the shareholders are happy, and screw any innovation.

Privately owned corporations such as SpaceX can afford "loftier" goals.

There are 0 hard numbers on profit margins and cost, just taking PR or best guesses at face value.

They’ll charge the similar prices, just putting cheaper heavier better-fueled robust satellites in orbit

Satellites are super expensive due to weight concerns, demand should go way up with the per-unit cost down

By enabling entirely new applications that aren't remotely economical otherwise. Asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing, all that scifi stuff that we've been talking about for half a century and can't do at thousands of dollars per pound to LEO.

Cheap high-volume launch means you can build things heavier and in some cases mass-produce them, so space hardware doesn't have to cost so much anymore either.

Consider how CPU manufacturing became a bigger industry as the cost per computation plummeted over the past 50 years. When it gets cheaper to do something, demand tends to increase because people start purchasing it for purposes that would have been ridiculous in the past.

Until other cheap lifters show up, SpaceX can dictate the floor on costs. But profit means there must be a demand for Starship, perhaps more than Starlink provides. There are businesses that may flourish in near space given cheap enough access to low orbit.

As for launch providers surviving, nation-states have a vested interest in subsidizing their space programs, even at a loss, until they can bootstrap their own cheap lifters.

Driving down launch costs is the point.

SpaceX a few years ago pretty much completely wiped out their Falcon 9 launch manifest because their launch cadence was so high, and the cost for SpaceX of doing so was so low. They briefly had a dip in launch cadence and it's only now building back up for two reasons:

1. They've dropped launch costs so their customers have new opportunities they can pursue at the new cost basis. 2. They started Starlink to soak up all their spare launch capacity. Hundreds of flights to low-earth orbit launching cheap satellites.

Starship/Super heavy is meant to be the next evolution of this. If the cost of launching heavy payloads massively drops then demand will appear to match it. They hope.

It's hard to make money on infrastructure, which space launches are in a way. But there is a lot of induced demand here: the main costs of satellites are the costs of the launch and the cost of the satellite, and satellites are in no small part expensive because launches are expensive (low weight, high reliability, long lifespan is expensive). If launches become cheaper, a lot more people will want to use them. Entire industries like zero-gravity fabrication, moon mining or space tourism only become viable as launch costs decrease.

I don't think you can assume that launch prices will drop substantially.

The problem is that demand for launches over the next 5 years is fairly static. Almost everything that will be launched in the next 5 years will already be well into the design phase.

SpaceX will keep prices below the competition, but they're already lower than the competition so why would they lower it further?

They want to retire Falcon9, so they do have a bit of a conundrum. They'd rather launch a Falcon9 size payload using Starship than using Falcon9 which puts pressure on them to charge Falcon9 per launch prices for Starship, but since Starship is much more capable than Falcon9, if per launch prices are the same, the Starship price is a lot less per ton.

But they have a way out: Launch as a service as an extension of their current rideshare model to larger payloads. Charge per kg rather than per launch. If you want to launch 17 tonnes into LEO you pay a different price than if you're launching 150 tonnes into LEO, even if both payloads go on a dedicated Starship.

OTOH being a private company they do have the ability to sandbag their profits over the next 5 years in the hope that they'll make up for it in >5 years. If they price at 10% of their current prices their launch profits over the next 5 years will be 10% of what they would be otherwise, but if it enables an asteroid mining startup that will buy hundreds of launches per year in a decade....

Once around the planet in low earth orbit is about 90 minutes. This is just how long these things take. In other words it would be difficult for a suborbital flight around the planet from Texas to Hawaii to take anything other than about 90 minutes.

Yeah I totally get not liking the billionaire, and I'm sure some of it started as a reaction to the elon musk worship that used to be common back then... but then it turned into a weird culture of random dudes thinking that they are smarter than NASA, SpaceX, the american military, the FAA... and having an audience for their groundbreaking "research".

Most of those are not skeptical that starship can work. Lots of doubt around the specific claims for the amount that it can drop launch costs by, launch cadence, first launch time frame (which was correct in it's prediction of no 2022 launch), but not really much actual doubt that SpaceX can successfully launch starship.

I made one of those:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368497

And there was nothing in the comment saying Starship could not be done. Was about something else.

Of course doubts are allowed, but what I'm saying is that SpaceX clearly have a team of world-class experts. They've all spend decades training, practising and honing their craft. Based on their track record, I'd say they're pretty good at what they do. They may even be the best in the world.

That makes it hard when some rando on the internet comes in to doubt or criticize, because it's virtually impossible for that rando to have more expertise than the entire SpaceX team.

If a person actually run the numbers and backed up their thoughts with legitimate reasons and a better idea that would be one thing. But that never happens, which is the problem.

If a government is aiming to increase the amount of renewable power, or a car company aims to make their cars more efficient, or a public transit operator wants to increase their service, or literally any one of billions of things that can be done, it is a waste of everyone's time for someone to chime in and say "Won't work because I said so" when they have absolutely zero experience, expertise or evidence to back up their thought that has no basis in reality.

It is something Elon Musk himself said and I don't really know the details.

But the Soviet were at the forefront of staged combustion engines, of which the Raptor engine famously is. And the "Super Heavy" booster is reminiscent of the N1 rocket, using a large number of small, efficient engines.

It indeed started as the "Interplanetary Transport System", but there isn't a Mars mission yet, so it is a solution looking for a problem. The challenges of getting to Mars are huge, and that essentially ended the "pissing contest" era of space travel that gave us Apollo, and pretty much all of what we know about space travel today. Political figures understood that the next step after the Moon was Mars and that neither the US nor USSR were ready to take it despite the ridiculous amount of effort they could spare. Landing people on Mars is hard, very hard, and having a launcher capable of that is only part of the equation. There are radiation, travel time, etc... There is no way SpaceX can do it by itself, and the US government is not ready. So it might be the big goal, but certainly not the product SpaceX will sell.

There is a Moon mission though, and I think SpaceX quickly switched the focus on that as soon as Artemis was starting to become a reality. But while it is part of the plan, the real "moon rocket" is SLS and the spaceship is Orion, Starship is "just" a lander. A weird situation if you ask me, but hey, politics.

So yeah, the think SpaceX is selling is a rocket to put tons of heavy stuff into orbit, with Mars and the Moon being the extra plan, if the government decides to take it. I am not convinced about Mars, unless maybe China starts a pissing contest, which may be the best thing that can happen to space travel, but it looks like the Moon is getting at least something (of which China is probably no stranger to), still wait an see of a settlement.

> firing 33 engines at the same time

They've gotten up to 31 at an unspecified less than full throttle

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/business/spacex-static-fire-s...

Well, let's hope it goes better than the N1.

Not back in the 80's.

Musk is apparently a great engineer and motivator, with passable to terrible management skills (depending on how much of his ego is involved).

Part of being a good CEO is knowing when to delegate.

There's a lot of credit to his engineering prowess in your link et al. But engineering alone does not a successful company make.