A white elephant is a possession that its owner cannot dispose of without extreme difficulty, and whose cost, particularly that of maintenance, is out of proportion to its usefulness. – Wikipedia
SpaceX is scheduled for another try at launching its giant rocket in June. Will it work this time? By work, I mean both booster and Starship vehicle return to the ground more or less intact Each launch has done better than the previous but all three launches have experienced “disassemblies” of both its booster and its main vehicle.
This will be the fourth test in a year. Some people reckon it may need twenty launches before it is ready for its first commercial cargo and even more launches before it is ready for a crew.
It’s years behind its promised schedule.
Its design is revolutionary and promises to make reaching Earth orbit cheap and easy. It’s fueled by liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The booster and the Starship vehicle are intended to be fully reusable. Both bodies are composed of stainless steel cylinders, each with a height less than six feet, and walls less than a quarter inch thick that have been welded together. When I think of those quarter inch walled cylinders welded together, I can’t help but think of the Titan submersible. How many heatings and coolings, jarring launches and landings before something pops? I hope they have tested this some way.
Elon Musk has promised a lot from the system. He considers it to be a kind of all purpose workhorse not only for interplanetary travel but even for quick travel from point to point on Earth. The U.S. military is even looking into whether it could be used to transport troops. It is critical to Musk’s plan to colonize Mars.
I’m not a fan of Elon Musk but I am a fan of SpaceX, so I think this would be great if Starship works. And maybe it will. I doubt this is going to fulfill Musk’s dreams of interplanetary travel or much of anything else besides lifting some heavy stuff into low Earth orbit.
Do we really think business travelers are going to hop a Starship to reach Tokyo in an hour? Is there going to be another booster waiting there for the return flight? What about weather? Can it launch in rain or with a little bit of wind? Probably not. The next generation of supersonic transport is going to fill this need. An SST might need a few extra hours to get there, but it will probably be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a giant rocket. A little bit of wind isn’t going to ground it. Even if it lacks the cachet of space flight, I think I’ll take the SST.
What about space flight? The problem is that Starship has been designed as a sort of Swiss Army knife of space transport. A Swiss Army knife can be a great tool in a pinch for some things. But it is not a hammer or even a saw unless whatever you need to slice is fairly skinny.
What really is needed for interplanetary exploration are different types of special purpose vehicles that can work together, not one single massive rocket.
1- Boosters that can lift really large and heavy objects from Earth to orbit.
The Starship booster could succeed at doing this, but the Starship vehicle isn’t needed because most of this stuff isn’t coming back. This will be things destined for Earth orbit or hauled to the Moon or Mars.
2- Transports for equipment, supplies, and people between Earth and the Moon or Mars.
These needs to be big and fast, but they don’t need to return to Earth or land anywhere else. They can be constructed in orbit, but they will need to use an advanced propulsion system, such as an ion drive, that can shorten the travel times. An ion drive is under development by NASA that could reach Mars in two months.For interplanetary travel a transport will need heavy shielding to protect humans from galactic cosmic rays.
3- Landers for non-human cargo.
Landing on Mars, landing on the Moon, and returning to Earth have different requirements. A lander carrying equipment and supplies doesn’t need to be able to return to space. No need for a Starship rocket carrying equipment to Mars to blast off after arrival.These could be cheap and able to be carried by the transports from Earth orbit to their final destination. Ideally the landers themselves could be repurposed once their cargo is removed. No need for complex or heavy life support systems for humans on these.
4- Space planes for humans to return to Earth.
The Space Shuttle had the right idea for return to Earth. Sierra Space is developing the Dream Chaser space plane. We can fly or glide like a plane in the Earth’s atmosphere. Why not take advantage of it?Why build a return vehicle with a big engine that it can land upright like Starship? It’s pointless on Earth where a lighter or even jet-fueled plane can serve. A plane could potentially land on almost any runway in a pinch.
5- Landers for humans for Mars and the Moon.
These need to be able to refuel and takeoff again without an additional boosters after landing. NASA is expecting the Starship vehicle to land on the Moon. Maybe it will some day. But since we are only carrying humans and life support, the Starship may be overbuilt unless we are planning to be transporting hundreds of people. I don’t see that anytime soon.
Where does the Starship system fit into this? The booster will be wonderful when we need to launch heavy stuff. There will always be that need, but ideally we would want to move to a miniaturization approach with most satellites and exploration vehicles.The Starship vehicle might work as human landers on the Moon or Mars, but probably vehicles specifically designed for the task might serve better.
Bottomline is I don’t see the future Musk sees, but then I’m not a visionary.
[Image from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#/media/File:Full_Stack_starship.jpg]
Broad Speculations 
I don’t know, but it seems like Starship has more going for it than the Space Launch System. The SLS definitely seems like a white elephant, really little more than corporate welfare for the traditional aerospace industry. Starship seems to be taking away its reason for existing.
I like that SpaceX is trying new things. (Although not a Musk fan either.) And it does seem like we need a heavy lift capability. Although there’s long been an argument that the big dumb booster approach would be cheaper. But I’d imagine that strategy can have safety concerns for crewed launches.
SpaceX does seem to have the enthusiasm of a lot of space advocates. I think its bigger white elephant, both for the company and the wider movement, is Mars colonization. We might eventually have research stations on Mars, but I doubt we’ll see much colonization anytime soon, for the same reasons we haven’t colonized Antarctica or the ocean floors, which are paradises in comparison.
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Yeah, the SLS has its own issues. No argument about that.
As far as having more going for it, the SLS has flown and went around the moon. Starship hasn’t reached orbit or even come back intact yet. And both have been in some form of development for over ten years.
Starship could easily eclipse the SLS if it gets perfected before SpaceX and Musk run out money (although probably the government will bail them out).
Methane and LOX might work for Earth orbit and the Moon, but I don’t see it for long distance travel in the solar system Mars, the Jupiter moons, the asteroid belt, the Lagrange points. It will be too slow to maintain a permanent presence on Mars.
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If I remember right, the SLS is mandated by law to use old Shuttle technology, or at least be a conservative continuation of it. It seems like it should be much further along.
I agree it looks like all either program really enables, by themselves, is lunar and other near Earth missions. Their chief contribution to future deep space missions may be that they can lift larger stuff into orbit, so the deep space craft could be composed of larger modules.
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Like I said, the SLS has its own issues. It isn’t going to compete with Starship if Starship works. The competition will come from China which has a Starship clone.
I don’t know about “mandated to use Shuttle technology” but it does have a similar configuration. I think the SRBs and main engine are both more powerful than the Shuttle’s.
“Their chief contribution to future deep space missions may be that they can lift larger stuff into orbit,”
That’s mostly my point. Planetary exploration with people is going to require a faster vehicle. To haul the life support systems for a reasonable number of people, the shielding, and landing vehicles (assuming they are separate as I am), it will probably also need to huge. All of that has to get to orbit some way, although probably an upgraded Falcon Heavy might have been able to do it with more launches than Starship would require.
I think until there is something faster to travel about the solar system, we ought to concentrate on robotics. Eventually there won’t be anything a human can do that a robot or specialized equipment cannot. It would be a fraction of cost, no risk to human life, and a lot of spillover benefits on the economy on Earth.
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From that I’ve read, both the SLS and Starship have potential payloads close to the old Saturn V in capabilities, around 300,000 lbs to LEO. The Falcon Heavy is currently about half that. Granted, that’s largely vaporware at the moment, but still seems like something worth striving for.
But I completely agree with your other remarks. Space has been pioneered by robots, which will only continue to increase in capabilities. For humans to have a permanent and meaningful presence, humanity itself will need to change, a much longer term proposition.
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Space humors me. We’ve obviously all grown up with strong sci-fi propaganda which tells us that humanity will not only colonize other planets (as if we were designed to live on them as well as our own), but build self sustaining space ships by which we can visit these various human civilizations. So strong has this propaganda been that apparently even people who should damn well know better, remain mute regarding the ridiculousness of that hope. It’s hilarious!
Your assessment seems reasonable to me James. I personally can conceive of humanity having space stations that are humanly manned on our moon or even Mars. Not impossible. But quite expensive to operate depending upon the size. Beyond standard human entertainment however I don’t know of an economic incentive for them. One thing that we should be able to do is explore our solar system with machines that collect samples and take pictures. Beyond entertainment I doubt there will be much economic incentive for that either. Factories? Mining? I doubt they’d make economic sense. But entertainment is still something. At some point however it should dawn on people that the only self sustaining space ship that we will ever have, is the planet that produced us. Perhaps once that becomes understood, much of the appeal of space will be lost.
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I think the metals in asteroids would likely be something of value, more so in the future if we start to run out of our supply on Earth. If you saw my comment below, I think there would be spillover economic benefit to robotization and automation if we mainly use machines for pure science and exploration.
In the long long future I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of significant human presence on Mars. I just don’t think Starship will be what gets us there.
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BTW, different topic regarding EM theories. You might want to glance at this paper regarding your proposals to test the theory with implants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9714613/
It tries to address the issue of external EM fields not having much effect on consciousness. It argues that the EM fields of consciousness are directed inward to the brain’s central area.
Some quotes:
The increased and focused density of inward directed EMFs would provide stronger ephaptic control of neurons, especially those in the brain’s central regions. Placing shields or introducing EMFs from external sources outside of the skull would hardly alter inward directed energies and would, hence, not appreciably alter our brain, mind or consciousness; this is what has been observed experimentally (Lashley et al., 1951; Sperry et al., 1955). Similarly, implanted deep brain stimulating electrodes appear to produce too localized a perturbation to alter the mind’s EMF, although effects on cognition do occur in some patients (Agashe et al., 2022; Chang et al., 2022).
And
Transcranial magnetic stimulation using strong magnetic pulses are well known to stimulate brain neurons, as does ultrasonic stimulation (Sarasso et al., 2015; Sanguinetti et al., 2020). EMF perturbations on the surface of the brain or outside it or very close to the surface do not affect mental processes, whereas EM perturbations that penetrate deeply into the brain do affect mental process.
This also aligns with my thinking that the core brain activity of consciousness is more heavily concentrated in the deeper and inner portions of the cerebrum which also shows the strongest electrical activity and EM fields.
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I guess on a “strong presence on Mars” scenario, my thought is that if it’s all just tourism and governments funding it given the popular false hope of this being a step to becoming Earth independent, then once it’s popularly understood that we’ll always be Earth dependent, that money ought to dry up. Shall we extravagantly put much money into space stuff for its own sake, or instead put it towards maintaining our own world? Probably the latter in any strong sense. In space there should always be some uses for scientific experiments and observations though.
If we use up easily mineable metals here for working purposes (which seems massive to me), then we’d go more into recycling junk metal. This should be similarly massive by that time. Then after that I’d expect off world mining to become economical. But wow, that would be us using quite a lot of metal! So maybe. But I suspect that we’ll kill ourselves off long before basic metals become scarce. I see no paradox to “Fermi” — as standard we should kill ourselves off pretty fast.
Thanks for the EMF recommendation! If I have any thoughts then I’ll let you know when I get the chance.
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“…the only self sustaining space ship that we will ever have, is the planet that produced us.” Amen.
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