On Thursday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk provided an update on the Starship project currently under construction at a site near Brownsville, Texas. How much this matters to you likely depends on your interest in space, technology in general, and in just where you place Musk on the scale of All-Time Worst Asshats. That asshat rating has been informed by the recent news out of Musk’s other company, Tesla, where he apparently allowed (or even promoted) a racist culture that reached absolutely horrific levels.
As Rebekah Sagar reported on Friday, “thousands of Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory were segregated into the most physically demanding positions and forced into the lowest-level contract roles.” Not only were Black workers denied promotion and held back from management positions, they were subject to the kind of abuse and racist statements that should seem unthinkable in this century. Or any. Musk, who grew up in South Africa, “requires workers directly hired to sign arbitration agreements in order to keep complaints secret and without an ability to appeal.”
Even that is just one aspect of a man who has proven himself to be incredibly petty, vindictive, and unwilling to admit he is wrong. He has fired workers who refused to violate safety guidelines, spread the worst kind of anti-science lies concerning vaccines, and is currently sending encouraging tweets to the truckers blocking highways in Canada—truckers who, completely by coincidence, are creating supply chain problems for Musk’s competitors in the automotive industry. To what extent Musk himself may be behind funding these disruptions isn’t clear, but considering how many times he has already taken actions that got him charged with securities fraud, it wouldn’t be surprising to find his money was behind the “convoy” slow-rolling U.S.—Canada trade.
There isn’t a term sufficient to reflect just how awful Musk is, or how disappointing he has turned out to be for those who share his professed goals of increasing renewable power and electrifying transportation. Even so, it’s important to understand what’s going on down in Texas, why Musk has built a rocket several times more powerful than a Saturn V, and why he wants to build hundreds more.
Fermi, Filters, and the fall of civilizations
During his relatively brief and uninformative presentation on Thursday evening, Musk told his requisite quota of badly thought out and badly delivered jokes, while the assembled throng did their duty by laughing and cheering (except for the instances in which Musk had to let them know he had just told a joke).
He also issued a few statements that seemed a good deal more sober, such as when he said, “To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days.” It would be nice to think that Musk wasn’t doing his best to swing a hammer at the never-more-than-crystal vase of civilizations. Though he clearly is.
However, this statement is key to Musk’s whole deal.
Understanding why involves bringing up a couple of buzz-phrases: The Fermi Paradox and The Great Filter. Though I’ve written on both of these topics at at exhausting, if not exhaustive, length in the past, here’s what these ideas mean in a nutshell.
The Fermi Pardox is simply the observation that we don’t see any aliens. They’re not talking to us. We don’t see their mega-structures out there among the stars. We’re not bumping into their old space junk or stumbling across evidence of their past visits, no matter what The History Channel says. This is odd mostly because there are just so damn many stars, and so unfathomably many planets, that the absence of any evidence of other intelligent races out there is baffling. This observation was made in the 1950s by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi. Hence the name.
The Great Filter provides one potential answer to that paradox. It postulates that the reason that we don’t see civilizations out there roving among the stars is that something comes along and swats them down. There is some chokepoint, some stumbling block, some filter that either no one, or at least exceedingly few, get past. Why are there no other civilizations visible? They all got great filtered out.
A hopeful look at the Great Filter might see it as something in the past. Maybe 99.99999% of the worlds where life develops never get past the single-cell stage. Maybe civilizations tend to stumble before ever reaching the technological stage. Maybe intelligence is so rare that we really are essentially unique, and there is no Great Filter.
The pessimistic view is that the Great Filter is somewhere in the future, Maybe it’s microplastics in the water. Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe it’s nuclear war. Maybe it’s a lot of things that, put together, choke out civilizations while they’re sitting around watching sci fi movies and saying “that’ll be us, one day.”
If the Filter is still out there in the future, and many other civilizations have made it this far, then it’s almost certainly going to get us. Sorry.
And that is exactly what Musk fears. For all his protests that he’s “an optimistic guy,” it’s fear of the Filter that drives Musk’s space ambitions. If “A” is the time at which it becomes possible to send crewed ships into space, and “B” is the point where civilization has declined so that it’s no longer possible, Musk worries that the distance between A and B is very brief. He’s obsessed with getting people parked in as many places as possible to delay, or prevent, B from coming around.
Billionaires on Mars
With Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos all expressing their inner sci-fi fan by buying up or building private space programs, it’s easy to look on this as an attempt to escape the failures of this world and hie off to some spacey paradise in orbit, on the Moon, or in Musk’s proposed Mars colony. Except that’s not what this is about.
Musk isn’t going to Mars. Not now, and likely not ever. Why not? Because living on Mars is going to suck. Super suck. Then add an extra layer of suckage.
Take all the claustrophobia of being trapped at home during the pandemic and multiply by 10,000, and that’s just the start. How comfortable would you be if you were asked to live the rest of your life in a bathysphere dropped to the bottom of the ocean, where any technical failure would mean instant death? How about getting permanently exiled to a tiny Antarctic station where going outside requires lengthy preparation and just hanging onto life requires constant grinding work. Mars is going to be worse than that, by a ass-puckering factor of many. Living on Mars is going to be awful, not just or the first few to arrive, but for decades. At least decades. Maybe always.
Musk is not going. Bezos is never going to live in his proposed orbiting space factories. Branson is not … Honestly, I don’t know what fantasies Branson dreams about. Something where he gets to look “cool.”
Why are any of these guys doing this? For Musk, that do-it-now-or-die is a big part of the push, but for all of them there’s a massive dose of ego and white savior complex at work. They all see themselves at the guy who could save civilization, pat humankind on the head, and send it off to the stars. They all envision Mt. Everest being carved into a stature in their honor, and are certain that some future Federation will have a day to celebrate their achievements right next to those of Zefram Cochrane.
Recently Melinda Gates announced that she was changing her view of philanthropy, and making the radical move of asking people on the ground how things should be done. That’s essentially the step these guys have missed. They’re all coming to your school, with pre-formed, set-in-stone ideas of what’s good for you. You, in this case, being every human being who will ever live.
No big news on a very big rocket
The biggest news about Musk’s rocket this year was that there wasn’t any. For anyone who would like to see this ungodly monster actually fly (and I admit to holding my hand up for this), that’s a very good sign.
In the past, when Musk has had these little presentations, they’ve come with major revisions to the design. The size of the rocket has changed radically. The materials from which it would be built were completely revised. The capacity and thrust have gone up and down in huge steps, as has every detail of the mission profile.
There was none of that this year. In fact, just about the only news that came out of the meeting was that Musk intends to reserve the Boca Chica facility for R & D development and testing, while operational flights of the new rocket will be moved to Cape Kennedy. Which has to be disappointing for those who were beginning to view “Starbase Texas” as the world’s new navel.
That’s not to say that the design won’t change as the rocket moves toward regular operations. It absolutely will. Both SpaceX and Tesla have a reputation for constantly modifying their vehicles. The Falcon 9 rocket flying today is a much more powerful, reliable, and more capable booster than the one first launched under that name.
The Starship that is now sitting, improbably huge, on a launch pad in Texas will be significantly different from the one that delivers satellites to orbit in a few years. Or takes passengers into space a few years after that (Note: NASA has already selected Starship as the landing stage of its upcoming Moon missions, but Musk provided no new information on how that would work, and no one expects it to meet the timeline currently scheduled).
The current version of Starship is so outlandish, that it might not even work. And the reason that’s true goes right back to that Fermi-Filter thing — Musk doesn’t just want to build a few rockets that can complete the missions on NASA’s schedule or serve to get his space-based internet service to the next level. He wants to build hundreds of giant rockets. Enough to spread people around the Solar System.
To that end, everything about Starship has been designed not just to be the largest, most powerful rocket ever built, but also to meet two other standards rarely associated with rockets: Cheap and easy.
SpaceX ditched early plans that would have seen Starship created out of more traditional space materials like carbon composites and aluminum alloys and went instead for a creation of stainless steel with a skin that’s not a whole lot thicker than a beer can. It created heat shield tiles that are more closely related to something that might go on your roof than on the space shuttle. It’s working at reducing the complexity of engines so that they can be cranked out at a rate of several a day — which is necessary, because each one of the booster plus orbiter “complete stacks” of Starship will require 42 of the methane-powered Raptors.
In a move made in just the last year, SpaceX even removed the landing legs from both the booster and the orbiter. Instead, it has created a launch tower that’s also intended to be a landing tower, with massive “chopsticks” that will catch a falling rocket in midair.
Will the enormous steel stack hold up to the forces of launch? Not clear.
Can the heat shield allow the orbiter to re-enter, at speeds far higher than the Falcon 9 rocket now encounters, without melting down? Not clear.
Can a launch tower actually catch a football-field sized rocket from the air and lower it back to the pad without the operation ending in a catastrophic fire ball? Stay tuned.
They’re going to try this. And then they’ll try again. And some more. Because Musk’s ego, and billions, are both expansive enough to keep trying variations on this theme until they find one that will work, or at least work well enough, to support some version of his scheme.
And who knows. Maybe Musk is right. Maybe he will get that Mars colony set up just in time so a handful of people can watch the rest of us go up in flames — and then curse us all for the miserable life they’re living in a place unbelievably inimical to humans.
If so, I’ll join in the crew carving his knees out of the Himalayan plateau. But he’ll still be an asshole.
In other space news that everyone can enjoy, things continue to go well with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is now in the process of aligning all the mirrors to produce one single image. Unexpectedly, NASA released several “selfies” of the telescope taken by one of the smaller cameras on the probe.
The very bright mirror in that image looks white because it’s reflecting the light of a star. Other images showed how the various mirrors are currently reflecting the star in slightly different ways, reflecting (pun intended) the work necessary to bring everything together for a single sharp image.
One thing that Musk mentioned in his talk that is worth repeating: NASA’s budget is 0,3% of the total federal budget. That’s everything from Webb, to the Parker Solar Probe, to what gets paid out for SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the ISS, the whole ball of space wax. Oh, and it’s also the Curiosity rover, which continues to send back amazing images.