A thing I find mind-blowing is that if this concept succeeds, that I and everyone reading this will be able to afford to go to low earth orbit on a relatively modest salary within the next ~20 years (conservatively).
This feels like quite a difficult reality to internalise given we all grew up seeing only a select few exceptional people, with the stars aligning in their career, be able to do that.
Long before heading to orbit, I'm excited to just get a front row seat for the launch of a fully loaded Starship. Apparently, being in the NASA guest stands for a Saturn V launch was mind-blowing and this would be double that.
Hopefully, SpaceX will set up some kind of excursion package where you get a Starbase tour, a primo front row seat to a launch and a limited edition T-shirt. Forget Taylor Swift tickets for >$1K when Starship can literally rock my world.
Spectators were kept about 3 miles from Saturn V launches, so you could build a REALLY WIDE stadium for Starship launches. The Circus Maximus wouldn't have ANYTHING on it.
We might be less than 50 years out from Starship or similar launches being as boring as a plane taking off or a train passing by.
I'm hoping it's more like 5 years to Starship launches being 'routine'. Maybe I'm an irredeemable optimist but that would at least be more similar to the curve of Falcon launches being 'routine' (I concede that to some of us, orbital launches will never be considered routine – no matter how frequent).
I'd even lay 50%-ish odds that they'll do back to back payload launches in 30 days or less by the end of next year. That'll of course depend on things going very well over the next few months so they manage to get a Starship to orbit and back on the ground at the launch site this year.
I saw an Atlas V launch at KSC in January 2017, from the LC-39 observation gantry, and it was incredible. Highly recommend seeing a launch – any launch! – if you have the means and opportunity.
> When it comes to the G-Forces being pushed on you, many roller coasters have peak G’s at or above these limits. Most people are probably familiar with the different rides at Walt Disney World so let’s use those for examples. At EPCOT, Mission Space is a centrifuge-based ride where you go through a simulated launch and landing on Mars. The sustained G’s on that ride is 2.5 G’s, close to how many G’s New Shepard will experience during launch.
> For the descent, Blue Origin says you must be able to withstand 5.5 G’s, if you ever rode Rock ‘n Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you would have experienced up to 5 G’s during the initial launch of the ride.
Epcot Mission Space (the "Orange" version) is pretty intense as it's really sustained G-forces, but manageable. During the ride, you have to reach in front of you to press some buttons, and that's when you feel the G-forces most. But for SpaceX/BlueOrigin, passengers do nothing.
Rock n Roller Coaster itself for the peak G is done by kids, not a big deal.
This is slightly misleading - what matters isn't the peak G force experienced, but moreso the integral of force over time. In a roller coaster you might experience 5Gs, but only for a moment. Astronauts experience 3G, but for up to 5 minutes continuously
On the Gravitron, a centrifuge carnival ride in the shape of a flying saucer, riders experience 3Gs for minutes. Best carnival ride as a kid, we rode it continuously for ages.
Oh god, I will never forget that ride. I was at a carnival when I was around 13 or 14 and rode that ride, and midway through it had a malfunction. They stopped it to address the issue, and then decided to give us an extra long ride to compensate for the problem. When it was finally over and I was about ready to stagger off of it, the operator got on the mic and said, “who wants more?!?” Seemingly everyone but me screamed for more. At that point I was too sick to make any sounds at all.
That night, hours later, as I lay on the floor of my friend’s bedroom (it was a sleepover), trying to fall asleep, I still remember feeling like the room was spinning. I never went back on that ride.
Funny, something really similar happened to me! 14 years old, at a friend's birthday party at Magic Mountain. The Superman ride was new. That's where you get into a bullet shaped gondola and get shot up a vertical tower, with a giant statue of Superman at its apex, go briefly weightless and then freefall backwards until you curve flat and brake to a stop. Never big on roller coasters, I got peer pressured into this one.
I didn't like it all that much. But what scared the hell out of me was when, on descent, the brakes malfunctioned. This caused the gondola to go screaming backwards past the platform where the next riders were lined up, fly through some butcher curtains and go crashing into a padded wall in a hidden cinder block cell at the end of the track.
We all sat there for a minute pretty stunned, and then some goofy employee came running out and jumped up on the front of the car. "Whoops! That wasn't supposed to happen!" He said. "But I have some great news for you! Who wants to go again??"
My brother and me tried this ~4 years ago (we are adults, but still, carnival is fun). I handled it well, but my brother was traumatized. I think you ought to check each future passenger if the sensation of being compressed and having troubles breathing won't trigger a phobia.
The area under the curve doesn't matter if the peak isn't big enough.
A physically fit person can probably live normally at 2g all day with no problems other than feeling tired af until you get used to it and all farts being dangerous.
I know it's not exactly the same as living in a 2g environment, but many people seem to live surprisingly long lives with a body weight that is several times what it should be.
I rode Epcot Mission Space Orange, and I didn't realize it was a centrifuge. I thought it just cleverly tipped you on your back to simulate G-forces. It certainly felt real, so it's neat to know that it was.
You can absolutely use engineering to limit the g forces. It's just a matter throttling back the engines near the end of a stage and/or staging sooner. For example, Gemini peeked at 6.4g, Apollo peeked at 4g and the Space Shuttle peeked at 3g.
3g is low enough that most humans shouldn't black out, even without training.
I'll also point out that professional astronauts are expected to remain functional for the entire assent (including emergencies, where g forces might peek much higher), which is not required for passengers.
I remember reading that the Titan 2 pushed so hard that even the astronauts, who were pretty tough test pilots back then, were happy when the engine finally shut off.
Astronauts also need to be able to survive 1) high g reentrues (apollo reached 7 gs on reentry) and abort modes, which can be very high acceleration indeed
For example, the space shuttle uses it's wings (and body) to generate quite a bit of lift and spread the reentry over a much longer period. the g-forces during re-entry. It's 10min at 1.7g.
Though that's from LEO. Apollo came in directly from the moon at a much higher velocity, resulting in ~7g; For the Apollo missions that never left earth orbit, reentry was more like 3.5g.
A space ship aiming to carry untrained passengers will pick designs and mission profiles that are within their passengers abilities to withstand for both launch and reentry. Apollo picked a design and mission profiles with 7g reentry acceleration because they knew their trained astronauts could withstand it.
As for abort.. it's only limited spikes of high-g you only need it to be survivable for the passengers, while the pilots need to be able to control it.
Most are. If you have certain heart conditions, you might not know you have them, and then die. That's why it's likely that they'd require an ECG (and maybe have an age limit and require generally reasonable health/fitness), but if you're a reasonably healthy adult, it should be fine.
Forces depend a lot of the specific vehicle. The space shuttle peaks at 3 G, I've seen numbers from 3.6 to 4.5 (again peak) for Crew Dragon on the way up, 3-5 on the way back. Soyuz seems to be 4 on a good day and 10 on a bad one, plus the momentary forces during landing.
Since we put anyone willing to pay a few bucks on carnival rides that sustain (!) up to 3 G for minutes, and the profile can likely be adjusted at the expense of reduced payload capacity, I don't expect this to be a big problem.
If William Shatner can do it in his 80s, I'm pretty sure that a substantial fraction of the population can do it.
Don't get me wrong, Shatner has worked hard to keep himself in shape. And he didn't get to orbit. But if you keep in shape (and are rich or famous) it may be an option.
Will Shatner was 90 when he was on a suborbital launch with Blue Origin. Given his wealth and access to quality healthcare etc. he was probably a decent amount healthier than the median 90 year old, but given that he was able to do it without issue I imagine the vast majority of humans under the age of ~60 or so can definitely manage.
Perhaps a lot of people wouldn't agree and I admit I'm stirring up debate a bit to see what other people think.
To me it seems if we see orbital success in the next 5 yrs, mass production of starship thereafter and SpaceX sticking to their Earth-to-Earth transport idea - this seems plausible. Airliners developed about as quick, but then again its a far harder environment - it's nice to dream.
Airliners also developed in the context of a state supported system that used regulated high ticket prices and mail route subsidies to keep the industry alive for any needed pivot to military aircraft. I don’t know that there is the stomach for such a system today.
The C-5 Galaxy can transport 127 tons and land at normal airports with at least one order of magnitude lower per kg prices. A C-17 can transport 77 tons. More importantly they can actually unload their cargo once they land. A Starship would need either special facilities or an as-yet undersigned integral crane to unload cargo.
I remember reading that that use case doesn’t really exist, especially for the US military. Stuff they need a lot of, they pre-stage, and an airborne invasion requires massive logistics, including the entire follow on ground invasion. It’s not just a matter of getting the paratroopers there quickly.
Pretty much the only airborne assaults considered still viable are airfield seizures. There is quite a bit of risk from ferrying troops to the drop zone and the time they are in the air (under canopies after exiting the aircraft). So, if the assault force can basically come "out of nowhere" and be on the ground in seconds rather than minutes, then much of the risk is reduced. Logistics can be brought in to the seized airfield in short order once secured.
I could see potential US Army interest in this concept. I think they would want the Starship to land horizontal rather than vertical for rapid disembarking though. I.e.: A ramp drops from the nose cone or similar. That doesn't seem very feasible.
While that's a good point, there are some situations they can't really pre-stage in without that in itself causing serious problems. Taiwan springs to mind.
So if some magical way is developed to have Starship land and offload it's entire cargo in <super short time>, before it's shot out of the sky, I wonder if that would be useful. Perhaps even as part of an effective deterrent strategy?
That doesn't include the cost of a vehicle that can support you for a week and re-enter and land safely, and does not include cost of ground systems to support the mission and recover you. Nor training or regulatory compliance costs. It's just the mass to orbit.
Even if Starship delivers everything promised, I doubt orbit would be within reach of wage earners. Similarly we could afford to pay for a ship to drop a few tons of rock off Guam, but going to the bottom of the Mariana trench and returning alive would be a different kettle of fish.
Every kilogram of mass added to the return trip increases the required deceleration, fuel, etc. Not cheap. At some point you can't reach orbit with the required fuel to get everything back. The Falcon 9 boosters are nearly empty when they come back. As a matter of fact, at least one of their early landing failures was because they cut the fuel load too close and ran out of fuel just before reaching the ground. Minimizing weight on the return landing is critical.
If a single one of those bridges is anything like launching astronauts to the space station in a reusable private spacecraft and launch system from american soil, it's worth buying.
"looks like marginal cost of launch will be less than $1M for more than 100 tons to orbit, so it’s mostly about fixed costs divided by launches per year"
Not trying to nitpick you here. Just hoping to correct some of the confusion that results from playing Telephone with secondary and tertiary sources.
I used to think that being born a millenial was a curse for realising those kinds of dreams. But as someone who's not an influencer and who's not interested in overpriced suborbital carnival rides I'm more than happy to be proven wrong.
> I don't think going to "fake space" for a minute is really going to be interesting by the end of the decade.
Not sure what you're referring to as "fake" here. LEO? Is the ISS fake space? If Starship fully succeeds it should make trips to and from the Moon and Mars.
I think they are referring to the sub-LEO suborbital hops that are being advertised as "a trip to space". Just high enough to clearly see the famous "blue marble" but nowhere close to being able to sustain an orbit or actually classify as being "in space".
Well kind of but speed isn't a really useful metric until you have a circular orbit.
Knowing speed won't be able to tell you whether you are suborbital (but it will tell you if you are on an escape orbit). However knowing your periapsis (elevation at lowest point in orbit) will tell you whether you are suborbital. It's only at the point where your periapsis is close to your apoapsis that speed is actually useful.
Any metric other than periapsis will require 2 components to describe that the orbit isn't suborbital. Periapsis only gets away with it by implying that the second component is at least as high up as it is (apoapsis is always higher). The other useful metric would be velocity (speed + direction) but while that's something you can easily and immediately measure, periapsis & apoapsis (aka height) are far easier to visualize.
There usually are reasons for real estate prices that you can’t know from basic stats.
Also about the point of being unaffordable, your first listing basically doubled since the last sale a few years ago, so in relative terms things aren’t looking too good. The second one’s estimate seems to have gone down recently, which tbh in this environment makes me think there is something very wrong with the house or the area and I would research the crap out of it before even considering looking at it.
There are thousands of homes in this price range on Zillow across the country.
Hell is most of the US you could buy a trailer and some land, bit of solar and batteries, build out a cesspit and start building something piece by piece.
Of course you can’t be 20 minutes from Times Square if you do that. But 100 million people want to live in Manhattan, and they can’t all do
If you are used to U.K. standards, living in Quitman GA might be a bit of a shock.
Why not take a vacation there? Looks like there's a regional airport in Thomasville only a 30-minute drive away, but it looks like it's too small to serve passenger planes. You might need to fly into Jacksonville FL, and drive ~2 hours from there.
People seem willing enough to allow enough lack of housing that thousands are needlessly homeless now. What's a few hundred thousands more? So many people already don't consider anyone to be real people once they are homeless.
This feels like quite a difficult reality to internalise given we all grew up seeing only a select few exceptional people, with the stars aligning in their career, be able to do that.