SpaceX Starship development proceeding

[TexasTowelie]

BROWNSVILLE — While everybody has been preoccupied with coronavirus the past several weeks, SpaceX’s Boca Chica operation has been aggressively pursuing development of the Starship spacecraft intended to take humans to the Moon and Mars.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done to get there. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, tweeted on April 17: “Good progress, but 18 years to launch our first humans is a long time. Technology must advance faster or there will be no city on the red planet in our lifetime.”

Boca Chica has become the locus of the company’s Starship accelerated build/test program, which has experienced failures as well as successes over the past several months. Starship Mk1, the earliest full-size prototype, was irreparably damaged in November during a cryogenic fuel pressurization test. The next prototype, SN1, met a similar fate on Feb. 28, dashing plans for a sub-orbital test flight this spring, though SpaceX’s Boca Chica team was already building SN2.

SN2 aced a series of pressurization tests on March 8 and was retired to make way for testing of SN3, which ruptured and collapsed during testing on April 2. Musk at the time suspected a “test configuration mistake,” and on April 5 confirmed it, tweeting that the “good news is that this was a test configuration error, rather than a design or build mistake.”

Read more: https://www.themonitor.com/2020/04/26/spacex-starship-development-proceeding/
(McAllen Monitor)

[mr_lebowski]

1. A city on Mars has got to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard ...

How about you invest these resources on fighting climate change, smart-guy? You know, maybe try to save the one and only planet that can support human life within thousands of light years at minimum?

Freaking ridiculous.

[friendly_iconoclast]

2. "(F)ighting climate change". Like building non-hydrocarbon burning vehicles...

...and building mass-storage devices for renewably generated electricity?

Oh wait- he's already doing that... <insert eyeroll smiley here>

Reflexive Luddism isn't very helpful for problem-solving

[mr_lebowski]

3. I didn't say he wasn't doing that ... in fact he is, and kudos to him.

Not being a Luddite at all, I'm far from that.

Nonetheless, a city on Mars is a stupid idea, and resources to do something like that are much better spent on making Earth a better place, no matter who you are.

[NNadir]

4. Mass storage of so called "renewable energy" will be a thermodynamic and thus...

...an environmental nightmare.

Storing energy wastes energy. This has been well known for well over a century. Given that we have spent trillions of dollars on so called "renewable energy" for no result, it would be better to use superior systems designed to operate continuously and cleanly, that being nuclear energy

I wish the people beating this stale chimera, massive piles of toxic batteries, to death would realize that they are beating the planet to death.

It will not do to simply mine the shit out of the planet, destroy every pristine wilderness and leave debris for all future generations for a demonstrably false affectation which, while popular, has not worked, is not working and won't work.

[NNadir]

5. Irrespective of whatever it is Musk is selling, there was an excellent lecture on moving to Mars...

...this winter at the Princeton Plasma Physics lab by the scientist who discovered, as an undergraduate, the existence of flowing water on Mars.

It can be found here:

Science on Saturday: 50 years of Mars Exploration: What have we learned?

Dr. Ohja makes the argument that "cities on Mars" remains a rather dubious proposition, that Earth is special and unique and Mars, as a habitable planet really doesn't cut it.

Of course, Dr. Ohja has been studying Mars at a high level and he, unlike Musk, actually knows something about the planet. (He also cares about this planet, something in which Musk has spectacular disinterest.)

A corollary that I would add to his argument would be that billionaires causing further damage to the planet by expending the huge amounts of energy that would be required simply to send a few people, not a cities worth, to Mars, is irresponsible.

My opinion is that Musk is irresponsibly mucking up space in an Ayn Randian bit of self absorption that is going to have tragic consequences for future generations.