11 ms·

Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars

313 points by GraemeL 7y ago

peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Excerpt: "Just iterate, baby" "I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a reusable, orbital Starship to get people and tons of stuff to Mars. So he is focused on that. He knows he won’t get Starship right at first. He employs some of the smartest engineers on this planet, and they’re still, in many ways, fumbling toward solutions for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit—then to land it and fly it again. Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design."
- addisonl 7y ago
  "Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design" This how everything is made. Revolutionary.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    You jest, but he actually does it. Executing the right idea is the value, not the idea. Everyone else is cush and doesn't want to rock the boat (SLS, legacy automaker leadership, etc). For those, innovation has no incentive. "Innovator's dilemma" [1] and all that jazz. Disclaimer: Not a huge Musk fan anymore, "world's least worst billionaire", but credit where credit due. I don't endorse sweat shops, but he has teached a cohort to yearn for the vast and endless sea. He is a salesperson first, and he is selling the dream. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
    - addisonl 7y ago
      Everyone does trial and error. Look at every major aviation achievement, were those done on the first try?
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        If so, why is everyone else so far behind?
        addisonl 7y ago
        Depends on how you measure "behind". If you measure it by "times been to the moon" SpaceX sure is behind. Less money? Less motivation? Less talent? The number of factors that contribute to success are unmeasurable, what a silly question.
        toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Let's be objective: SpaceX has radically lowered the cost to get to Earth orbit, and commands a majority of the worldwide launch market. They are simply more efficient than other launch providers, so much so that they are branching out into global communications (StarLink) to capture more revenue (global comms is 10x the market size of the launch market). They don't need to go to the Moon to succeed. There is no market to get to the Moon unless nation states make one. Musk is building his own market for Mars logistics demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition#Since_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio... > SpaceX's market share increased rapidly. In 2016, SpaceX had 30% global market share for newly awarded commercial launch contracts, in 2017 the market share reached 45%, and 65% in 2018. Tesla, according to the opinion of a single auto industry expert, has a 7 year head start against legacy automakers [1]. They sell every vehicle they build, and combined, legacy automakers have shed almost 40k jobs in the last year as they attempt to transition to building EVs to compete against Tesla. A reasonable person might conclude these metrics indicate an achievement of some level of success. [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/auto-experts-tesla-has-7-year-head-start-over-legacy-automakers/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/auto-experts-tesla-has-...
  - ajnin 7y ago
    No, not in aerospace. The common approach is to spend years designing, simulating, and then actual tests come at the very end, and sometimes you don't even test because you can't or it would be too expensive. That's what Boeing are doing with their own rockets; Mars missions until now didn't really go through an iterative process; satellites are usually manufactured only by one and they better work once in orbit.
    - addisonl 7y ago
      > years designing, simulating So trial and error, but virtually. You're telling me we went to the moon on the first try? We went into space on the first try? The Wright brothers were successful on their first flight? No, it was all trial and error.
      - Miraste 7y ago
        Simulation is not the same as trial and error. There's no such thing as a perfect simulation, and imperfect simulations without real world testing and iteration result in disasters. There are many examples, but the Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes to mind.
        addisonl 7y ago
        > Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes So a trial and subsequent error.
        Miraste 7y ago
        You're not differentiating between an iterative design process, during which failures are expected, and a monolithic one where the end product is final. When Starships blow up, Musk can build new ones and try again. When the probe crashed, that was the end of the mission and there was no more Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a one-off. This is a common problem in spaceflight. The Webb Space Telescope is another example. If it eventually does launch and something goes wrong, we'll have paid >$10 billion for absolutely nothing. These aren't trial and error because the designs are never improved based on the errors. They're just scrapped. SpaceX works in a fundamentally different way.
- amelius 7y ago
  > for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?
  - AgloeDreams 7y ago
    Efficiencies of scale. Too small and you can't pack enough food for the trip or proper redundancies, still too small and you can't build the base fast enough, don't bring enough stuff on the trip and you need to make more trips..which are time limited due to the rendezvous. You end up inclined to 'as big as possible'
  - Retric 7y ago
    People need to live in it. A 1 Kg probe can take some pictures, the tiny Apollo Lunar Module was 16,400Kg and only designed to support 2 people for 75 hours. Meanwhile Mars (3.72 m/s²) has significantly more gravity than the Moon (1.62 m/s²), making a trip back from the surface even more difficult.
  - petewailes 7y ago
    Tonnage. If you're wanting to move 7/8 figure tonnage loads over a period of time, you're going to need a big trunk. In space vehicles, that means everything gets really, really big.
    - jcims 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction Launch vehicles tend to scale payload capacity at a greater rate than dry mass. So a small launch vehicle like RocketLab's Electron might have a wet mass of 12,000kg at launch and an LEO payload capacity of 225kg (225/12000 ~ 1.8% payload), the SpaceX Falcon9 has a wet mass of 550,000kg and an LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg (22800/550000 ~ 4.1% payload). This just tends to mean that, very generally and with exceptions, larger vehicles can get mass into space with less fuel.
      - SEJeff 7y ago
- Tsarbomb 7y ago
  Iteration is what originally gave the Soviets the advantage in the space race.
  - BigBubbleButt 7y ago
    I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots. The best example being Korolev, possibly the greatest rocket designer in history (certainly up there with Von Braun and Xuesen, and in my opinion more impressive), who died because he was sent to the Gulags by a bitter politician (this is an incredibly short edit of the full story, but that is a factual statement). Korolev built working rockets the US said were theoretically impossible, and he did it because he couldn't afford to build the rockets the way the US were doing it. So he got resourceful. Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
    - TuringNYC 7y ago
      >> I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots. I'm not familiar with that history, but I'm quite familiar with Corporate America. One thing I've seen is that when Engineering is great, it gives the company great momentum and allows the Management/"Business"/Strategy/etc functions to lag and get lazy. Good Engineering momentum essentially produces enough residual value for others to leech off from.
      - deleted 7y ago
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      - mrkstu 7y ago
        Which may be an insight on how SpaceX/Tesla avoid some of those traditional business issues- the business is this case is a means to an engineering end, not a means to perpetuate the power/wealth/comfort of management.
      - 7y ago
- floatrock 7y ago
  The quote that explains why it's important to build one Starship a week: > “A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”
- nohuhu 7y ago
  This makes total sense to me. If you can solve the hardest problems, it is reasonable to expect that you can solve the rest as well. If you fail at solving the hardest problems, the system will not work anyway. The science, then, lies in identifying the hardest problems. The art lies in identifying people who can solve these problems.
tpmx 7y ago
This Musk quote from the article resonated with me: > There’s plenty of forgiveness if you pass me the buck. There is no forgiveness if you don’t.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Next week, Musks inbox is flooded with "Weld 28467 is looking slightly bubbly. It'll probably be okay, but wanted to pass the buck to you".
  - I-M-S 7y ago
    That was my first thought as well - how does the spiritus movens behind both Tesla and SpaceX have the bandwidth to pull off that level of (micro)management?
    - hef19898 7y ago
      He doesn't, plain and simple. So either it is propaganda or dilution or hybris. Probably a combination of all three.
      - widowlark 7y ago
        People say he doesn't over and over - but he beats expectations over and over. Hmm.
        hef19898 7y ago
        Two things. Yes he does, but despite his management style, not because of it. And no, he doesn't have the bandwidth people think he has. That is part of his narrative, and that narrative, more than anything else, keeps his companies afloat. Not to forget that he misses a ton of deadlines and constantly moves the goal posts. Helps in beating expectations.
        avmich 7y ago
        Once working on an important project (and the work went round the clock), Sergei Korolev ordered people to literally wake him up at night if some serious questions or problems surfaced up. His team took that literally, and Korolev was woken up a few times at night. Later he said "you seem to conspired to not let me get some sleep", but nobody was fired[1], and the team still adjusted to a balance between importance of problem visibility and importance of getting rest. Sorry for no references, writing from memory :) . [1] Firing in Korolev's team was a whole 'nother story entirely. For example, Korolev used to fire people in the morning only to require them to work extra hard in the same afternoon. The team got used to this feature. In reality, nobody wanted to be fired - people saw the importance of their work.
justapassenger 7y ago
Is it me, or does this article basically romanticize abusing workers and glorifies running projects without a plan, just with a goal?
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  I assume that an "all-hands" meeting at 1AM means an all-hands for everybody working the night shift, not the entire staff. Yes, shift work sucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean overwork.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    Having several SpaceX employees in my circle of friends, I would not assume that at all.
    - brlewis 7y ago
      Are your friends up at 1am because they're excited about what they're doing?
      - zionic 7y ago
        No because optimizing for ad click rate just doesn't get me out of bed.
  - jgalt212 7y ago
    Shift work also correlates with elevated levels of various diseases and cancers.
- virgilp 7y ago
  AFAIK they work in shifts, non-stop; crazy hours & weekend is irrelevant in this context.
  - brlewis 7y ago
    This part of the article is about shifts for assembly workers: So Musk is making the machine to make the machine. Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla’s assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they’ll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free.
londons_explore 7y ago
I wonder how they handle differences in plans/knowledge/outlook between the 4 shifts. I can totally see the AM team working towards different quality standards or designs than the Evening team because they never talk to one another.
- deleted 7y ago
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- riffraff 7y ago
  usually people change across shifts over time, you don't always work with the same people every time, so there would be a continuous sync up.
WoodenKatana 7y ago
Elon Musk is beyond obsessed with reaching Mars. I feel bad for his employees
- detritus 7y ago
  They can always leave. I'd presume that many of them are on-board in the first place because they're engaged by the idea.
  - everdrive 7y ago
    Right, particularly, engineers who can build space stations definitely have other employment options.
    - _Microft 7y ago
      My guess is that an engineer who can build space stations has every employment option in his field that he could wish for. Wave with SpaceX's employer's reference letter and get the job, basically.
      - Cobord 7y ago
        Overqualified
    - detritus 7y ago
      An odd response! :) If SpaceX didn't exist, how would they put food on the table?
    - robotresearcher 7y ago
      Not many if they want to build space stations.
  - wolco 7y ago
    I suspect we have a few groups. Those who drank the kool-aid and liked it. Those who used to believe in it but after abuse are now stuck in an endless cycle where they have no time for job searches. And those that never drank the kool-aid and will leave after getting time on their resume. It takes a great mix of super smarts and super stupid to work there.
PedroBatista 7y ago
I don't know about the Starship a week but he definitely fulfils his hyperbolic bullshit per day quota. And it's mostly "our" fault, "we" let him getaway with so much shit ( from market manipulation to criminal workplace offences ) because he entertains our egos with the promise of getting all our problems solved ( which is ridiculous at so many levels ). OK let's pretend Elon builds one Starship a week, at which cost and for what? the promise of "immense riches in the New World?". Why are these people slaving away to entertain a rich boy's wet dream?
- deleted 7y ago
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- daxaxelrod 7y ago
  The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time. Does it? Do you have some examples? As far as I can tell, societal progress moves slowly and incrementally, with many people contributing by building on the works of others.
    - daxaxelrod 7y ago
      Lightbulb, Automobiles, Printing press https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87288/8-skeptical-early-reactions-revolutionary-inventions https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87288/8-skeptical-early-...
      - aguyfromnb 7y ago
        >Automobiles Automobiles were developed over hundreds of years. What was the skepticism there? >Lightbulb Edison "invented" the first commercial bulb in 1879. The first electric lights were created in the early 1800s. >Printing press People were trying to find ways to print books for centuries. Copying them was laborious. Some random monk claiming hand-writing to be morally superior doesn't change that.
throwaway13337 7y ago
It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it. Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. Such a clear goal makes it easy to have greater purpose that you don't second guess. This isn't a scheme to get rich, a zero sum political movement, or a narcissistic artistic endeavor. It's pretty unique there. There's that whole danger of a cult of personality but the project is bearing fruit.
- deleted 7y ago
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- grecy 7y ago
  > Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. This statement resonates deeply with me. Whenever I meet someone new or that I might be interested in dating I ask "What are you doing with your life?" or "What are you striving for?" and I find the extreme majority of people don't have an answer beyond "I just go to a job I don't really like" It seems very few people are seriously driven and motivated and living a life where they're pushing hard to achieve something great.
  - StaticRedux 7y ago
    Why do they have to? I have that drive, but my wife is perfectly happy with a calm, comfortable, stress-free life. And in fact it helps to bring me back down to Earth sometimes also. There's nothing wrong with wanting a life that free. In fact it's oftentimes admirable. Especially at times when I'm wound so tight I feel like I could pop. If you're choosing a partner based solely on whether they want to be the next Elon Musk or not, you're doing yourself a serious disservice. And if you really ask those questions to every potential date, you should stop, because dude, wtf?
    - airstrike 7y ago
      > Why do they have to? Not speaking about (or judging!) anyone individually, but because if none of us did, we'd still be living in caves. Or, more likely, be extinct. The reason all of us are having this conversation now is because many people before us had purpose and built something
ballooney 7y ago
Settle on Mars
chottocharaii 7y ago
Humans are not biologically adapted to surviving on Mars, and for that reason, any settlement to Mars is bound to fail in the long term.
- mandeepj 7y ago
  I don't know how fun that would be to roam around with a helmet on your face or live in a giant doom or environment controlled building
  - glouwbug 7y ago
    I imagine mars would be terraformed eventually over time. It just needs a little atmosphere to get going
    - krapp 7y ago
      Unfortunately, due to Mars' lower gravity and lack of a magnetically active core, not only can it not hold a substantial atmosphere to begin with, any such atmosphere would inevitably be blown away by solar winds. So there's that. Maybe we can put a big dome around the whole thing like Planet Druidia.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        The timeline for that process is millennia, so if we come up with a continual process for replenishment that works on shorter timeframes, it's maintainable. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-speed-of-solar-wind-stripping-martian-atmosphere https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-spee... > MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams (equivalent to roughly 1/4 pound) every second. "Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”
superbrane 7y ago
I hope he gets to solve the terraforming part of going to Mars, as well. Also, maybe he sets his eyes on colonizing the ocean space on Earth - lots of empty space in the water.
- Cobord 7y ago
  Do a simple lower bound calculation, and you see that Elon is talking out of his ass.
kerenua 7y ago
godspeed
Ajedi32 7y ago
The pace of innovation here is absolutely ludicrous. They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom x-ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks? They've gone from a production rate of one prototype in 8 months to one prototype every 2 weeks in less than a year. They doubled the size of their workforce in less than 48 hours. I'm gonna have to agree with the article author here: this is absolutely mad.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom X-Ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks? Can any engineer speak to whether this is actually progress, or even necessary? It seems like every time something goes wrong, Elon "invents" a way to do it better. I'm old enough to remember rescue subs, battery swaps, brain implants that will cure autism, factories spitting out factories, solar shingles, truck carriers, one-hour body shop service, tunnels at a fraction of the cost, the ability to identify squeaks in your car with your phone, robots assembling cars so fast they need a strobe light to be seen...
  - peeters 7y ago
    I'm not in that area, but I struggle to find an analogue of a large pressurized tank on Earth where mass is the dominant cost factor. You might have equally big tanks on Earth, under equal pressures, but it will be more cost-effective to just increase the material used on the shell of the tank to solve your problems. Whereas in space, every kg that can theoretically be removed from the launch vehicle is worth investing in, even if it raises the cost of engineering and materials. So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges.
    - aguyfromnb 7y ago
      >So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges. Isn't weld strength something engineers would know/understand in advance, though? How would it come as a surprise that the welds would fail under pressure? It seems strange to me that Musk could be spending so much time working on Starship, and somehow a "badly designed, badly built, and badly checked" rocket makes it to the platform and explodes.
martythemaniak 7y ago
Slightly off-topic but apart from Mars-related things, I don't think are appreciating how big of a deal Starship/Super Heavy will be. Because space is hard and expensive, when designing payloads, they also have to be over-engineered to make sure you're getting the most out of your ride, which then makes the rockets over-engineered and expensive to make sure they don't blow up carrying the precious cargo. It's a positive feedback loop. So we end up with incredible telescopes like Hubble or James Webb, but it's literally a once-in-a-generation event. There's no tolerance for failure, so budgets and timelines ballon. What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? Why not mass-produce slightly lower quality telescopes instead of these masterpieces. The JWST's successor is LUVOIR, slated for sometime in the 2040s (!!), why not build a dozens JWST-like telescopes and use interferometry to build giant telescopes larger than the earth with higher light-gathering ability than even ground-based telescopes? This is the technique used by Event Horizon Telescope to capture the first picture of a black hole last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...
- grecy 7y ago
  > What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? That's exactly the premise of Starlink. SpaceX know they can launch those things 100x cheaper (1000x ?) than ever before in history, so they're churning them out and throwing them up. Even though the ones going up right now aren't "finished" it doesn't matter, because replacing them with new and better ones is so cheap.
  - baking 7y ago
    400 Starlink satellites per Starship launch costing $2M is $5,000 per satellite per launch. Basically nothing compared to the eventual mass-produced cost to make each satellite which might be $100,000. https://youtu.be/Exd1IO52exs?t=361 https://youtu.be/Exd1IO52exs?t=361
    - _Microft 7y ago
      Musk recently said that they need to get Starship working because the launch cost on Falcon 9 is already exceeding the cost of the launched Starlink satellites. With a launch cost of approximately $30M and 60 satellites, they are already at $500k per satellite at most.
nsm 7y ago
This article from October 2019 also does a great job explaining the enormity of vision. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-sta...
ratsimihah 7y ago
Not a bad idea, it's a good way to save the few healthy/surviving ones if coronavirus (or nature, or humanity itself) ends up wiping all of humanity.
recusancy 7y ago
Has he ever talked about how people would survive on Mars without a magnetosphere?
- scrumbledober 7y ago
  most likely using martian soil as a radiation shield. Either built up in mounds around structures, or by tunneling under the ground (boring company?)
- dnate 7y ago
  living under big shields perhaps?
- kuprel 7y ago
  Is a magnetosphere what would contain the atmosphere? I remember reading that if someone did nuke the poles the atmosphere would escape anyway
kaycebasques 7y ago
I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality. I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now. There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us. And yes when I say “there is no Planet B” I’m being vaguely spiritual. I believe Earth is a creature and somehow won’t allow one of its creations to explore the stars until that creation learns mutualism. But I’m also being pragmatic: A) colonialism was a big motivation in our last 2 world wars and we still have intense colonizer memes circulating through our societies B) we now have the means to destroy ourselves thoroughly C) Mars is the crown jewel of potential colonies right now.
- kiba 7y ago
  We can do both. Cheap and rapid space launch may allow us to put polluting industries where they belong: in space.
  - kaycebasques 7y ago
    Ah, yes, the old “just shove it under the rug” strategy.
- _carl_jung 7y ago
  The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones. Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming.
  - kaycebasques 7y ago
    > The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones. I agree that they’re parallel because the reality is that they’re both happening right now. I’m pointing out that there’s a huge risk in not figuring out A before B, which is that we’ll just be transporting our problems to a new planet (and if they succeed, then whoever controls Mars will be able to use their monopoly to exacerbate problems on Earth). Granted, the rocket sure is shiny, though... funny how that trick never fails ;) > Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming. Or perhaps you’re in the equivalent of an “early internet” optimism phase around Mars exploration. We have all the resources we need here. The research around mutualistic living (renewables, land use, food waste, etc) is making that clear. If we’re glorifying hard problems, then the real hard problem is figuring out how to get humanity to share our already abundant resources equitably and peacefully. Once we solve that problem we will be ready for Mars. And to be clear I share the dream of exploring the stars. But I can’t in good faith support that dream until we shift from a parasitic to a mutualistic relationship.
zerop 7y ago
Steve jobs was super rude to Elon Musk! Right.
pjc50 7y ago
So we've accepted that we're never going to find life on Mars, and that there's no concern of "contamination"? Or is this just a big plan to build a city in the first bit of "unspoilt" wilderness we can find off planet?
dangus 7y ago
What is the benefit of settling on Mars? Until we explain that in some kind of sane way that doesn’t just involve the earth being a crutch for raw materials, it all seems rather stupid to me. Settling an earth-like planet? Sure! Seems logical. Mars? Not really.
- koboll 7y ago
  Ability to survive nuclear war. He doesn't just want to settle, he wants to settle with a self-sustaining colony. It's a contingency plan. We've almost plunged the world into nuclear holocaust a couple times before. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats, and rising ethnonationalist populism and climate change are threatening to strain these tensions further. This is a real risk.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - giantrobot 7y ago
    I'd buy into Musk's Mars bullshit if he built a sealed self-contained colony in New Mexico. We have experience with two long term space habitats, Mir and the ISS. Despite all of the engineering know how that built both shit breaks on them all the time and needs to be repaired. They also need regular resupply because they're nowhere near self sufficient. They also need a Soyuz capsule docked at all times in case they need to evacuate. The Starship is an iterative design with seventy years of engineering knowledge behind it. Keeping humans alive outside the Van Allen belts for a long duration and then on a completely inhospitable planet has very little engineering knowledge behind it. Also to suggest a Mars colony is a contingency plan is ludicrous. In order for a Mars colony to be a human civilization contingency plan it would not only need to be self sustaining but self perpetuating. Otherwise a life ending event on Earth would just give the Mars colonists a few months to come to terms with their mortality. Then no kore humans. There is nowhere in the solar system that can support humans in the way Earth can. In fact everywhere else is so hostile we need to take significant amounts of Earth with us just to not die immediately. If you want to live in underground colonies have the Boring company build you tunnels here on Earth. At least when you need parts for the GECK you can go above ground with just a gas mask and rugged clothes instead of a bulky space suit.
schaefer 7y ago
A Linguistic Beef: The word "Starship" means specifically that the ship is capable of traveling between stars. At a minimum, it should travel from it's home star to the nearest neighboring star. What we're talking about here are "Spaceships". -- The only way I can lighten up and enjoy the name Starship in this context is to assume it's being used ironically... like someone who's named their cat "Dog".
- rococode 7y ago
  It's going to be really interesting to see how vocabulary changes as frequent space travel becomes a reality. This may be one of the few times in history where a field has had so much imagination invested into defining it (sci-fi stories making up words for things) before it slowly becomes a reality.
- olex 7y ago
  There are other vehicles called "Starship" that aren't actual starships either - the Beechcraft Starship (a twin-engined turboprop pusher aircraft) or "The Starship" (a Boeing 720 used by Led Zeppelin and other bands). It's a proper noun chosen as a name or model designation for the vehicle, as opposed to a common noun describing the vehicle itself (a spacecraft).
- aglavine 7y ago
  It is called after a fictional spacecraft https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-fictional-spacecraft-we-wish-were-real4.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-fictional-spacecraft-we...
- weregiraffe 7y ago
  >The word "Starship" means specifically that the ship is capable of traveling between stars. Well, it would be capable. Just very-very slow.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Seen from the earth every light point in the sky is a star at first. Even planets. Or the starship itself. Or some satellites. So even if it only travels to Mars, which looks like a star to us it would be OK to call it that. Don't be so uptight!
paulcarroty 7y ago
Living without big plans & big dreams is bad, don't matter how crazy they are. Why I support Elon.
zshrdlu 7y ago
Why Mars, specifically? Why not "settle" Antarctica or Marianna's trench? Aren't these orders of magnitude easier?
- vsareto 7y ago
  Marianna's is probably way tougher than Mars to be honest.
- KoftaBob 7y ago
  The overarching goal is to have a "backup" of humanity so to speak. Having some of society living on Mars so that if something were to happen to Earth, humanity wouldn't cease to exist. Settling Antarctica doesn't solve that problem.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    About the only thing that'd make it harder to survive on Earth than on Mars is a planetoid-sized impactor. For anything else a few hardened, isolated bunkers would be a hell of a lot cheaper than colonizing Mars, at least as effective at improving human survivability, and we could start building them today. Of course I'm rooting for the Martian stuff because it's cool and may be accidentally useful (SpaceX already has been, really) and beats the fuck out of finding new ways to sell crap to people and the other garbage lots of other prominent companies do, but the goal isn't valuable per se, in my opinion.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    I'm a huge Musk fan and would love to see us settle mars. But. Really. What's the threat model here? Mars is meant to be a backup of humanity. OK. Against what threat? We can think of many, but a self-isolating base in the Antarctic would survive nearly all of them with better conditions than a Mars base. Nuclear armageddon? Not much fallout over Antarctica and OK, you can't go outside of a while. Still better than Mars where you can't go outside ever. Runaway global warming? The ice will melt but at a slow pace that leaves plenty of time for adaptation, the climate will become more hospitable at the poles rather than less, and at least you will have lots of fresh water. Unlike, say, on Mars. Global pandemic? An Antarctic base can self isolate, no problem. Just lock the doors and let anyone who tries to reach you freeze to death. A serious Mars base would need some sort of border control policy too, if Musk had made it cheap to get there. Massive asteroid strike? I guess it'd wreck the atmosphere but ... well, then you're no worse off than on Mars which doesn't have one to begin with. And you're much more likely to get nuked by a 'roid on Mars where there's no atmosphere to burn it up. I dunno man. I'm trying to think of a problem that a serious Antarctic city couldn't solve and coming up blank. Short of Earth getting sucked into a black hole or something, what scenario is survivable on Mars that isn't at the poles?
immmmmm 7y ago
I don’t get the point 1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first? 2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice) 3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue) 4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea. 5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars? 6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first? I don't see why we can't do both. Maybe if you come up with an actionable plan you can start your own company like Elon and tackle that problem. 2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice) No electric cars won't suffice, but they are a start. As is an increase in nuclear, and renewables in areas it makes sense. Again I don't see how this detracts, especially looking at Elon's other ventures. Maybe you can create a company that tackles the concrete problem, that's a big one. 3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue) That's subjective and you don't know if it can be solved or not, seems they are working on it. Why do you think a non-reflective coating won't work? 4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea. We don't have to mine all of them at first. Look where we started here on Earth, from scratch. 5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars? I'm sure it's negligible relatively. Was that rhetorical or do you have a number? 6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere? Are you talking about the ice found? The martian biosphere is already destroyed, terraforming it would bring life to the surface and if there is life it's underground and must be pretty hardy.
cstross 7y ago
This is a spectacular gamble, however Musk has a track record and I think Superheavy/Starship will pay off with unpredictable dividends. But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduced gravity, and we know there are biological changes that affect astronauts. The same goes triple for the plants and bacteria and fungi (never mind animals) we depend on for agriculture, and a closed-loop agricultural system and air plant is implicit in Musk's goal of a self-sufficient colony on Mars. We haven't even repeated the (failed) Biosphere 2 experiment. We need the giant payload capacity before we can test the life sciences problems in a realistic manner (small and ferociously expensive lab experiments on the ISS are useful but fail Musk's iteration test because the lead time for running one is measured in years if not decades). So we won't know if a Mars colony is even possible until some time after Musk builds the ships to put one there.
- zionic 7y ago
  One interesting idea I heard: Send starships in pairs. When in interplanetary coast attach each at the nose with a long (300+m) tether. Use RCS to start a spin. You can then simulate 1G the entire way.
  - viklove 7y ago
    What are you building the starships out of that they can withstand those forces continuously over multiple years?
    - nopzor 7y ago
      wouldn't 1g of force be the same as they'd be subject to sitting on earth?
      - cstross 7y ago
        Starships sitting on Earth are under compression. Starships hanging from one another's nose via a tether are presumably under tension, unless the tether is somehow anchored to the engine support structure at the base of each vehicle. So some non-trivial structural modifications would be required.
tectonic 7y ago
Self-promotion: If you want weekly updates about SpaceX's progress, and about space science and the space industry in general, I write a newsletter for just that purpose: https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com
shoulderfake 7y ago
Who da hell wants to go live there seriously??
justinclift 7y ago
Wonder if friction stir welding would be suitable instead? That seems to be used when very strong + predictable welding is needed. Not sure if it's generally used for 4mm thick material though.
deleted 7y ago
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nohuhu 7y ago
So I guess this is how living in the 1960s felt like? :)
sam36 7y ago
Curious, does spacex have any work from home software dev jobs?
moonmac 7y ago
Elon needs to build himself a loony bin with thick padded walls. The children of kids not born yet will have on heck of a tab to pay back with all his constant insanity!

313 points by GraemeL 7y ago

Excerpt: "Just iterate, baby" "I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a reusable, orbital Starship to get people and tons of stuff to Mars. So he is focused on that. He knows he won’t get Starship right at first. He employs some of the smartest engineers on this planet, and they’re still, in many ways, fumbling toward solutions for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit—then to land it and fly it again. Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design."

addisonl 7y ago
"Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design" This how everything is made. Revolutionary.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  You jest, but he actually does it. Executing the right idea is the value, not the idea. Everyone else is cush and doesn't want to rock the boat (SLS, legacy automaker leadership, etc). For those, innovation has no incentive. "Innovator's dilemma" [1] and all that jazz. Disclaimer: Not a huge Musk fan anymore, "world's least worst billionaire", but credit where credit due. I don't endorse sweat shops, but he has teached a cohort to yearn for the vast and endless sea. He is a salesperson first, and he is selling the dream. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
  - addisonl 7y ago
    Everyone does trial and error. Look at every major aviation achievement, were those done on the first try?
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      If so, why is everyone else so far behind?
      - addisonl 7y ago
        Depends on how you measure "behind". If you measure it by "times been to the moon" SpaceX sure is behind. Less money? Less motivation? Less talent? The number of factors that contribute to success are unmeasurable, what a silly question.
        toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Let's be objective: SpaceX has radically lowered the cost to get to Earth orbit, and commands a majority of the worldwide launch market. They are simply more efficient than other launch providers, so much so that they are branching out into global communications (StarLink) to capture more revenue (global comms is 10x the market size of the launch market). They don't need to go to the Moon to succeed. There is no market to get to the Moon unless nation states make one. Musk is building his own market for Mars logistics demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition#Since_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio... > SpaceX's market share increased rapidly. In 2016, SpaceX had 30% global market share for newly awarded commercial launch contracts, in 2017 the market share reached 45%, and 65% in 2018. Tesla, according to the opinion of a single auto industry expert, has a 7 year head start against legacy automakers [1]. They sell every vehicle they build, and combined, legacy automakers have shed almost 40k jobs in the last year as they attempt to transition to building EVs to compete against Tesla. A reasonable person might conclude these metrics indicate an achievement of some level of success. [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/auto-experts-tesla-has-7-year-head-start-over-legacy-automakers/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/auto-experts-tesla-has-...
- ajnin 7y ago
  No, not in aerospace. The common approach is to spend years designing, simulating, and then actual tests come at the very end, and sometimes you don't even test because you can't or it would be too expensive. That's what Boeing are doing with their own rockets; Mars missions until now didn't really go through an iterative process; satellites are usually manufactured only by one and they better work once in orbit.
  - addisonl 7y ago
    > years designing, simulating So trial and error, but virtually. You're telling me we went to the moon on the first try? We went into space on the first try? The Wright brothers were successful on their first flight? No, it was all trial and error.
    - Miraste 7y ago
      Simulation is not the same as trial and error. There's no such thing as a perfect simulation, and imperfect simulations without real world testing and iteration result in disasters. There are many examples, but the Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes to mind.
      - addisonl 7y ago
        > Mars probe that crashed because of a unit conversion error comes So a trial and subsequent error.
        Miraste 7y ago
        You're not differentiating between an iterative design process, during which failures are expected, and a monolithic one where the end product is final. When Starships blow up, Musk can build new ones and try again. When the probe crashed, that was the end of the mission and there was no more Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a one-off. This is a common problem in spaceflight. The Webb Space Telescope is another example. If it eventually does launch and something goes wrong, we'll have paid >$10 billion for absolutely nothing. These aren't trial and error because the designs are never improved based on the errors. They're just scrapped. SpaceX works in a fundamentally different way.
amelius 7y ago
> for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  Efficiencies of scale. Too small and you can't pack enough food for the trip or proper redundancies, still too small and you can't build the base fast enough, don't bring enough stuff on the trip and you need to make more trips..which are time limited due to the rendezvous. You end up inclined to 'as big as possible'
- Retric 7y ago
  People need to live in it. A 1 Kg probe can take some pictures, the tiny Apollo Lunar Module was 16,400Kg and only designed to support 2 people for 75 hours. Meanwhile Mars (3.72 m/s²) has significantly more gravity than the Moon (1.62 m/s²), making a trip back from the surface even more difficult.
- petewailes 7y ago
  Tonnage. If you're wanting to move 7/8 figure tonnage loads over a period of time, you're going to need a big trunk. In space vehicles, that means everything gets really, really big.
  - jcims 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction Launch vehicles tend to scale payload capacity at a greater rate than dry mass. So a small launch vehicle like RocketLab's Electron might have a wet mass of 12,000kg at launch and an LEO payload capacity of 225kg (225/12000 ~ 1.8% payload), the SpaceX Falcon9 has a wet mass of 550,000kg and an LEO payload capacity of 22,800kg (22800/550000 ~ 4.1% payload). This just tends to mean that, very generally and with exceptions, larger vehicles can get mass into space with less fuel.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
Tsarbomb 7y ago
Iteration is what originally gave the Soviets the advantage in the space race.
- BigBubbleButt 7y ago
  I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots. The best example being Korolev, possibly the greatest rocket designer in history (certainly up there with Von Braun and Xuesen, and in my opinion more impressive), who died because he was sent to the Gulags by a bitter politician (this is an incredibly short edit of the full story, but that is a factual statement). Korolev built working rockets the US said were theoretically impossible, and he did it because he couldn't afford to build the rockets the way the US were doing it. So he got resourceful. Had he not died in 1966, I suspect the Soviets would have beat the US to putting a man on the moon.
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    >> I always found the dichotomy of Soviet culture interesting - that engineers were the most pragmatic I've ever seen, and the politicians were just...fucking idiots. I'm not familiar with that history, but I'm quite familiar with Corporate America. One thing I've seen is that when Engineering is great, it gives the company great momentum and allows the Management/"Business"/Strategy/etc functions to lag and get lazy. Good Engineering momentum essentially produces enough residual value for others to leech off from.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - mrkstu 7y ago
      Which may be an insight on how SpaceX/Tesla avoid some of those traditional business issues- the business is this case is a means to an engineering end, not a means to perpetuate the power/wealth/comfort of management.
    - 7y ago
floatrock 7y ago
The quote that explains why it's important to build one Starship a week: > “A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”
nohuhu 7y ago
This makes total sense to me. If you can solve the hardest problems, it is reasonable to expect that you can solve the rest as well. If you fail at solving the hardest problems, the system will not work anyway. The science, then, lies in identifying the hardest problems. The art lies in identifying people who can solve these problems.

tpmx 7y ago

This Musk quote from the article resonated with me: > There’s plenty of forgiveness if you pass me the buck. There is no forgiveness if you don’t.

londons_explore 7y ago
Next week, Musks inbox is flooded with "Weld 28467 is looking slightly bubbly. It'll probably be okay, but wanted to pass the buck to you".
- I-M-S 7y ago
  That was my first thought as well - how does the spiritus movens behind both Tesla and SpaceX have the bandwidth to pull off that level of (micro)management?
  - hef19898 7y ago
    He doesn't, plain and simple. So either it is propaganda or dilution or hybris. Probably a combination of all three.
    - widowlark 7y ago
      People say he doesn't over and over - but he beats expectations over and over. Hmm.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Two things. Yes he does, but despite his management style, not because of it. And no, he doesn't have the bandwidth people think he has. That is part of his narrative, and that narrative, more than anything else, keeps his companies afloat. Not to forget that he misses a ton of deadlines and constantly moves the goal posts. Helps in beating expectations.
      - avmich 7y ago
        Once working on an important project (and the work went round the clock), Sergei Korolev ordered people to literally wake him up at night if some serious questions or problems surfaced up. His team took that literally, and Korolev was woken up a few times at night. Later he said "you seem to conspired to not let me get some sleep", but nobody was fired[1], and the team still adjusted to a balance between importance of problem visibility and importance of getting rest. Sorry for no references, writing from memory :) . [1] Firing in Korolev's team was a whole 'nother story entirely. For example, Korolev used to fire people in the morning only to require them to work extra hard in the same afternoon. The team got used to this feature. In reality, nobody wanted to be fired - people saw the importance of their work.

justapassenger 7y ago

Is it me, or does this article basically romanticize abusing workers and glorifies running projects without a plan, just with a goal?

bryanlarsen 7y ago
I assume that an "all-hands" meeting at 1AM means an all-hands for everybody working the night shift, not the entire staff. Yes, shift work sucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean overwork.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  Having several SpaceX employees in my circle of friends, I would not assume that at all.
  - brlewis 7y ago
    Are your friends up at 1am because they're excited about what they're doing?
    - zionic 7y ago
      No because optimizing for ad click rate just doesn't get me out of bed.
- jgalt212 7y ago
  Shift work also correlates with elevated levels of various diseases and cancers.
virgilp 7y ago
AFAIK they work in shifts, non-stop; crazy hours & weekend is irrelevant in this context.
- brlewis 7y ago
  This part of the article is about shifts for assembly workers: So Musk is making the machine to make the machine. Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla’s assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they’ll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free.

londons_explore 7y ago

I wonder how they handle differences in plans/knowledge/outlook between the 4 shifts. I can totally see the AM team working towards different quality standards or designs than the Evening team because they never talk to one another.

deleted 7y ago
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riffraff 7y ago
usually people change across shifts over time, you don't always work with the same people every time, so there would be a continuous sync up.

WoodenKatana 7y ago

Elon Musk is beyond obsessed with reaching Mars. I feel bad for his employees

detritus 7y ago
They can always leave. I'd presume that many of them are on-board in the first place because they're engaged by the idea.
- everdrive 7y ago
  Right, particularly, engineers who can build space stations definitely have other employment options.
  - _Microft 7y ago
    My guess is that an engineer who can build space stations has every employment option in his field that he could wish for. Wave with SpaceX's employer's reference letter and get the job, basically.
    - Cobord 7y ago
      Overqualified
  - detritus 7y ago
    An odd response! :) If SpaceX didn't exist, how would they put food on the table?
  - robotresearcher 7y ago
    Not many if they want to build space stations.
- wolco 7y ago
  I suspect we have a few groups. Those who drank the kool-aid and liked it. Those who used to believe in it but after abuse are now stuck in an endless cycle where they have no time for job searches. And those that never drank the kool-aid and will leave after getting time on their resume. It takes a great mix of super smarts and super stupid to work there.

PedroBatista 7y ago

I don't know about the Starship a week but he definitely fulfils his hyperbolic bullshit per day quota. And it's mostly "our" fault, "we" let him getaway with so much shit ( from market manipulation to criminal workplace offences ) because he entertains our egos with the promise of getting all our problems solved ( which is ridiculous at so many levels ). OK let's pretend Elon builds one Starship a week, at which cost and for what? the promise of "immense riches in the New World?". Why are these people slaving away to entertain a rich boy's wet dream?

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daxaxelrod 7y ago
The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time. Does it? Do you have some examples? As far as I can tell, societal progress moves slowly and incrementally, with many people contributing by building on the works of others.
  - daxaxelrod 7y ago
    Lightbulb, Automobiles, Printing press https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87288/8-skeptical-early-reactions-revolutionary-inventions https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87288/8-skeptical-early-...
    - aguyfromnb 7y ago
      >Automobiles Automobiles were developed over hundreds of years. What was the skepticism there? >Lightbulb Edison "invented" the first commercial bulb in 1879. The first electric lights were created in the early 1800s. >Printing press People were trying to find ways to print books for centuries. Copying them was laborious. Some random monk claiming hand-writing to be morally superior doesn't change that.

throwaway13337 7y ago

It's quite inspiring to see a real goal and drive towards it. Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. Such a clear goal makes it easy to have greater purpose that you don't second guess. This isn't a scheme to get rich, a zero sum political movement, or a narcissistic artistic endeavor. It's pretty unique there. There's that whole danger of a cult of personality but the project is bearing fruit.

deleted 7y ago
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grecy 7y ago
> Purpose is so hard to come by now because we all don't know what we want. When we do know, we're constantly unsure about it. This statement resonates deeply with me. Whenever I meet someone new or that I might be interested in dating I ask "What are you doing with your life?" or "What are you striving for?" and I find the extreme majority of people don't have an answer beyond "I just go to a job I don't really like" It seems very few people are seriously driven and motivated and living a life where they're pushing hard to achieve something great.
- StaticRedux 7y ago
  Why do they have to? I have that drive, but my wife is perfectly happy with a calm, comfortable, stress-free life. And in fact it helps to bring me back down to Earth sometimes also. There's nothing wrong with wanting a life that free. In fact it's oftentimes admirable. Especially at times when I'm wound so tight I feel like I could pop. If you're choosing a partner based solely on whether they want to be the next Elon Musk or not, you're doing yourself a serious disservice. And if you really ask those questions to every potential date, you should stop, because dude, wtf?
  - airstrike 7y ago
    > Why do they have to? Not speaking about (or judging!) anyone individually, but because if none of us did, we'd still be living in caves. Or, more likely, be extinct. The reason all of us are having this conversation now is because many people before us had purpose and built something

ballooney 7y ago

Settle on Mars

chottocharaii 7y ago

Humans are not biologically adapted to surviving on Mars, and for that reason, any settlement to Mars is bound to fail in the long term.

mandeepj 7y ago
I don't know how fun that would be to roam around with a helmet on your face or live in a giant doom or environment controlled building
- glouwbug 7y ago
  I imagine mars would be terraformed eventually over time. It just needs a little atmosphere to get going
  - krapp 7y ago
    Unfortunately, due to Mars' lower gravity and lack of a magnetically active core, not only can it not hold a substantial atmosphere to begin with, any such atmosphere would inevitably be blown away by solar winds. So there's that. Maybe we can put a big dome around the whole thing like Planet Druidia.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      The timeline for that process is millennia, so if we come up with a continual process for replenishment that works on shorter timeframes, it's maintainable. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-speed-of-solar-wind-stripping-martian-atmosphere https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-spee... > MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams (equivalent to roughly 1/4 pound) every second. "Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”

superbrane 7y ago

I hope he gets to solve the terraforming part of going to Mars, as well. Also, maybe he sets his eyes on colonizing the ocean space on Earth - lots of empty space in the water.

Cobord 7y ago
Do a simple lower bound calculation, and you see that Elon is talking out of his ass.

kerenua 7y ago

godspeed

Ajedi32 7y ago

The pace of innovation here is absolutely ludicrous. They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom x-ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks? They've gone from a production rate of one prototype in 8 months to one prototype every 2 weeks in less than a year. They doubled the size of their workforce in less than 48 hours. I'm gonna have to agree with the article author here: this is absolutely mad.

aguyfromnb 7y ago
>They designed and built a custom welding machine _and_ a custom X-Ray machine for building tank domes in four weeks? Can any engineer speak to whether this is actually progress, or even necessary? It seems like every time something goes wrong, Elon "invents" a way to do it better. I'm old enough to remember rescue subs, battery swaps, brain implants that will cure autism, factories spitting out factories, solar shingles, truck carriers, one-hour body shop service, tunnels at a fraction of the cost, the ability to identify squeaks in your car with your phone, robots assembling cars so fast they need a strobe light to be seen...
- peeters 7y ago
  I'm not in that area, but I struggle to find an analogue of a large pressurized tank on Earth where mass is the dominant cost factor. You might have equally big tanks on Earth, under equal pressures, but it will be more cost-effective to just increase the material used on the shell of the tank to solve your problems. Whereas in space, every kg that can theoretically be removed from the launch vehicle is worth investing in, even if it raises the cost of engineering and materials. So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >So yes it seems reasonable to me that these are groundbreaking challenges. Isn't weld strength something engineers would know/understand in advance, though? How would it come as a surprise that the welds would fail under pressure? It seems strange to me that Musk could be spending so much time working on Starship, and somehow a "badly designed, badly built, and badly checked" rocket makes it to the platform and explodes.

martythemaniak 7y ago

Slightly off-topic but apart from Mars-related things, I don't think are appreciating how big of a deal Starship/Super Heavy will be. Because space is hard and expensive, when designing payloads, they also have to be over-engineered to make sure you're getting the most out of your ride, which then makes the rockets over-engineered and expensive to make sure they don't blow up carrying the precious cargo. It's a positive feedback loop. So we end up with incredible telescopes like Hubble or James Webb, but it's literally a once-in-a-generation event. There's no tolerance for failure, so budgets and timelines ballon. What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? Why not mass-produce slightly lower quality telescopes instead of these masterpieces. The JWST's successor is LUVOIR, slated for sometime in the 2040s (!!), why not build a dozens JWST-like telescopes and use interferometry to build giant telescopes larger than the earth with higher light-gathering ability than even ground-based telescopes? This is the technique used by Event Horizon Telescope to capture the first picture of a black hole last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...

grecy 7y ago
> What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? That's exactly the premise of Starlink. SpaceX know they can launch those things 100x cheaper (1000x ?) than ever before in history, so they're churning them out and throwing them up. Even though the ones going up right now aren't "finished" it doesn't matter, because replacing them with new and better ones is so cheap.
- baking 7y ago
  400 Starlink satellites per Starship launch costing $2M is $5,000 per satellite per launch. Basically nothing compared to the eventual mass-produced cost to make each satellite which might be $100,000. https://youtu.be/Exd1IO52exs?t=361 https://youtu.be/Exd1IO52exs?t=361
  - _Microft 7y ago
    Musk recently said that they need to get Starship working because the launch cost on Falcon 9 is already exceeding the cost of the launched Starlink satellites. With a launch cost of approximately $30M and 60 satellites, they are already at $500k per satellite at most.

nsm 7y ago

This article from October 2019 also does a great job explaining the enormity of vision. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-sta...

ratsimihah 7y ago

Not a bad idea, it's a good way to save the few healthy/surviving ones if coronavirus (or nature, or humanity itself) ends up wiping all of humanity.

recusancy 7y ago

Has he ever talked about how people would survive on Mars without a magnetosphere?

scrumbledober 7y ago
most likely using martian soil as a radiation shield. Either built up in mounds around structures, or by tunneling under the ground (boring company?)
dnate 7y ago
living under big shields perhaps?
kuprel 7y ago
Is a magnetosphere what would contain the atmosphere? I remember reading that if someone did nuke the poles the atmosphere would escape anyway

kaycebasques 7y ago

I respect the clarity of the vision and the drivenness to make the vision a reality. I disagree with the vision. The best analogy I can think of right now is high school kids renting a hotel for a party and trashing it and then doing the same thing next week. That’s humanity right now. There is no Planet B until we build a mutualistic relationship with the one that created us. And yes when I say “there is no Planet B” I’m being vaguely spiritual. I believe Earth is a creature and somehow won’t allow one of its creations to explore the stars until that creation learns mutualism. But I’m also being pragmatic: A) colonialism was a big motivation in our last 2 world wars and we still have intense colonizer memes circulating through our societies B) we now have the means to destroy ourselves thoroughly C) Mars is the crown jewel of potential colonies right now.

kiba 7y ago
We can do both. Cheap and rapid space launch may allow us to put polluting industries where they belong: in space.
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  Ah, yes, the old “just shove it under the rug” strategy.
_carl_jung 7y ago
The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones. Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming.
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  > The pursuit of sustainable living and the pursuit of a multi-planetary existence are parallel endeavours, not serial ones. I agree that they’re parallel because the reality is that they’re both happening right now. I’m pointing out that there’s a huge risk in not figuring out A before B, which is that we’ll just be transporting our problems to a new planet (and if they succeed, then whoever controls Mars will be able to use their monopoly to exacerbate problems on Earth). Granted, the rocket sure is shiny, though... funny how that trick never fails ;) > Perhaps the view from Mars will instil a renewed perspective on our dependence on Earth, and teach us lessons on ecological management via terraforming. Or perhaps you’re in the equivalent of an “early internet” optimism phase around Mars exploration. We have all the resources we need here. The research around mutualistic living (renewables, land use, food waste, etc) is making that clear. If we’re glorifying hard problems, then the real hard problem is figuring out how to get humanity to share our already abundant resources equitably and peacefully. Once we solve that problem we will be ready for Mars. And to be clear I share the dream of exploring the stars. But I can’t in good faith support that dream until we shift from a parasitic to a mutualistic relationship.

zerop 7y ago

Steve jobs was super rude to Elon Musk! Right.

pjc50 7y ago

So we've accepted that we're never going to find life on Mars, and that there's no concern of "contamination"? Or is this just a big plan to build a city in the first bit of "unspoilt" wilderness we can find off planet?

dangus 7y ago

What is the benefit of settling on Mars? Until we explain that in some kind of sane way that doesn’t just involve the earth being a crutch for raw materials, it all seems rather stupid to me. Settling an earth-like planet? Sure! Seems logical. Mars? Not really.

koboll 7y ago
Ability to survive nuclear war. He doesn't just want to settle, he wants to settle with a self-sustaining colony. It's a contingency plan. We've almost plunged the world into nuclear holocaust a couple times before. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats, and rising ethnonationalist populism and climate change are threatening to strain these tensions further. This is a real risk.
- deleted 7y ago
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- giantrobot 7y ago
  I'd buy into Musk's Mars bullshit if he built a sealed self-contained colony in New Mexico. We have experience with two long term space habitats, Mir and the ISS. Despite all of the engineering know how that built both shit breaks on them all the time and needs to be repaired. They also need regular resupply because they're nowhere near self sufficient. They also need a Soyuz capsule docked at all times in case they need to evacuate. The Starship is an iterative design with seventy years of engineering knowledge behind it. Keeping humans alive outside the Van Allen belts for a long duration and then on a completely inhospitable planet has very little engineering knowledge behind it. Also to suggest a Mars colony is a contingency plan is ludicrous. In order for a Mars colony to be a human civilization contingency plan it would not only need to be self sustaining but self perpetuating. Otherwise a life ending event on Earth would just give the Mars colonists a few months to come to terms with their mortality. Then no kore humans. There is nowhere in the solar system that can support humans in the way Earth can. In fact everywhere else is so hostile we need to take significant amounts of Earth with us just to not die immediately. If you want to live in underground colonies have the Boring company build you tunnels here on Earth. At least when you need parts for the GECK you can go above ground with just a gas mask and rugged clothes instead of a bulky space suit.

schaefer 7y ago

A Linguistic Beef: The word "Starship" means specifically that the ship is capable of traveling between stars. At a minimum, it should travel from it's home star to the nearest neighboring star. What we're talking about here are "Spaceships". -- The only way I can lighten up and enjoy the name Starship in this context is to assume it's being used ironically... like someone who's named their cat "Dog".

rococode 7y ago
It's going to be really interesting to see how vocabulary changes as frequent space travel becomes a reality. This may be one of the few times in history where a field has had so much imagination invested into defining it (sci-fi stories making up words for things) before it slowly becomes a reality.
olex 7y ago
There are other vehicles called "Starship" that aren't actual starships either - the Beechcraft Starship (a twin-engined turboprop pusher aircraft) or "The Starship" (a Boeing 720 used by Led Zeppelin and other bands). It's a proper noun chosen as a name or model designation for the vehicle, as opposed to a common noun describing the vehicle itself (a spacecraft).
aglavine 7y ago
It is called after a fictional spacecraft https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-fictional-spacecraft-we-wish-were-real4.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-fictional-spacecraft-we...
weregiraffe 7y ago
>The word "Starship" means specifically that the ship is capable of traveling between stars. Well, it would be capable. Just very-very slow.
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Seen from the earth every light point in the sky is a star at first. Even planets. Or the starship itself. Or some satellites. So even if it only travels to Mars, which looks like a star to us it would be OK to call it that. Don't be so uptight!

paulcarroty 7y ago

Living without big plans & big dreams is bad, don't matter how crazy they are. Why I support Elon.

zshrdlu 7y ago

Why Mars, specifically? Why not "settle" Antarctica or Marianna's trench? Aren't these orders of magnitude easier?

vsareto 7y ago
Marianna's is probably way tougher than Mars to be honest.
KoftaBob 7y ago
The overarching goal is to have a "backup" of humanity so to speak. Having some of society living on Mars so that if something were to happen to Earth, humanity wouldn't cease to exist. Settling Antarctica doesn't solve that problem.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  About the only thing that'd make it harder to survive on Earth than on Mars is a planetoid-sized impactor. For anything else a few hardened, isolated bunkers would be a hell of a lot cheaper than colonizing Mars, at least as effective at improving human survivability, and we could start building them today. Of course I'm rooting for the Martian stuff because it's cool and may be accidentally useful (SpaceX already has been, really) and beats the fuck out of finding new ways to sell crap to people and the other garbage lots of other prominent companies do, but the goal isn't valuable per se, in my opinion.
- thu2111 7y ago
  I'm a huge Musk fan and would love to see us settle mars. But. Really. What's the threat model here? Mars is meant to be a backup of humanity. OK. Against what threat? We can think of many, but a self-isolating base in the Antarctic would survive nearly all of them with better conditions than a Mars base. Nuclear armageddon? Not much fallout over Antarctica and OK, you can't go outside of a while. Still better than Mars where you can't go outside ever. Runaway global warming? The ice will melt but at a slow pace that leaves plenty of time for adaptation, the climate will become more hospitable at the poles rather than less, and at least you will have lots of fresh water. Unlike, say, on Mars. Global pandemic? An Antarctic base can self isolate, no problem. Just lock the doors and let anyone who tries to reach you freeze to death. A serious Mars base would need some sort of border control policy too, if Musk had made it cheap to get there. Massive asteroid strike? I guess it'd wreck the atmosphere but ... well, then you're no worse off than on Mars which doesn't have one to begin with. And you're much more likely to get nuked by a 'roid on Mars where there's no atmosphere to burn it up. I dunno man. I'm trying to think of a problem that a serious Antarctic city couldn't solve and coming up blank. Short of Earth getting sucked into a black hole or something, what scenario is survivable on Mars that isn't at the poles?

immmmmm 7y ago

I don’t get the point 1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first? 2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice) 3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue) 4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea. 5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars? 6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere?

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
1) we are plain in the middle of a mass extinction event, expected to get much worst in a decade or two. Wouldn’t it be good to solve that first? I don't see why we can't do both. Maybe if you come up with an actionable plan you can start your own company like Elon and tackle that problem. 2) we need a 4th industrial revolution to survive global warming as a civilization. Wouldn’t be better to fix that first? (No, electric cars won’t suffice) No electric cars won't suffice, but they are a start. As is an increase in nuclear, and renewables in areas it makes sense. Again I don't see how this detracts, especially looking at Elon's other ventures. Maybe you can create a company that tackles the concrete problem, that's a big one. 3) is it really necessary to spoil astronomy/night sky to finance one’s dream? (No, vantablack won’t solve the issue) That's subjective and you don't know if it can be solved or not, seems they are working on it. Why do you think a non-reflective coating won't work? 4) our technology presently rely on mining 100+ elements. Does anyone here believe one can mine all of those on an a planet that misses an atmosphere? Using Earth ressources for a “colony” seems a dubious idea. We don't have to mine all of them at first. Look where we started here on Earth, from scratch. 5) has anyone an idea of the CO2 equivalent cost of bringing one person to mars? I'm sure it's negligible relatively. Was that rhetorical or do you have a number? 6) there is growing evidence that there is life in the Martian underground. Should we take the risk of destroying another biosphere? Are you talking about the ice found? The martian biosphere is already destroyed, terraforming it would bring life to the surface and if there is life it's underground and must be pretty hardy.

cstross 7y ago

This is a spectacular gamble, however Musk has a track record and I think Superheavy/Starship will pay off with unpredictable dividends. But the elephant in the room that Musk appears to be ignoring is the life sciences side of things. Only 12 humans have sortied outside the Van Allen belts (which protect us from the deep space radiation environment). Nobody has spent more than 18 consecutive months in space or reduced gravity, and we know there are biological changes that affect astronauts. The same goes triple for the plants and bacteria and fungi (never mind animals) we depend on for agriculture, and a closed-loop agricultural system and air plant is implicit in Musk's goal of a self-sufficient colony on Mars. We haven't even repeated the (failed) Biosphere 2 experiment. We need the giant payload capacity before we can test the life sciences problems in a realistic manner (small and ferociously expensive lab experiments on the ISS are useful but fail Musk's iteration test because the lead time for running one is measured in years if not decades). So we won't know if a Mars colony is even possible until some time after Musk builds the ships to put one there.

zionic 7y ago
One interesting idea I heard: Send starships in pairs. When in interplanetary coast attach each at the nose with a long (300+m) tether. Use RCS to start a spin. You can then simulate 1G the entire way.
- viklove 7y ago
  What are you building the starships out of that they can withstand those forces continuously over multiple years?
  - nopzor 7y ago
    wouldn't 1g of force be the same as they'd be subject to sitting on earth?
    - cstross 7y ago
      Starships sitting on Earth are under compression. Starships hanging from one another's nose via a tether are presumably under tension, unless the tether is somehow anchored to the engine support structure at the base of each vehicle. So some non-trivial structural modifications would be required.

tectonic 7y ago

Self-promotion: If you want weekly updates about SpaceX's progress, and about space science and the space industry in general, I write a newsletter for just that purpose: https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com

shoulderfake 7y ago

Who da hell wants to go live there seriously??

justinclift 7y ago

Wonder if friction stir welding would be suitable instead? That seems to be used when very strong + predictable welding is needed. Not sure if it's generally used for 4mm thick material though.

deleted 7y ago

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nohuhu 7y ago

So I guess this is how living in the 1960s felt like? :)

sam36 7y ago

Curious, does spacex have any work from home software dev jobs?

moonmac 7y ago

Elon needs to build himself a loony bin with thick padded walls. The children of kids not born yet will have on heck of a tab to pay back with all his constant insanity!