It has been a long road for SpaceX to get here. It has been incredible to watch from their first successful Falcon 9 launch 13 years ago, the many landing tests and the first successful landing in 2015, then falcon heavy and the seemingly long (but actually very fast) development of Starship. The first launch was pretty messy, but I know so many of us space fans are excited to see what happens with this one!
Per Reddit scuttlebutt, Nov 13th is the earliest theoretically possible date, but it will almost certainly not happen that fast. My money is on end-Nov or early Dec.
Honestly if you are not excited about this, you should be. This is a massive milestone and could change the world for the better like very few things we’ll see this century.
I mean these launches are fun to watch, but this century we could see advances in AI and robotics that change the way we work or the way we see the world or lead to social and economic reforms, advances in quantum computing that change the way we have to do encryption or make certain computations possible that seemed impossible before, transportation innovations (hyperloop?), advances in the fight against climate change (renewable energy, carbon capture, battery technology, sustainable agriculture, international cooperation etc) such that our planet doesn't enter a death spiral, advances in healthcare (solutions for antibacterial resistance, new cancer treatments or preventions). The list goes on. Hard to see this launch being in quite the same category if I'm honest! But I'd be keen to hear your case.
Space colonization will be a turning point in a way that few other events in history can match. A few million years from now no one will know what social reforms we came up with any more than we know about the dinosaurs. But they will be looking at our footprints on the moon.
Leaving our planet is equivalent to when life grew legs and crawled out of the oceans, or the invention of fire, perhaps the implications are even greater if we learn that the Fermi Paradox is real and we are one of the few to get around it.
As much as I'm a space nerd and avid sci-fi reader myself, I'm not that convinced. We have plenty of places on earth that are more hospitable and cheaper to get to compared to space, like the bottom of the ocean and mountain tops. Some of those places even have valuable metals to mine. And I don't see people rushing to live and work there. I'm not saying space colonization can't make sense, or that it won't happen. My gut feeling is, it will happen but not in the way we envision today, similar to the vision of flying cars. Where the technology is there to make it possible, but the economics make it impractical as of now. Also the whole biosphere destruction is not gonna put our focus elsewhere, except for those that want to flee into some expensive escape fantasy.
My guess is that for the most part, the moon or mars will remain uninhabited. It will eventually become a source for mining and launching cheaply trillions of tons of materials. Humans will only really "colonize" huge castles that can house billions, gigantic structures assembled in space from lunar materials and launched from magnetic rails, bit by bit, assembled directly in their useful orbits (cyclers maybe?). With bigger and bigger mirrors and solar panels pointed at the sun, there would probably be no limit at the distance those could be from the sun.
you could launch a jwst every month because it wouldn't have to be the most complicated folding contraption ever. A ton of stuff to orbit might be about to be thousands of tons. it's like why do we have terrabit subsea cables
ok, but you still didn't give me any direct idea of how the world would be directly improved.
JWST is cool, as is starlink or whatever, but what do we plan to put in orbit that would "change the world for the better like very few things we’ll see this century" ?
Nuclear fusion, better batteries, better PVs, cancer cures, tailor-made vaccines, phage therapy, quantum computing, genomics, robotics, AIs.. all seem to have a more likely direct impact as this century's innovations.
I don't know why you people have to make up these lies. I really don't know what drives you guys to stick your head into the sand this deep. You are fully aware that the launch cost of the JWST is an insignificant part of the mission budget. You are fully aware that there is no factory that mass produces telescopes like that and you are fully aware that there is no demand for launching the same telescope over and over again.
What you might not be aware of is that the folding contraption that you deride so much is probably the simplest and most reliable part of the telescope.
What is particularly perplexing is that people hate on the mission and worship the launch vehicle.
> You are fully aware that the launch cost of the JWST is an insignificant part of the mission budget.
The reason for that is the folding contraption.
And the sunscreen.
And the very delicate instruments.
And the requirement to be extremely lightweight.
All those things combined is what led to the decades long development timeline, and the incredible cost.
If you instead have 150 metric ton of payload capacity to orbit, you don't care that you could shave 100 grams of one component. Not even several metric tons of extra weight would be an issue, when you have so much spare capacity you could just add an extra 10-20 metric ton of fuel to compensate.
Starship allows a paradigm shift in spacecraft design where weight is no longer your most important target. Nor your second or even third.
Instead you can use off the shelf components that might be twice the weight, but 1/10th the cost.
If JWST was designed today with Starship just around the corner, the final cost would have been a lot lower.
Yes, the cost would probably still have been much higher than the launch cost, but it would probably have been a lot closer $1-2 billion than the $10 billion it costed in the end.
I mean if you could hit the nail on the head more accurately and clearly: I’m not sure how.
People really don’t understand that launch costs are only a small part of reducing launch compexity, which is the side effect of larger payloads.
A lot of payloads aren’t even worth launching because of the high cost, but the payload that are worth launching are going to drop in complexity as putting them into orbit without stage deployment or super lightweight materials or any of the other massively limiting compromises we totally take for granted are going to effectively be history — that is exciting!
What would be needed to have a significantly better space telescope than the JWST? A monolithic mirror might be an good improvement, but we would still be limited by the size of the fairing.
Even better than that would be to create and grind the mirror directly in space, but this would require orbital manufacturing abilities. And this means big infrastructures, so big launches.
Or maybe we need to send a telescope a few hundred AU away from the sun tp make a solar gravitational telescope! Once again, big rocket required.
JWST is a fine telescope, but the bottlenecks we face going forward require better launching capacity.
10 years ago we didn't have reusable rockets, or mass produced satellites, or single constellations more than double the number of all others combined. We are on the cusp of having reusable launch vehicles bigger than the space station. There is no factory that mass produces telescopes yet.
I can only despondently imagine China laughing at a glacial Fish & Wildlife service review blocking US space heavy-lift capacity. While they burn all cylinders to match SpaceX.
There is a need to balance between the need to become an interplanetary species… and… get this… preserve the life support systems of the home planet.
You should be a LOT more concerned about cultures that can’t understand that. And honestly, if environmental review to make sure impacts are reasonable is what kills human progress then maybe it wasn’t progress in the first place.
Got to take care of your home if you want to have one.
This is one of the few comments that doesn't actually mention Elon at all, not sure why you posted this reply here. The comment is specifically criticizing slow bureaucracy in the US, somewhat independent of anything related to SpaceX / Elon. I think the same comment would apply if it was ULA trying to get a test launch through
Joke aside, I suspect that those people have always existed, but the debate is more polarized now and many of the people who tended to leave nuanced comments don't bother any more when it comes to Musk articles.
Looks like an organized campaign. It’s dramatic and noticeable. Probably state actor related as this site is full of influencers and definitely “on the radar.”
Like the other poster, I agree that it's likely just because conversations about him have become so polarized. I also often find myself flagging anything related to Musk, I don't even have anything against him, I just find that most of the discussion tends to be totally unproductive, often full of deliberate lies and misinformation.
Not much nuance, usually just a mix of blind fanatics who uncritically eat up the most scifi interpretation of anything he says and people pushing the usual tired, countered talking points or misinfo ("fix earth first", "slaves on Mars", "he shutdown Starlink in Ukraine", "he just bought his way into space" and so on).
It is misinfo. According to Ukraine’s authority, there was no turn-off at the moment in question. Also it was turned on at some point and there have been no problems since, at least as of September 2023. Long but worth reading interview.
”This specific case everybody's referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn't at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month. There might have been some specific cases I'm not aware of. But I'm totally sure that throughout the whole first period of the war, there was no coverage at all.
…
There have been no problems since it's been turned on over Crimea.”
See the note and footnote on that article. They had always had cells over Crimea off, they received a request from Ukraine to enable them, SpaceX refused, likely for liability reasons (as using the Starlink antennas as drone control systems is officially against SpaceX's stated policies, as such use is also not backed by the US government).
Isaacson for some reason interpreted that as them shutting it down in response, which got reported as if it were sabotage.
That's not what Isaacson wrote, and it's not even what Isaacson tweeted to try to diffuse the situation when book excerpts were published.
What actually happened, as reported by Isaacson: Elon called Isaacson in a fit one night, worried about how Ukraine seemed to be poised to use starlink to attack Sevastopol (Crimea). Isaacson reports explicitly that Elon, after much dithering, had starlink engineers secretly geofence starlink so it was disabled near Crimea.
THEN Ukraine discovered this. As reported by multiple noteworthy people on twitter and elsewhere, Ukraine had previously tested starlink's coverage, they didn't just build drone boats and hope that wherever they sent them, starlink would still work; think about how little sense that would make.
THEN Ukraine contacted SpaceX/Elon asking in a panic for starlink to be enabled (re-enabled), and Elon declined. (This is what Isaacson and Elon rely on for all their non-denial denials.)
Isaacson's "correction" of the record does not deny that Elon called that night, while "in a state". It doesn't deny that Elon reduced starlink coverage by telling engineers to do that on the down-low. It simply re-states the last thing in that series of events, that starlink was disabled near Crimea, and that Ukraine called to ask SpaceX to turn it on (really, turn it back on) and they declined.
Why would Elon have been so concerned about a Ukrainian drone-boat attack on Sevastopol using starlink navigation if such an attack wouldn't work by default? Why would he have communicated at length with Isaacson that night if Elon's narrative is to be believed?
It's tough, given all that, for me to see Isaacson's correction as anything other than a lie by omission. If he'd wanted to make a crystal clear correction, he certainly could have done so. He's a veteran journalist. He knows the art of the non-denial denial.
We knew about this last year. Even today there's no service in Crimea.
There was no service there during the Battle of Kyiv there too. At some time it will have had to be turned on for the turn off claim to be true.
>>As reported by multiple noteworthy people on twitter and elsewhere, Ukraine had previously tested starlink's coverage, they didn't just build drone boats and hope that wherever they sent them, starlink would still work; think about how little sense that would make.
Nope. They definitely had coverage just offshore Odessa. Doesn't mean Crimea is covered. Azovstal used to be covered. No reason to believe it is today
> Why would Elon have been so concerned about a Ukrainian drone-boat attack on Sevastopol using starlink navigation if such an attack wouldn't work by default? Why would he have communicated at length with Isaacson that night if Elon's narrative is to be believed?
I don’t know, because he feels like it? Ukraine has no right to use a peacetime American funded, built, and operated satellite network to command drones to kill people.
Oh, they can’t use it for X offensive or Y attack? How is that our problem? Maybe they should ask the smart people in the EU to build and operate a space weapons program instead.
In all seriousness, this has always been my belief of China's Achilles' heel: the environment. They have allowed heavy industry and many others to pollute without penalty for so long, that I think it will eventually be a significant problem for them. I recognize that they are trying to do some mitigation, but once the "well is poisoned," it can be near impossible to bring it back
China has made significant progress in cleaning up, the sky in Beijing is actually blue these days (sometimes). Now almost all of the world's most polluted cities are in India or Pakistan.
The construction of 106 gigawatts of coal-fired power was approved last year — four times more than in 2021 and the highest amount since 2015 — would like to have a word with you.
And China builds more coal powered power plants than the entire rest of the world combined.
But go ahead and educate me please. I’m open to changing my mind but I haven’t seen any evidence that shows a material shift.
China also has more solar power than the rest of the world combined, more wind power than the next 7 countries combined, and is 5 years ahead of schedule on its plan to hit 1200 GW of green power in production. And many of those coal plants are replacing old, heavily polluting ones.
I’m genuinely interested how a new coal power plant is less polluting than an old coal power planet? Particularly when carbon capture isn’t a thing yet.
For starters I don’t think ignoring the fact that China is building enough coal factories to power supply the whole of Britain can be so easily swept aside with talk of renewable progress in other areas, especially when you look at the poor quality of the solar projects that have been built.
After all, much of China’s green revolution is just that: talk. But rather than argue I’ll just share RAN RAN’s article below. Talk is cheap, especially when it’s state sponsored propaganda.
You also cannot take any one strategy for climate mitigation in isolation — earth doesn’t care about the politics only the quantities.
In a decentralized system, managing pollution has become less important than managing blame.
The world’s ability to limit atmospheric warming from greenhouse gases depends very much on China’s will and ability to control the carbon emitted by its growing economy. Currently the country is responsible for about 27% of global carbon emissions—more than anywhere else—and it will likely drive half of the growth in the world’s carbon emissions between now and 2030. And carbon-driven warming isn’t China’s only environmental problem. Air pollution alone kills more than 1.5 million people every year.
Since 2012, China’s leadership has often spoken of a “China Dream” that connects domestic environmental actions to global leadership on climate change and national revival. President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that China’s effort to address climate change is not because others have asked for it, but is instead self-motivated. Xi often speaks of green policies in glowing terms, such as “moving toward a new era of ecological civilization and the construction of a beautiful China are the most important elements to realizing the China Dream of a glorious revival of the Chinese nation.”
The world’s ability to limit atmospheric warming from greenhouse gases depends very much on China’s will and ability to control the carbon emitted by its growing economy.
Leaders in China’s central government show a great awareness of climate change issues and have devoted significant resources to comprehensive climate policies and environmental laws, while trying to lead the creation of a global climate change regime. The government’s 13th Five Year Plan, covering 2016-2020, built on previous plans to set stricter environmental and energy targets. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of these climate change policies have produced little effect, and some showcase projects appear to have failed, including the low-carbon-city pilot project and northern China’s rural coal-to-gas heating projects—both of which have become very controversial.
Within China, the gap between lofty green political rhetoric and reality is often explained by a phrase from the Yuan dynasty: “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” This analysis sees the major obstacle to China’s climate governance as local governments and officials who turn blind eyes to polluters in their jurisdictions, ignoring policies from higher up.
From this point of view, the reason Beijing’s climate change policies are ineffective is because local officials oppose the central government’s policies or refuse to implement them properly. But this is simplistic and illogical, in my opinion. Furthermore, understanding and addressing the true roots of the problem could provide a pathway to bringing implementation closer to the promise of greening China’s dream.
In fact, between Beijing’s soaring climate change agenda and its lackluster implementation lies a political paradox, and understanding it requires delving into the institutional constraints embedded in China’s climate and environmental politics at the local and national level. To start, it is useful to explore two such institutional constraints—political incentive and blame management—and the ways they defy expectations. Examining the nuances of these constraints will both explain why China’s environmental ambitions have failed to trickle down to local levels, and why local officials seem to be competent at carrying through on other polices but not the green ones.
The officials who implement national policies at the local level are party members, known as cadres, who can be considered both rational and ambitious. One of their major goals is to maximize their own political and administrative power, seeking promotion to higher positions as quickly as possible. In a democratic system, ambitious officials do this by courting voters, who continue to elect them to higher offices. In China’s system, where local cadres are competitively selected and appointed by the Communist Party, job promotion could be an effective political incentive to motivate local government officials to fully implement environmental policies.
Within China, the gap between lofty green political rhetoric and reality is often explained by a phrase from the Yuan dynasty: “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
But a closer look at the promotion system reveals why this does not occur. The major institutional mechanism for rewarding local officials is the Cadre Performance Evaluation System (CPES), administered and run by the central government. The CPES conveys information about which national policies should receive priority—detailing which are quantifiable “hard targets.” Successfully implementing a hard target is likely to help advance an official’s career, whereas failure to meet the targets could effectively end an official’s career. Accordingly, local officials value positive CPES evaluations, and so they are more likely to implement clear and quantifiable hard targets rather than vague “soft targets.”
One reason why local government officials haven’t readily adopted climate change and environmental goals is that they became hard targets regulated by the CPES only in 2011. China’s 12th Five Year Plan, released in March 2011, addressed growing environmental and energy concerns by setting binding targets in seven major areas: energy intensity, carbon intensity, percentage of renewable fuels used in the primary energy mix, emissions of major pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, forest coverage, amount of water consumed per unit of value-added industrial output, and farmland reserves. This plan was widely perceived as an ambitious blueprint for a Chinese green revolution.
One might assume that making environmental and energy goals into hard targets would encourage cadres to implement them. However, in practice, the process by which targets are set and evaluated is imprecise and often creates internal competition and conflict with other hard targets. Generally speaking, local government officials are under the impression that meeting environmental and energy targets is likely to conflict with fulfilling other hard targets regulated by the CPES, which include increasing local revenue growth; hitting goals for production of goods and services; and even restricting the number of public protests, called “mass incidents.” Though they are supposed to meet all these targets, local governments actually prioritize among competing and conflicting mandates. This is especially true because meeting environmental targets is time consuming and often requires longer term investments than other nonenvironmental ones.
When it’s impossible to meet a target through investment and hard work, local governments feel compelled to meet the target by other means—often statistical data manipulation. Such fudging has a long history in China, perhaps reaching its peak during the Great Leap Forward in 1950s, when local governments gave glowing accounts of productivity as the country slipped into famine. If local cadres are faced with too many hard targets that they cannot meet, they may manipulate the statistical data by overreporting achievements, underreporting failures, or using different statistical methods. As a local environmental official I interviewed put it: “Meeting targets is like playing a numbers game. It’s impossible to meet all the binding targets, but still we have to meet those targets by whatever measures—which means we have to produce fake data.” Another explained: “It won’t be very hard to meet those targets once you know how to play the numbers game with the central government.” The temptation for cadres to fake data is also magnified by the fact that the central government has no effective institutional mechanism for double-checking the data.
Before concluding that cheating local officials are to blame for China’s shaky environmental progress, it is necessary to ask whether the central government is aware of widespread manipulation of the data. But a review of public official documents of the central government makes it clear that policy-makers in Beijing are familiar with the problem. Therefore, the larger issue is that the behavior of local governments is legitimized by a system where they can choose whichever method of measurement will best help them meet the requirements of hard environmental and energy targets.
China is literally the second one on the list. In India almost all those cities are in and around Delhi and it’s mainly because of one thing- farmers burning the crop stubble before a new planting season. In theory something that can be easily rectified once India can get around to it.
There's a lot of Chinese rocketry startup, but like what exists in the American rocketry market, they're not up to the standard required to compete SpaceX.
Deserve to lose the next space race because of a minor delay? Too much hyberbole.
Honestly, I'm a huge huge huge Mars fan and spaceflight fan and all-things-space fan but I don't care one inch about the environmental review delays.
WTF is the point of going to Mars if we don't even care about the endangered wildlife we're killing on Earth while we go? I mean, yes, some wildlife will die in the human pursuit of spaceflight. It already has, lots of it. Humans too.
But at the end of the day, we ought to care. The whole point of going to Mars is to spread life to other words. At the very least we should observe and care about the ways we kill it here especially when in the pursuit of space travel.
Arguably turning the site into a launch facility preserves the area from even more destructive future development. Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center is some of the last pristine waterfront on the eastern Florida coast. The rocket launches keep most people away, giving more space for wildlife.
It really depends on the tradeoffs though. Preserving a handful of hyper-specific species (eradicating which would still be the worst case scenario and hardly a given) is arguably much less useful than heavy lift launch capacity.
The truth is that we are killing off the planet way faster with other means than we are with rocket development, so these decisions don't exist in a vacuum. The faster we can heavy lift tons of material in to space, the faster we will get outer-space industry up and running. The faster we do that, hopefully the less destructive we can be on earth. For example, wouldn't it be cool if we were able to mine lithium-rich asteroids instead of destroying entire regions with open-pit mines here on earth?
As I see it, expanding into space is one of the few ways we can continue to grow and progress as a species without further decimating the earth by necessity. Certain people in our society would prefer that "progress" just halts entirely and that we should care more about preserving [insert random animal or plant species here] than about the future of humanity, but I can't really agree. And more importantly, there are other players on the board that don't care at all about the externalities, so it seems important that the players who actually care try to lead the way, lest they get left behind and the environmental destruction happens anyway.
Maybe they hope to live in a planet buffet where they can all be exploited non stop and we don’t have to deal with “minor inconveniences” like the devastation of the one functional planet we have.
Mars must be getting sold by timeshare salesmen because there’s nothing but incredible hardship waiting for yet it’s somehow supposed to be our ticket. A ridiculously speculative bet in some distant future.
It’s sad that we will do anything as a society other than stop. True tragedy of the commons at play.
>The whole point of going to Mars is to spread life to other words.
I sincerely would prefer if we keep our chaotic, destructive, cancerous lifely existence out of the rest of space. The universe would be better off for it.
And before the inevitable flaggings and warnings come in: Imagine how peaceful Earth would be without us, or at least not in any significantly influential form. I sincerely would prefer the rest of the universe be peaceful.
SpaceX chose regulatory hard-mode when they put their launch pad right next to a wildlife preserve. I’m sure it had a lot of other benefits but they knew what they were getting into.
Basically all land not near a population center is some sort of wildlife preserve. Every little piece of land on earth has its own unique [insert wildlife here] and you can always find some people that think preserving that thing is more important than almost anything else.
Everywhere in the US has either wildlife or somebody's beach house. If we want rockets, high-speed rail, or whatever some turtles are going to get killed.
Yeah, can anyone with know-how chime in on this? Why did they choose to do this instead of buying a bunch of desert in Nevada or something? I'm sure there are some very smart technical reasons but I have no clue.
There’s a limited amount of sites available with an eastern shoreline. You can’t launch a prototype heavy launch vehicle over Salt Lake City (though China is notorious for this with their inland launch sites).
Elon got into it a little bit in his recent interview with Joe Rogan. If I understood it correctly, they essentially need an eastward-facing coast and all of the beaches along the Florida coast are residential. There weren't many options.
IIRC there was also a consideration for how interested the local government even was in having them. Boca Chica was also a good option because the local government was very interested. The nearby Brownsville is on the poorer end of American cities, they benefit heavily from rich young engineers coming over to the area.
Rockets launch eastwards to take advantage of the rotation of the planet to improve efficiency, and flying prototype rockets over land is frowned upon. That's also the direction satellites typically launch in.
I'm a bit surprised that Mexico, France (owner of French Guiana, the site of Arianespace launches), or other more equatorial countries haven't offered their coasts to SpaceX. Development could take place there, and government launches would take place at Canaveral and Vandenberg as planned.
Then again, the cost of shipping supplies and relocating people to a southern port would be considerable.
Because it would require overland flight of populated areas. That would be even harder to get permission for - especially with a novel and experimental vehicle.
Nobody can compete with SpaceX now without paying an enormous amount. SpaceX is launching with real customers, and it's hard to go from zero to caught up when the competition is so far ahead.
You don't fight uphill against a foe that has already won all the government and private contracts.
> Nobody can compete with SpaceX now without paying an enormous amount.
Well, if by enormous you mean maybe about five billion dollars a year, which isn’t really that much. There are clearly other reasons why nobody is seriously competing with SpaceX.
> There are clearly other reasons why nobody is seriously competing with SpaceX.
Such as? Government contracts? A monopoly on aerospace talent? The tremendous lead?
Any company trying to catch up will be starting from behind, without customers, and will have to attract talent. All while SpaceX continues to improve their own tech.
It’s a shame that they disturbed a quail nest on their last test flight and may have broken two of their eggs. They should be prohibited from launching.
By the way I was just out for brunch this morning and had the most amazing brunch with hash browns with a quail egg on top!
