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by JumpCrisscross
263 days ago
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> That's a bit of a re-branding No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO. > How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communications outside our ecology versus based on wires strung through it. Let's reverse the question. For the environmental impact of space launch, what else do we do that's more-agreeably useless? |
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https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+movie+mars&oq=spacex+...
Google tells me exactly this:
>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."
It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.
Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.
There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.
It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.