Starship and Elon Musk I am writing this article, some call it a column, on 16 April, 2023, one day before SpaceX tries to do its most ambitious launch. It usually takes about a month for one of my articles to reach being posted on my website due to the fact I like to backup articles so I have enough if I can’t write due to unforeseen circumstances. You have to do something like this when you have no employees and you are a one man band like me. I am telling you this because you will already know the outcome, by the time you read this. Sometimes I will jump an article ahead of the schedule, but only when I deem it was important enough to be moved up. So much for telling you about housekeeping on Truth Facts. I find the Starship, the giant rocket SpaceX wants to launch an incredible piece of tech. It is the biggest rocket ever launched and Musk says even if it blows up, he won’t worry about it. I think he means it will still advance the development of the rocket. I heard he had several more ready to go. With the booster attached, the rocket is almost 400 feet. If it were a building and we figured 10 feet each story, this means it is as high as a 40 story building. In Brooklyn, New York, one of the tallest buildings is the Greenpoint and it is about 400 feet tall, just to give you a reference point. In case you were wondering, the booster for the Starship is 226 feet tall and the Starship is 164 feet tall. As I have mentioned before, it is more powerful than NASA’s moon rocket and is said to be able to hold 100 people with all their gear. You can see an overview of the Starship on the SpaceX site at https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/ The Starship was started after NASA’s Artemis program which will cost NASA, which was estimated by an audit of the NASA Inspector General, 93 billion dollars by 2025. SpaceX has estimated the cost to develop Starship at between 2 to 10 billion dollars. NASA had given a contract to SpaceX in 2021 to develop a version of Starship for two flights to the moon. Musk claims he will eventually be able to launch Starship for only one million dollars, while the NASA moon rocket, again according to the NASA Inspector General will cost about 4.1 Billion dollars to launch. Does anyone else see something wrong with the contract for the Artemis rocket? I am all for the advancement of space travel, but I hate to see companies taking advantage of us and when I look at the Artemis program, I can’t help but think this is what has happened. We should have went with SpaceX’s Starship and never started the Artemis program. Will this knowledge ever change anything? I doubt it, because the powerful lobbying system in this country seems to control everything. There seems to be a strong desire for at least two uses for Starship by the government. One is for moon and Mars flights, while the other is for a very quick way to move many tons of cargo around the world fast. An estimation of the amount of cargo it can carry is 150 tons to low earth orbit. From low earth orbit it could circle the earth in 90 minutes, so it could reach any point on earth in an incredible shot time. I had read it could even carry far more tonnage if the rocket was expendable. As huge as the Starship is, it could be ushering in a period where even bigger rockets will be produced, before we figure out how to use more efficient means of space travel. Let’s face it, rockets are ancient technology and have just had more power added to them. Sometimes, things keep getting bigger until better technology is found. It happened to the with steam powered trains. Even before that it happened with horses, then chariots, and finally wagons, before truck and cars came along. Elon Musk seems to have an incredible head for space travel and is liable to come up with some other great ideas. Who would have thought it would be possible to land a rocket vertically? He did. We had all seen this in science fiction movies, but no one I know about ever considered doing this before Musk. Not only was this a great idea, it meant the rocket could be far more reusable and we didn’t have to search for where they splashed down in the ocean. I am very interested in what Musk is thinking about Mars, after all, one of the reasons Starship was developed was to take people to Mars. Does he have ideas about what a colony on Mars would look like or need to survive? I know one thing he thought about and that was sending spacecraft ahead of people to Mars with all sorts of supplies so when the people get there, they are ready to create habitats and have all sorts of resources. I imagine the supply ships would keep coming until some day the Martians, that is humans, can become self-sufficient. To make this happen I think the planet would ultimately have to be terraformed, but in the beginning domed, pressurized enclosures could be built to house the colonists. This way, they could grow their own food and perhaps keep animals, or maybe grow meat in a lab. We have been making great progress in this area. Another thing to consider is space flight will become much cheaper for people, instead of the millions of dollars it would cost, it should be much cheaper. Remember Blue Origin charges 1.25 million dollars just to get you into space for a couple of minutes. Virgin Galactic is one third the price, but where are you really going? A trip on Starship to Mars will probably take six to nine months, not a couple of minutes. Starship is just getting started and seeing the way Elon Musk thinks, it will keep getting improved. Look at what he has done so far, improved his launches and made them almost routine. There is always some amount of danger, but when we watch a SpaceX launch of any type, most of us feel they are safe, and the launch records would indicate an incredible record of safety so far. Update: Starship blew up but much data was gained from it. It was so powerful, it destroyed the launchpad as it was launching.
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