What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
$50 is a number for LEO (Low-earth orbit). $/kg to a Moon orbit (or flyby) might be significantly more expensive. Not only that, because it is further so it needs more fuel, but also it is a few days trip which would need a bunch more kilos in provisioning food, water and other things. So yeah, unfortunately not that cheap to have a honeyMoon in the moon (heh)
There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.
This will probably take a few more decades, though.
Yeah it wasn't explained well in the book, but I did some reading of third-party sources and diagrams about the Uphoff-Crouch Lunar Cycler orbit, which helped (Wikipedia and the like).
That is true, I guess some weird multi billionaire might have a honeymoon there. We should see some other media as well, like movies perhaps, and of course p*rn
Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.
Besides what 55555 said, in the near term SpaceX has indeed passed at least some of the cost savings onto customers. NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads. <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>
Over the extremely long term in competitive industries, prices asymptote at ~costs. So it's still a generally useful measure, and in ~all cases, it's at least a directional indicator.
Why would the extremely long term be a useful measure, when we have no way to know how long that will take to happen, and no way to know what will happen in the meantime to disrupt it?
The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
Meta has a history of churning out MVPs and doubling down on what works. Launching with a desktop client, EU, etc are in direct opposition to a lean MVP. Meta definitely has some missteps but not sure this is one.
Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a large audience vs all the other Twitter clones. Carrying over the social graph was a wise decision imho.
The Starship analogy makes little sense as well. Starship is not an MVP and well on track to continue to push forward the state of the art of rocket engineering.
> Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a large audience
Resonate, or was simply them leveraging their current user base? I don’t think the use of an Instagram login and having your current contacts imported made it “resonate” with anyone. It was just a growth hack.
Mueller talks about “ pharmaceuticals, or materials, or semiconductors” production shifting to space. Can anyone expand on this please? What aspects of these industries is better done in space? How large (in revenue) are those portions of those industries? Thanks!
Building organs in microgravity, a potentially crucial ingredient to make the process work. From what I've seen this is the most realistic near future application.
"When you're 3D-printing a tissue culture on the ground, there's a tendency for them to collapse in the presence of gravity," he says. "The tissues require some sort of [temporary, organic] scaffold to hold everything in place, especially with cavities like the chambers of a heart. But you don't have those effects in a micro-gravity environment, which is why these experiments have been so valuable."[0]
Although I do think, taking human progression in the limit, moving to self sustaining manufacturing in space, using local raw materials (asteroids or otherwise), and dropping products back down to earth will be the natural progression. Space offers what earth does not -- infinite resources, infinite space(heh), infinite energy. Delete scarcity and what remains is purely a logistics problem.
I was rejected by YC and still point to them (namely, the combo of PG’s essays and HN comment wisdom) as the greatest single source of startup advice as I’ve built a company in the 9-10 figure range. Thank you YC! You have done so much for the startup community!
Why are they doing this? Trickle down effects for their mass market products? There is no way that the prosumer market is big enough to justify this distraction for Apple even if it used to be their core business line.
Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market. In a way, they never did "mass market". While the prosumer market may be a small proportion of the overall market, it could be very significant, for Apple, relative to the market Apple addresses.
Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.
Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market.
Small is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Apple sold nearly $11 billion worth of Macs last quarter. Once you get out of the HN echo chamber and enterprise IT circles, Macs are quite popular.
In a way, they never did "mass market".
Having an Apple Store within a 20 minute drive of 80% of the American public counts as mass market [1]. Haven't been lately because pandemic but my local Apple Stores were always packed with people. And of course there's a Best Buy, Micro Center and other regional retailers that sell Macs in places with no Apple Stores.
It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with. I've been involved in user groups since the 80's; trust me, most Mac users are just regular people—not music producers and cinematographers.
An M1 Mac mini, which certainly outperforms most PCs in it's price class. The retail price starts at $699 but is available for significantly less via 3rd parties like Amazon.
If you think of the market segment as "non-plastic computers that don't suck", Apple is doing quite well. And now that Apple Silicon performance continues to outpace the industry as a whole, this will continue.
The other segment is the "I like nice things" crowd. They aren't price sensitive; they just like nice things and Macs have that in spades compared to the vast majority of PCs.
> It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with
It's like when people say their iPhone is better quality than a $200 Xiaomi phone. Well, duh??? Why are you even comparing them? If you look at higher tier Xiaomi phones, or in your example, laptops from reputable companies such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, they're much closer in build quality, have a choice of tradeoffs ( you can choose if you want small, light, long battery life, type of screen, ports, performance, etc. and not have Apple choose), and were still quite a bit cheaper than equivalent specs Macbooks. That's no longer quite as valid for laptops due to the M1s l, but is still valid for phones.
"Prosumer" is also a somewhat vague term. It's probably supposed to mean consumers with lots of disposable income, but if you're an engineer, developer, video editor, or studio musician it just means you think of Apple hardware as a business expense.
Yep, this is the requisite "hey Hollywood I know we haven't thought about your studio needs in a while, here's a bone that reminds you why Apple is the industry standard" play.
So, you'd think, and that's certainly what I was thinking when watching the thing... but they teased a future Mac Pro announcement at the end. This is a mid-level machine, apparently (similar to the old iMac Pro, I suppose).
There is a big market of creatives/artists who basically own an apple product as a decent chunk of their personality, for good or bad. Ergo, they'll sell.
The indie professional market is more than big enough to justify this. Small films have been able to roll some pretty impressive vfx on desktop computers recently, and North American creative types tend to love Macs.
I look at it from the other side - why aren’t Dell and Lenovo and HP and Microsoft doing this? Have they given up? Is assembling commodity parts into the same computer everybody else makes the only thing they can do?
In one sense, yes. In another, though, most great artistic works draw inspiration from other earlier works, and so are arguably not a "creation" by a single human; more like an evolution, a synthesis, a derivation, a continuation...
Would Shakespeare have written Romeo and Juliet if there hadn't previously been Pyramus and Thisbe, or many other sources?
Seems like an especially smart investment. Tycoons purchasing storied media assets usually have to contend with journalistic integrity when trying to push their agenda. Binance will not have any such challenges with Forbes.
Hoping this is satire