Astral Codex Ten

Starship

4 min read

Starship

Article

Starship is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 07, 2022 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “If John has more time, I’m interested in knowing how Starship changes the equation”; “To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship)“. It most often appears alongside America, Chicxulub, Earth.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 07, 2022
  • Last seen: September 18, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On "Don't Look Up"
January 07, 2022 · Original source
If John has more time, I’m interested in knowing how Starship changes the equation.
But also, Tech CEO kind of randomly builds a starship, complete with a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months. Was the starship peer-reviewed?
If some comet disassembly mission is run by a bunch of Nobel-winning scientists and led by a guy who builds starships as a hobby, I feel like asking “okay, but did he also do a Google search for ‘journal with low standards’ and then get Reviewer #3 to sign off on it?” is not a high bar.
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
I understand the frustration... but my impression is that space exploration is one of the fields where very thorough, very systematic planning with very conservative change cycles is the most promising approach to get something that works at the first attempt - even if it takes longer and costs more than planned. Compare the JWST to the most recent "Starship" launch for illustration.
This would sound plausible, except that Musk has succeeded by doing the opposite. I think this is why so many people are in love with Musk: he’s proven that valuing good ideas, moving fast, and not having bureaucracy can work, sort of, in a weird little bubble of his own creation. Yeah, the first Starship exploded, but most people predict Starship will eventually work, and when it does it will be a much more impressive feat of engineering than JWST or anything else created the “proper” way.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".