[bumby]

>Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes

How reliable would this really be in practice? I'm thinking of all the times a projected launch has to get scrubbed and rescheduled days later. Not exactly the type of delivery uncertainty you'd want for critical equipment.

[AustinDev]

What if you have that equipment in a Starship already in orbit?

[JumpCrisscross]

> What if you have that equipment in a Starship already in orbit?

Way cheaper to have redundant assets at multiple sites on the ground.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

lol - wat?

As a former air force contracting specialist... This is completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend (Politically, physically and fiscally).

Also, no matter how much money you spend or how many bases you build, you can't get 90 minute asset delivery EVERYWHERE ON EARTH, which is every military strategists' wet dreams since alexander.

Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35. They care about effective. The check book is infinite, and slight advantage is everything.

[dragonwriter]

> Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35.

Being cheap was the motivation for everything that led to the F-35 being expensive, so, no, this is wrong: the military cares a lot about cheap, they are just very bad at doing it.

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

Being cheap is developing a next generation war-fighter that blows every other aircraft out of the water? next generation halo lenses, with advances stealth, manuverability, and rate of weapon deployment? With multiple different variety's and add ons to enable all weather and VTOL? What is cheap about the initial contraints of the project?

[dragonwriter]

The F-35 (more specifically, the JSF program out of which the F-35 was the successful contender) was conceived as a comparatively cheap multiservice, multirole fighter to reduce both initial development and ongoing operational costs by having a high degree of commonality between the conventional air force model, the CATOBAR navy model, and the STOVL marine corps model; It was also supposed to replace basically every US fighter and strike aircraft except for the F-15 and variants, which the F-22 would replace, and the F-22 itself.

As it turned out “do everything" and “be cheap” turned out to be less compatible goals than originally envisioned.

[JumpCrisscross]

> completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend

Nobody suggested building more bases. The proposed problem was launch reliability. A major reason for launch scrubs is weather.

AustinDev proposed staging in orbit [1]. I said it’s cheaper to have more than one launch location on the ground over more than one launch location in orbit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35485273

[AustinDev]

You're correct, I know that DARPA is evaluating this same equation right now.

[bumby]

Tbf, DARPA researches all kinds of approaches that never turn operational.

[bumby]

That's a good point. I would imagine that might violate some of the international laws about militarizing space, but I don't know.

Edit: it looks like conventional weapons are not banned by treaties. But I suspect that would make Starship an easy target as well.

[wolfram74]

also: this model is 9 meters in diameter, and will already be more robust to weather effects than the f9, the 18 meter diameter model would be a beast if ever built.

[bumby]

Sorry, I didn't necessarily mean from a physical reliability perspective. I was speaking to launch/timetable reliability.

[macintux]

I’d be curious how many scrubs are technically necessary, vs precautionary.

If war is afoot you’re willing to take far more risks, with the weather and with sensor glitches.

[bumby]

I imagine there's a lot to go into it. For example, if it's a one-of-a-kind weapon with a long lead time to develop, they probably have a pretty low risk threshold.

[philistine]

Exactly, but what if you're sending dumb munitions, a couple of tanks, or relief to a disaster zone?

You could spare to blow all that during takeoff. Whatever, let's try again in four hours.

[bumby]

Launch windows generally aren't open-ended and typically only last a few hours because they are orbit-dependent. That's why when a launch is scrubbed, a window often doesn't open again until days later.