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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Monday, October 17, 2022

Does anyone really know what Elon Musk's "Starship" will cost to launch from earth?

I posted the following question on reddit: "Does anyone really have any idea, at all, what Elon Musk's "Starship" will actually cost to launch on a regular basis? Estimates vary from 1 million to 5 billion dollars a launch. That's three and a half orders of magnitude difference. Obviously, a cost of just a million dollars to put a hundred tons of material into earth orbit would open up a lot of possibilities, including orbital gas stations. While a cost of five billion dollars wouldn't even allow the vehicle to be credible to get astronauts to the Moon, let alone Mars, since its fuel capacity is only half a Saturn V or an SLS. So, does anyone really have clear data to prove what launches of the "Starship" would actually cost? And, I don't mean what Elon Musk says, since that usually doesn't mean a great deal, at all. Anyone have some real, meaningful data here?" Best Answer from Ask Physics: "Elon Musk's Starship is fictitious at this moment in time. Any estimate of cost is about marketing the idea and not related to the actual cost." I also posted on the reddit Spaceflight site, but just got a bunch of accounting gibberish from NASA and Elon Musk enthusiasts about how it was possible, somehow in the future, to bring costs down to almost nothing, because the materials involved weren't very expensive, at all. And, after all, once the Starship gets mass produced, the labor costs will be quite minimal, too. Uh-huh. So, really, the fact that it's cost 10 billion dollars to build just one of them, which doesn't even work yet, is really totally irrelevant. Makes sense, right?

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