SpaceX offers a mind-blowing plan to build a robotic launch platform to catch a falling booster, and reassemble the next space flight vehicle on the pad. Elon Musk believes he can handle three Starship lift-offs daily to ferry construction supplies to a Martian city. The future is finally better than the future was.
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26 replies on “Mechazilla: Mind-blowing SpaceX Plan to Launch 3 Starships Daily to Build Martian City”
I’ve been greatly enjoying your coverage and our shared excitement for this project, fellas. Keep your eyes on the skies; there is much more coming and I see it as cause for authentic hope. I’ve had the singular thrill and humbling honor of being part of the Starship team since April (currently on booster flight software, where I see my main job as not fouling up a perfectly good rocket), and have felt appreciative awe on a daily basis for the brilliant and skilled people who are designing and building the hardware we’re flying at an astonishing pace. You are exactly right that the point is not one or two rockets but an efficient process for building them and an entire fleet of Starships that can operate continuously to take human beings and the supplies we need to the Moon, Mars, and who knows where after that. New frontiers are about to open (once again), and in that I’ve found the most encouraging array of possibilities I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. Freedom will find a way.
Wernher Von Braun wrote a Science Fiction in 1949 called Marsprojekt or Project Mars. It was only translated into English in 2006 in Canada.
Guess the name of the first president of Mars in that book?
It means Oak tree in Hebrew. Elon Musk’s Mother is Canadian.
Correct, Steve. O’Neill cylinders. Nice pull. Stanford Torus was the other popular one. Put 1 at L4 and 1 at L5.
I was almost an L5 society member but the paper work beat me. My life membership in the National Space Society has expired three times. Once they just forgot me. The second time was September 11 2001, the organization was in Trade Tower one. All staff, records and models were lost the staff were last seen hauling hoses up stairs. Both were ex-astronauts. The third time the life membership expired before I did. lol. Kirby Ikin and Robert Zubrin sold me that life membership in Canberra way back in the 1990’s.
For those who may not know, DD Harriman is a character in Robert Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold the Moon”. It is one of Heinlein’s Future History stories and details how one man pushed manned space flight to happen. It was written in 1949 and published in 1950.
Interestingly, DD first appeared in a story called “Requiem” about his death on the moon; written in 1940.
Read TMWSTM first, then Requiem. It might get dusty at the end.
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Bob Heinlein stole (borrowed? quoted? dunno …) that epitaph from Robert Louis Stevenson, whose work some of which I also enjoy. That poem is inscribed on Stevenson’s gravestone in Samoa. It amply applies to both Stevenson and D.D. Harriman.
3 a day will take almost 46 years bill.
The text errata in this episode and the backstage episode correct bill’s estimate of 50,000 launches to 10,000. At 3/day, that would take 9 years and change. But it’s fair to assume there would be delays *and* multiple launch/recovery pads.
So, a date of 2050 doesn’t seem unreasonable. I would hope it happens by 2040 or even 2035, giving Musk a strong chance of taking the trip to the (partially finished) colony.
However, even if the cost per vehicle comes down, 10,000 flights of fuel, payload and infrastructure sounds like more than even Musk can afford – even if he’s making a ton of money from Starlink and similar enterprises.
Elon Musk is the modern day incarnation of Robert Heinlein’s “D.D. Harriman”.
I don’t want to say Elon Musk is going to be wholly successful in his Mars project because as Bill points out “you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it”. The technical hurdles are considerable so we’ll see what we’ll see but …
I’m willing to take bets that like D.D. Harriman was buried on the moon, Elon Musk’s final resting place will be Mars.
As I mentioed below I’ve been reading past Through Tomorrow – if that book were written today I’d swear that Harriman was based on Musk!
BB – I have read that Anthology many many times. Amazing that most were written in the 40s and 50s.
I seriously never considered those aspects of Heinlein to be prophetic until Musk came along and proved ol’ Bob to be a visionary.
Harriman was actually thought to be based on a wealthy family well known in Heinlein’s day. I don’t know for certain and as he’s dead we will never know but … It fits to think Heinlein was trying to goad the Harriman family into private development and investment in space exploration. Too bad that didn’t work, if that was the case. We’d have been a lot further along now than we are. Considering the government predilection to over-bloat and under-deliver I mean.
They were RailRoad family, right?
I can’t remember (sigh). I know they were prominent in industry (could have been the railroad industry?) and several family members were also well entrenched in the US Diplomatic Corps in various capacities.
I think Musk has said, I want to die on Mars, just not in a crash landing.
I agree Musk = DD Harriman. Mostly because I have said it many times.
Sorry, my intention was not to steal your thunder. It’s just that every time Musk comes up with another seemingly miraculous innovation in private space exploration D.D. Harriman pops into my mind.
LOL no worries. great minds think alike. I just can’t seem to convince Scott to give the old guy a try.
Heh – I love how this thread has become a Heinlen book club meeting
🙂
It would make a difference on where he started, I think. I can’t say as I thought much of “I Will Fear No Evil” though in hindsight it is also somewhat prophetic. It’s just that the kooks aren’t actually putting their brains in bodies of the opposite sex, they’re keeping the same bodies and brains and relabelling them. Much simpler but less valid that the context of “I Will Fear No Evil”.
Steve’s in favor of starting the Babylon Project. Our last best hope to make a quick buck.
I’m no Musk, but on one wall of our basement we have “The Great Wall of Gaming”. It’s a wall w/ 5 TVS, with the following complement: 1) Atari / Roku, 2) Super Nintendo / extra speakers, 3) Switch / Antenna / DVD / Air TV / Sound Bar, 4) Game Cube, and 5) Wii / Roku / stereo.
When Sister Babe asked why I needed this, I proclaimed myself the Steve Jobs of Chareu D’ Bob : You ask why; I ask “why not?”
As evidence, here’s how I watched the return of college football
On Ron Swanson’s recommendation, I’ve been reading Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow this summer. This feels like the future that Heinlein envisioned and we’ve sadly failed to realize
Multiple thumbs up. Been trying to get Scott to read this for years! I may have to send him my copy.