[dlisboa]

The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes, if ever. Maybe in the US because Musk is the government now. Just risk aversion will inhibit it, plus the economics for it will never make sense either.

Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.

[LeroyRaz]

How is a starship in anyway like an ICBM?

ICBMs are weapons, and are dangerous because you target them at specific targets and they explode.

How is starship coming down significantly more dangerous than a plane? If they can demonstrate similar levels or reliability (a huge ask), then I don't see a problem.

[lazide]

ICBM’s take a payload (warhead) and deliver it from the launch point to somewhere on the earth very far away (on another continent).

If you don’t see how earth to earth starship use couldn’t be construed as a type of ICBM, I suspect you’re thinking branding means a lot more than capability.

[mulmen]

The B-2 famously bombed Afghanistan from Missouri. That doesn’t make the 747 a weapon.

[lazide]

If you don’t think a 747 should be considered a potential weapon, then…. 9/11. Literally.

Same as trucks/cars and carbombs.

For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.

[mulmen]

> If you don’t think a 747 should be considered a potential weapon, then…. 9/11. Literally.

Yet we still have airplanes, boats, cars, sports equipment, lawn tools, and kitchen utensils. Nothing about Starship makes it more likely to be weaponized than anything else we already account for in our daily lives.

> For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.

Is “potential weapon” really the way countries view vehicles crossing borders? I have never gotten that impression. Border crossings maintain some healthy skepticism but not because a Camry is similar to an M1 Abrams if you squint really hard.

[lazide]

I’m honestly not sure what relation your comment has to what I wrote or this part of the thread.

ICBMs and M1 Abrams also exist? They also are used carefully and heavily regulated.

Heavy aircraft are also heavily regulated, and their presence near occupied areas is heavily controlled - including with fighter jets and AA installations on standby in many areas.

Car bombs are a huge issue in many parts of the world, and approaching some facilities in a car in those places without going through exactly the right procedures will get you shot before you can get too close.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be built, rather that if you expect it to be able to be allowed to go anywhere and do anything without significant security measures and/or even bans, that isn’t how this works. Because it wouldn’t be hard for it to be defacto a ICBM, just like it wasn’t hard to turn those planes on 9/11 into massive cruise missiles.

You can’t really turn a car into an ICBM the same way, correct?

[samatman]

Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive.

Trucks have blown up buildings. Anything is a weapon if you arm it.

Conversely...

[mulmen]

> Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive.

A fully fueled 747 only carries about 190 tons of fuel and 140 tons of cargo. How do electronics turn that into kilotons of explosives?

[samatman]

Centitons of explosive then. Much like a Starship.

[mulmen]

I don’t think jet fuel is as explosive as TNT so these two paratroopers would have to fill the cargo hold with tens of tons of explosives.

[Aaargh20318]

> The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes

The US military actually has a contract with SpaceX to develop this to enable cargo drops, and in a later stadium even personnel, in 1 hour anywhere on the planet.

I suspect that if you're at the point where the US military intents to drop cargo or soldiers into your country within an hour, they're not going to be too concerned with asking for permission.

[JacobThreeThree]

Just setup oil-rig style landing terminals in the various oceans.

He's already landing Starships in oceans.

People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.

[tsimionescu]

1st class is 18h of extreme comfort. Starship would be a few hours of extreme discomfort. It's very likely much of the target audience wouldn't even survive the accelerations if they were allowed to attempt it.

[hparadiz]

It's 60 minutes to any point on the planet. 100 people fitting comfortably with a lot more room than a current airliner. The G forces are meant for humans. Very different considerations. No need to bring food or have bathrooms when the flight is that quick.

[tsimionescu]

The G forces are meant for astronauts, not for regular people rich enough to buy this flight. And the whole point of first class is that you pay for luxury. The duration of the flight barely matters, the luxury is the point, and a rocket just can't offer that. There are very few situations where rich people would be willing to put up with the discomfort for a shorter trip.

Especially given that the total trip time will likely be much longer than the flight itself. Consider that you can't take off or land Starship anywhere near a densely populated area, it has to be at least a few hours away by car from anywhere that people actually live.

So you can take a chauffeur to the airport, go trough priority and special luxuries as a first class passenger until your flight for say 1h total, board your 15h flight spent in luxury, and then a limo waits to take you to your destination 30m away from the landing airport.

Or, you can get driven for 3 hours out to the Starship launch site, board the rocket, probably in a special life support suit, wait some hours on the ship for it to be filled (humans are never allowed to approach an already full rocket), fly for one hour in an extremely bare bones flight that literally feels like a roller-coaster (so forget any kind of phone access, you'll be lucky not to puke while just holding on). Then you'll arrive at your destination landing area, ready for some limo to take you on another three hour trip back to civilization.

So you've saved maybe 8-10 hours, being extremely generous and only for the longest haul flights possible, but got none of the luxuries you'd expect. And you get to pay much more for the whole deal.

Remember that the Concorde halved or less the Paris-New York trip, and gave all the luxury you could want, and still went out of business.

[fragmede]

Concorde stopped flying for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that BA was the only one flying them by the end. In a different world, had there been a robust cargo program (and a reason for one), it would not have been on British Airways to run the program by themselves and the program would have continued. This is hypothetical, of course, but the rockets are flying to deliver cargo (and people) to space anyway, so there's a lot of expertise being built up that doesn't depend on a passenger service.

I don't know if rocket passenger service will ever happen or become routine, but there's just so much to the Concorde story that simplifying it like that isn't a good case study that does the program justice.

[hparadiz]

Have you actually bothered to look it up? I have.

https://preview.redd.it/b9f14da6y0ac1.png?width=1105&format=...

You only experience anything over 1.5 Gs for 180 seconds.

Please stop making stuff up and look at the data.

[tsimionescu]

According to SpaceX themselves [0], the axial acceleration can reach up to 6g, though they do say it can be throttled, so what can be achieved in practice remains to be seen. Some graph on reddit with no other context is hard for me to trust.

[0] https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf

[mulmen]

Starship is to an ICBM what a 747 is to an F/A 18.

Noise is a major concern for sure. But when the competition takes 18 hours you can put the launch and landing sites in very remote places where that’s less of a concern then feed them with planes or trains.

Regardless of how practical you think this is it is the reason SpaceX is pushing rapid reusability.