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by ricardobeat 2717 days ago
The answer is “because SpaceX is actually building a stainless-steel starship, with first test flights planned for March”.
1 comments

Unless they have quietly invented warp drive, no they aren’t.
As Scott Manley said [1] so nicely:

If you're one of those people that wants to complain about this [name 'Starship'], please show that you're also complaining of Boeing StarLiner and at Lockheed Starfighter otherwise I'll presume you're biased against Elon Musk specifically.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVgEKBwE2RM&t=41

I have never heard of the Starliner and the Starfighter went out of service before I was born but consider them both complained about too.
Test flight in this case does not equal “going to mars”, they’re doing a short 5km hop.
Are you also worried about calling people who go to space astronauts vs cosmonauts?
Should the band be called "Jefferson Band" instead then?
The frustration at the misuse of the name will only drive further attempts at building the actual thing. Except it too will likely have an exaggerated name when it comes along.
They are calling it Starship, so the parent isn't entirely wrong.
It's just pedantry about the name, must really hate the Starliner too, or the Starfighter, or anything else with the word star in it, if it can't physically get there.
If it can get to Mars then it could certainly fly itself into the sun too. Possibly wouldn't be the best use of SpaceX money, though.
Nope. It takes far more delta-V to get to the Sun than to get to Mars.

To get to Mars you need to change your solar orbit from that of Earth to match that of Mars. The difference is a small fraction of Earth's orbital velocity.

By comparison, you only need to add about 41% of Earth's velocity to escape the solar system entirely.

But to get to the Sun, you need to subtract 100% of Earth's orbital velocity. It's a colossal amount of delta-V.

> But to get to the Sun, you need to subtract 100% of Earth's orbital velocity.

Yeah, one would need to substract 100% of velocity if it wanted to land on a surface of the Sun safely, bringing the ship to a full stop. But why might one bother with the slowing down, if ship will just get melted by the heat of the Sun? You need just to rotate a vector of velocity by some clever gravity assist maneuver.

This is really interesting. Is there a connection between this fact and the universe being continuously expanding?
On the other hand where do you ultimately end up if you only add 40% delta V ?
That's so counter-intuitive. It feels like the sun is a giant gravity well and we just have to give something a bit of a shove in the right direction to fall down into the well. It's not like its rocket science.
This is a common misconception. It requires much much more energy and delta-V to send a craft on a collision course with the sun than to send it to Mars, or even to send it outside the Solar system altogether[1][2].

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5lt50r/why_does...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Interplanetary

Not technically true. To dive into the Sun requires a much higher delta-v then to transfer to Mars. If you look at the Parker Solar Probe it is using a 7 year flightpath getting multiple gravity assists of Venus to miss by 6Gm at 200km/s.
I will establish a new small company, focused on innovating hygienic facilities for starships. I will call it Startubs.
Starshits?
No no, totally fine with "starter motor" and "bastard"