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Reddit-runner t1_j2aft0h wrote

Reply to comment by robertojh_200 in SpaceX launches Israeli reconnaissance satellite and lands rocket, marking 61st and final flight of 2022 by marketrent

I can't count anymore the number of discussions I had about why building a giant Mars ship in LEO with Starship will neither be cheaper nor faster than riding Starship to Mars directly.

Dedicated and highly specialised vehicles for every little task seems to be ingrained into most minds. (Honestly I blame the architecture of the Apollo program for this)

And on top of that comes the illogical dismissal of everything SpaceX/Musk, as you said.

It's an uphill battle for something that actually should excite people naturally.

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robertojh_200 t1_j2ai51v wrote

Certainly not anytime soon. I could see a space-built ship, like an Aldrin cycler, coming about down the line when we have more established manufacturing infrastructure in space already. The gravity well of earth is something that we are going to eventually have to circumvent, as it’s the single most prohibitively expensive part of space travel.

But we can’t get to that point without multipurpose vehicles like starship, the ships that will establish the infrastructure in space that is needed in order to build something like that in the first place. Colonies, manufacturing, in situ resource utilization, etc. all of that doesn’t happen until starship launches, and hopefully it’s only the first. I’m also excited about the neutron rocket from rocket lab; it’s not as powerful as starship but it is approaching the weight class as a heavy multi purpose vehicle.

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