Starship is Misunderstood, with Casey Handmer (Terraform Industries)

[@mkt90]

if you get a dynamic usb-c mic for like $60 this will be nicer to listen to. great guest and conversation. thank you

[@Marcoose81]

Here come the Big Mic shills!

[@JoshKaufmanstuff]

100% agree

[@musicman53]

With the trajectory that Casey's Terraform Industries is on, I can see Casey becoming one of the most positively impactful persons on the planet.

[@mskiptr]

23:35 "If he's busy on Rockets he's not shooting himself in the foot on social media. But if he's just sitting there waiting for a launch license for like two months, things go sideways." lmao

[@regolith1350]

This was pretty amazing! I've been reading Casey Handmer's blog for several years, and he's one of the most insightful, forward thinking space advocates out there.

[@ankanbasak1488]

This video was actually spot on! A perfect video to recommend to someone who has no idea how revolutionary the Starship project is!

[@DownunderGraham]

I just listened to the series starting with Delta-V by Daniel Suarez on audible (you could read the books if you prefer). Obviously fictional, but still pretty interesting. I kind of liked the ideas of how we could progress outwards and the steps that might be needed.

[@DownunderGraham]

What I specifically like about Daniel’s writing (generally speaking) is that it skirts along the edge of the possible with today’s capabilities. While I love stories of the far future with worm holes and warp drives and alien civilisations and all those sorts of things, this series is just our solar system and not all that far off what we could “almost” accomplish now if we had someone with the resources who put their mind to it and/or there was the political will to make it happen. Then again, I’m not sure that there is the possibility of anything happening due to “political will” now days. Not like the moon landings of the 60’s. I think now days, the best that we can hope for is that the political side keeps out of the way of those with the financial resources to make things happen.

[@hamandchees3]

You don't need to break for ads. Just plan a question for an edit break

[@kiwigurn]

Incredible insite, thankyou for bringing this to us. Looking forward for the long form

[@x_ph1l]

I've just discovered this awesome podcast with amazing hosts and nice set of questions. Thank you! Just, please please, get yourself some inexpensive USB podcast microphone. The sound from earbuds is really bad, and I'm not really picky.

[@DownunderGraham]

And thanks for the interview. Very interesting and look forward to more in the future. Especially the 4hr Lex style version. LOL

[@MikhailBaskov]

Thank you! Great presentation! I am building my company's business case anticipating the Starship 10mln/launch prices :)

[@mskiptr]

44:00 The problem with these $120 is that Musk's insistence on "single price for the whole world" simply doesn't work when doing currency conversions. I live in central/eastern Europe and here in cities or towns the internet access prices are more like $10 or $20. And that gets you a gigabit connection usually. That's between 5 and 15 times less! In other words 400% to 1400% price difference (or 80% to 93% reduction if you want to read it that way). And that outlook will certainly not appear any better if you take a took at poorer places in Africa or Asia. So while $120 might seem like a great deal in rural America, it's just prohibitively expensive in other parts of the world really. I get that the antenna tech really is expensive. And it's fine if the kit is priced around what it costs. But the actual internet traffic itself should absolutely be priced in line with the demand and network utilization in a particular area. Make routing packets an economy and the participants will naturally find the most efficient setup.

[@davidpotter8297]

Re: 36:47 Is Mars a Business, it's a lot like fundamental research. Most lines of research don't have a profit based payoff, but occasionally one does. Look at all the very sincere lists of reasons a Mars colony can't survive, and imagine if one of those intractable problems is solved by a Martian.

[@savinobodei4656]

But imagine if just one single reason *isnt* solved...No more martians

[@williamhoward7121]

Excellent interview! I believe starship will change everything if they can resolve the fuel depot issues. All of this will go nowhere if our country doesn't wake up and remove the regulatory issues that serve no purpose other than delaying progress.

[@davidpotter8297]

And yesterday, the day this video was published, JPL announced an 8% workforce reduction. They are laying off about 530 employees and 40 contractors, after last months 100 contractors being let go. Most of the latter worked on Mars Sample Return, a wildly complicated and over budget project.

[@MicahJKelly]

Great interview! Im glad youtube finally suggested for me something that does not already have millions of views per episode.

[@SaahilAcharya]

love your guests, great work getting them to come on!! Just a friendly suggestion: the quality of podcasts in general has been going up quickly, and good sound equipment doesn't cost much these days.. pls invest in a decent microphone, so that you at least sound as good as some of your guests!

[@mskiptr]

I think you forgot to add the endcard thingies at the end

[@1975Per]

Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson, (it's a trilogy!) It's so good I've read them multiple times. It's about colonizing mars. Set over 200 years (it goes alot slower at first). It's amazing! Edit: Ooooohh my god, Casey mentioned it, hahaha!

[@johntheux9238]

The biggest market by far is streaming (television for example) because people share the same data. There is also GPS because it doesn't need much bandwidth. Internet on the other hand require a crazy amount of bandwidth and only starlink has succeeded so far.

[@starship9874]

Great interview, but please invest in a better mic! :)

[@patrickunderwood5662]

Casey Handmer’s blog is a go-to. Thank you for this interview! Some thoughts: 1. Serious synergy between SpaceX and Terrraform, as both aim to produce hydrocarbons from air using solar power. I wonder if Casey has thought about a potential, er, collaboration (ha ha). 2. Sad that much of the aerospace industry, potential customers and beneficiaries of Starship’s capabilities, will lag 5-10 years in adoption due to unwarranted skepticism. What a waste. Has the Falcon 9 story taught them nothing? 3. Interesting that one of the biggest players of all, Airbus, has already gotten the memo (Starlab). 4. Also sad that, apparently, Casey sees the Biden Administration’s many attacks on Musk and his companies as a natural and logical consequence of Musk’s promotion of free speech and criticism of the Administration. Man… that breaks my heart.

[@renderuntoseazer4884]

Im here from Alien Scientist YT channel.

[@FoxtrotYouniform]

The guest became incredulous almost immediately. The viewpoint that Solar and Wind are on the trajectory to replace fossil fuels by 2040 is one which requires blinders to ore availability, energy production site suitability, production capacity, energy transmission loss, the momentary nature of the current ESG zeitgeist (just as with all zeitgeists), geopolitical instability, before even looking at things like the ethical queation of sourcing components from the PRC which practices near functional slave labor, what we would do with all of the toxic leachates from the rare-earth processing, etc etc etc. It reeks of tech-bro monodisciplinary optimism wearing serious forecasters' pants. They dont fit.

[@nbrowne1]

He meant replace fossil extracted energy, not hydrocarbons. His company has a tech that affordably extracts CO2 from air, splits hydrogen out of water, and merges then into methane. That is the tech that will replace oil and gas drilling as it will be produced locally and be renewable

[@FoxtrotYouniform]

@@nbrowne1 tell me about what 'will' happen when at least 0.1% of implementation is done. till then, its 'solar roads' or landfill TDP or some other wonder tech or process. There have been almost as many of those as there have been people shilling them while simultaneously being unable to articulate the reasons that it will fail.

[@kennethferland5579]

Your an idiot if you doubt the Solar/Wind transition is happening. Littarlly none of the things you throw out are barriers.

[@zotfotpiq]

how close are we to NASA's saltwater nuclear engine tech? could that system be fitted to starship so it could make it to the moon and back several times per refueling? if so it may be MORE than just a stupidly heavy otherwise useless starlink LEO enshitifier. 🤔

[@pieter5466]

7:20 It's so amusing when people use the "nuclear versus solar" argument. Solar is heavily subsidized, nuclear is regulated to death! lol

[@ldm3027]

this is the dumbest scheme imaginable - the conversion efficiency from solar PV to methane (not natural gas) is ~ 25% and that is before the methane is burnt. so the overall process efficiency is just Terrable. It relies on subsidy that will not scale with the tech, which is a fatal flaw. overall a waste of money and effort

[@juniperpansy]

Lighting is 25% efficient or so. Using sunshine to create artificial light is also stupid. Very roughly only 12% energy efficiency in the whole process. But you know what, it's less stupid than all the alternatives! I'm all ears for a better way to make "fossil fuels" sustainable. Please enlighten me

[@ericmatthews8497]

Starship has one critical flaw. Requiring 10 to 16 orbital fueling missions is an extreme increase in the Operational and Logistic Complexity to ensure mission success. I think that Starship for Deep Space missions is DEAD ON ARRIVAL!! Sorry.

[@GabeSullice]

NPC arguments are lame

[@ericmatthews8497]

@@GabeSullice NPC?

[@SyntheticSpy]

With a fuel depot it’s not a very big issue. The primary mission just has to dock once with the depot and continue on. As long as it is reasonable affordable to refill the depot then it is feasible. And it doesn’t have to happen at the exact time of the primary mission, so the depot can be ready to go before the mission launches

[@FoxtrotYouniform]

I disagree about refueling missions - _if_ they can be made as routine as landing orbital rockets has become. Yes, if something goes wrong with the ship in orbit than you may lose a lot of time on a Lunar or Martian mission as a new ship would need to be launched and refueled. But, while I tend to think that Starship is extremely sub optimal in terms of servicing missions outside of the Earth system, Starship represents a stage of capability we dont currently have and likely won't be able to surpass with more optimal systems for several decades. Further, by addressing the fuel mass in orbit question, payloads to the Moon or Mars can be dramatically heavier and thus critical redundancies or backups or even capabilities which otherwise might be mass budget limited are otherwise freed of their constraints, which can extremely _decrease_ the likelihood of mission failure. Even more, the engineering can be made cheaper by being made more robust. A mission now might require a strut that is perfectly machined of exotic materials to extremely tight specifications because that is the only way to be able to fit a part to do the job with the size and weight limits - when without that it could simply use off-shelf angled steel because the size and weight matter less. $100k part vs $10 part philosophy. As yet, I dont think we have a good read on whether Starship will 'work' or not. Maybe it just can't work with current tech and materials sciences. Maybe it works but the benefits aren't considered substantial enough due to economies and funding, lack of projects large enough to require it, or any number of boring real world reasons why things don't work out. And maybe it can actually work actually work as advertised. I think it is worth finding out and refraining from making DoA prognostications as if it _does_ work and can be made routine, then the immediate benefits are massive.

[@mskiptr]

Rockets have one critical flaw. Requiring 90% of the mass of an orbital launcher to be fuel is an extreme increase in operation and logistic cost to allow mission feasibility. I think that rockets for orbital missions are DEAD ON ARRIVAL!! Sorry.