I thought HN of all place is free of faked outrage or ignorance?
Even if Starship was the dirtiest of a rocket (it isn’t), a rocket flight is only as dirty as a B777 flight, thousands of them happening everyday.
Try this exercise. Measure how much carbon incurred by an activity that you absolutely love, such as playing video game, and see how much you could contribute by not doing it. A lot of activities is worth doing, even if there is inevitably carbon cost, even if you don’t think it’s worth it.
Fuel is one of the cheapest portions of launching a rocket. There’s much bigger problems to solve on that front until they start launching commonly. Once they do then moving to sustainable methane won’t be an issue.
Also what’s the alternative right now? Hydrogen made from the same methane by steam reformation? We don’t even have long range aircraft running on anything but jet fuel, which is more polluting than methane.
Nothing about Starship is incompatible with carbon neutral fuels.
The point of Starship is Mars; Mars cannot be done with Starship in the absence of a box that fits in its own cargo bay, and which takes in sunlight, CO2, and water, and outputs methane and oxygen.
Fortunately some French scientists figured that out how to do that 126 years ago.
They are spooling up commercial passenger rocket flights (for cross-continent travel) in 5 years and won't likely have renewable sources by then, they have already put in or filed to put it pipelines for petro industry gas sources in Texas.
They gave the timeline for entering passenger service competing with long haul aviation back in 2018, sayijg within a decade. Years later they reconfirmed that timeline.
You're willing to buy his estimate for a timeline about a thing you don't like (I've seen him talk, even he knows his timelines are optimistic, and he shows much the same optimism about FSD) while totally ignoring the thing invented before any living human was born and which is already deployed in various places?
Well first off, that's Elon time dates, and secondly even if you take it at face value, 5 years does seem reasonable to me for when substantial carbon neutral methane may start getting made.
> , 5 years does seem reasonable to me for when substantial carbon neutral methane may start getting made.
Like this?
> All Tesla Supercharger stations in regions affected by California power outages will have Tesla Powerpacks within next few weeks. Just waiting on permits.
And:
> Over time, almost all [superchargers] will disconnect from the electricity grid.
> Tesla Supercharger will over time allow you to travel anywhere on pure sunlight for free
It really doesn't make sense to disconnect them from the grid if they aren't next to tons of solar, their physical footprint often isn't big enough to capture enough.
