Links for October 24

Starships, LLMs, Urban Legends, Comics, Novels

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to support Bullfish Hole, you can become a subscriber with the button below. You can also leave a one-time tip at this Stripe link.

Now onto some interesting items from around the interwebs.

Above and Beyond

You’ve probably heard about SpaceX catching the enormous Starship booster rocket with a pair of giant mechanical chopsticks. I watched the launch and catch live, and on through the reentry and soft water landing of Starship itself. If you haven’t seen it yet, the full video of the test flight is on Youtube. This shorter video focuses just on the launch and catch. There’s probably a million other edits, clips, and photos out there.

Peter Hague at Planetocracy writes about the catch as a kind of inverse Challenger disaster, in which nature defeated negative PR by showing that that the crazy idea actually worked.

At Quillette, Hague writes about why the successful test flight and catch is a big deal:

Mass is the key problem of spaceflight…. In the modern commercial era, the most important measure is cost per kg—and even with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy substantially reducing costs, each kilogramme of matter sent into low Earth orbit still costs over $1,000 USD. What Starship promises is, depending on which estimates you believe, a per kilogramme cost in the range of $10–$100 USD.

The point of catching the rockets with a tower is to save mass by ending the need for heavy landing legs on both the Starship and its booster. As Musk said in his conversation with Dan Carlin on the Hardcore History Addendum podcast, “mass costs you mass.” More mass on one part of the structure means you need bigger engines, more fuel, and so forth. All of that subtracts from the payload the rocket can carry out of Earth’s gravity well.

Hague continues:

SpaceX is several years late relative to its initial timeline, and the clock is ticking for the company’s contractual commitment to NASA to deliver a human lander for the Artemis missions; and for Elon Musk’s vision of sending humans to Mars in his lifetime. Musk is demanding that once the rocket is ready, its launch rate be rapidly increased—to up to 1,000 ships per year by 2028. If SpaceX employees achieve even a fraction of the target they have been set, it will transform life on this planet and beyond.

If all that seems far-fetched, consider what the company has already achieved: The same week as the successful catch, they launched a NASA probe to Europa, sent up two rocket-loads of their Starlink satellites, and another load of satellites for an internet competitor. Falcon 9 just celebrated 100 missions flown so far this year, compared to the 135 flown by the space shuttle in 30 years of service. Oh, and while I was writing this, one of their Dragon capsules splashed down, safely returning astronauts and cosmonauts from the space station.

I’m old enough to remember a decade ago when rockets landing and taking off again wasn’t just the stuff of science fiction, but the stuff of outdated science fiction — goofily optimistic 1950s zeerust. Now it happens nearly weekly.