Really interesting. I remember scratching my head a little about stainless steel. It’s durable but heavy, cuts into payload fraction, and probably not what you would pick if the goal was to shoot interplanetary. At least not for the upper stage. Maybe for the big chunky reusable booster, but there aluminum probably makes more sense. Falcon is aluminum so it’s already the devil they know anyway.
I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.
You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.
I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.
But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.
The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?
China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.
North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.
Without discounting the possibility of him being fully russia-psyopped, always keep in mind that elon MUST put forward some nonzero pro-Russia face because he is a diplomatic point of contact in an increasingly tenuous diplomatic situation between the US and Russia on account of his company lifts Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the regular
[−]actionfromafar · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:50 UTC ·
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Why do you think there is a country interested in attacking the US? I don't think there is a single country interested in doing so.
> If not Russia than who?
then*
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:55 UTC ·
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First off, I think this is all conspiratorial nonsense. But as for Golden Dome - it's more about offense than defense. The reason MAD works is because if you destroy another country then they also destroy you. But if you can negate the latter part, then you're simply left with 'you can destroy another country.' In other words if you can negate an enemy's ability to retaliate, then you can nuke or invade whoever you want, without concern about retaliation.
The geographic location of the US would make this basically a godmode type 'weapon' because a conventional invasion of the US is practically impossible since you'd need to bring mass number of forces across an ocean and those ships would simply get popped. Even coming through South America wouldn't really work because the Isthmus of Panama could just be hyper-fortified. And even then you still have to get to South America! But the US' chosen enemies are somehow half-way around the world, and we have plenty of proxy armies we can throw against them. And when our victims retaliate against our proxies then we'll support them with a powerful army of flags, emojis, and slogans on social media.
All that said, this still doesn't work. Nuclear fallout would affect the globe, with a Russia-US conflict estimated at driving some 5 billion deaths from climatic effects alone. [1] Missile defense will likely always lag behind offense simply because offense is akin to shooting a bullet at a giant stationary target, whereas defense is akin to shooting a bullet at a bullet. It requires a massive technology disparity to be effective. And there are also other forms of nuclear strikes than missiles - such as nuclear created radioactive (and super sized) tsunamis. And if a country really wants the flashing red button, then a salted nuke could likely kill off most of all of humanity (and everything else on Earth), let alone any given country.
I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.
You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.
I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.
But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.
The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?
China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.
North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.
Without discounting the possibility of him being fully russia-psyopped, always keep in mind that elon MUST put forward some nonzero pro-Russia face because he is a diplomatic point of contact in an increasingly tenuous diplomatic situation between the US and Russia on account of his company lifts Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the regular
> If not Russia than who?
then*
The geographic location of the US would make this basically a godmode type 'weapon' because a conventional invasion of the US is practically impossible since you'd need to bring mass number of forces across an ocean and those ships would simply get popped. Even coming through South America wouldn't really work because the Isthmus of Panama could just be hyper-fortified. And even then you still have to get to South America! But the US' chosen enemies are somehow half-way around the world, and we have plenty of proxy armies we can throw against them. And when our victims retaliate against our proxies then we'll support them with a powerful army of flags, emojis, and slogans on social media.
All that said, this still doesn't work. Nuclear fallout would affect the globe, with a Russia-US conflict estimated at driving some 5 billion deaths from climatic effects alone. [1] Missile defense will likely always lag behind offense simply because offense is akin to shooting a bullet at a giant stationary target, whereas defense is akin to shooting a bullet at a bullet. It requires a massive technology disparity to be effective. And there are also other forms of nuclear strikes than missiles - such as nuclear created radioactive (and super sized) tsunamis. And if a country really wants the flashing red button, then a salted nuke could likely kill off most of all of humanity (and everything else on Earth), let alone any given country.
[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0