It's kind of funny that we are on the verge of having too much launch capacity. Right now, SpaceX fills their launch schedule with Starlink satellites, as nobody can produce satellites for launch fast enough to fill their launch vehicles at the cadence they can be operated. And that's only for Falcon. Starship, if it works, will give us so much launch capacity that we'll be unable to fully utilize a handful of vehicles for more than a decade.
Every satellite today is at the end of a long production chain with lots of bottlenecks, finding funding for launch being only one of them. We'll need assembly lines of them to feed this rocket.
Launch capacity as a whole was never really a big bottleneck and is also driven by demand and supply. But even cutting down cost didnât really meaningfully increase demand, as Falcon showed.
SpaceX is already in the spot they cannot utilize Falcon capacity - if you look at their earlier plans, they were expecting to lunch them more than once per week long time ago. Instead, even with a bulk of their launches being internal ones, they are still way below that goal.
Assuming Starship can deliver on their design goals, weâll see if another price cut will actually drive up the demand.
It's also likely that lowering launch cost does (and already has) increased demand. But the timescales are large. It took SpaceX less time to make a reusable rocket than it will take the industry to pivot to more and cheaper launches.
But it is starting to have an affect already. There are multiple companies talking about launching and maintaining satellite "constellations", not just Starlink. Launching and maintaining that kind of network is difficult if you can only launch once a year and it costs what launches cost 10 years ago.
Starlink is the only thing that will keep SpaceX from imploding while they wait for people to understand their value.
Needing, and bankrolling, several hundred launches over several years will gradually get people used to the idea of bulk freight to orbit, and some will find other plausible uses for the capability, and shepherd the idea through fundraising channels. It will take time.
> Launch capacity as a whole was never really a big bottleneck and is also driven by demand and supply. But even cutting down cost didnât really meaningfully increase demand, as Falcon showed.
I disagree. The excess payload and cheapness of Falcon 9 created a huge market for smallsats and microsats as secondary payloads. If you look at the _number_ (not mass) of operational payloads since Falcon 9 has come online, the numbers have been shooting up dramatically (and that is excluding Starlink). There's been a 5-fold increase in the number of smaller satellites being launched (excluding Starlink) since the last decade.
See (pdf): https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/Bryce_Smallsa...
I think you argument hinges on the fact that demand shows up immediately after the price is cut. That would require there is a backlog of payloads which are just waiting for the price to be low enough. That is obviously not true, I believe lower prices are dramatically accelerating the demand as evidenced by space sector investment (1), but the demand curve is lagging because building space vehicles is hard.
(1) I could not find a good chart showing the historic Space Sector investment, but there were multiple articles talking about record amount of the investment: https://spacenews.com/space-industry-in-midst-of-transformat...
>>building space vehicles is hard
...mostly because reliability must be so high and launching mass costs so much. If you can launch mass cheaply, and accept lower reliability, space vehicles should be much easier to build.
> That would require there is a backlog of payloads which are just waiting for the price to be low enough.
Not only that, but they'd need to integrate with Starship and, right now, we aren't even sure which way the payload needs to go once the target orbit is achieved (it looks like it's sideways, while every other launcher releases the payload forward).
But isn't it SpaceX plan for getting to Mars to require something like 35 Starship sized lifts to get all of the supplies needed for one trip to Mars? Sounds like builtin needs for launch right there. Wasn't this "I can't get to space on my own so I'll sue everyone that can" Bezo's main critique in one of their attempts to make fun of SpaceX?
But who'll be paying for that trip? Does NASA have enough astronauts to crew a Mars base in addition to a Moon base? What private companies would want to do with Mars that can't be done on Earth? I'm all in for astronaut selection to be less rigorous (since I wasn't flying supersonic jets and earning a PhD when I was 18 - seriously, the bar is waaaaay too high) and would be delighted to be able to work that remotely, but I'd expect to be paid to go and have a return ticket already paid for.
We have always had too much launch capacity. You will notice that every program estimates prices based on how many launches occur a year, with the price going down the more launches there are. Large launch vehicles are less expensive per mass to orbit than small ones. There are huge economies of scale.
It isn't that SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity and so fills it with Starlink satellites. SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity because they're launching so many Starlink satellites. They only make large launch vehicles and they can only hit the prices they do if the launch regularly. If they stop manufacturing their own demand the price will rise precipitously.
SpaceX is currently subsidized by investor money. The steady state remains to be seen.
One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued was that there was no need for such a large vehicle. It was cheap per unit mass to orbit but there was not enough demand to justify it.
I am still utterly baffled by the way people are impressed by a reusable launch vehicle. This stuff is old hat. This person worked at NASA! They probably worked on systems that were launched on Shuttles!
I'm a bit baffled as to how you dont see how Falcon 9 and Starship are different to the shuttle. Much more re-usable, must faster turnaround. And hence much cheaper cost per kg to orbit. Granted that Starship might turn out to not work (Musk likes to gamble, thats what innovation _is_) but even Falcon 9 is reusable in a much more comprehensive way than the SLS ever was.
(For anyone else confused like me: codeulike is replying to a different, dead comment by the same person.)
> old hat
to be fair to them the idea is not new and shuttles could not have worked the way Space X rockets do, for that it requires sensors and computing power not available at the time.
>. It was cheap per unit mass to orbit
Cheap for whom? Governments with unlimited budgets? It was not cheap for commercial entities designing products for sure.
Saturn V was cancelled in 1968.
Back then, there were no commercial entities designing and launching satellites. The first two Telstar comsats were basically international collaborative experiments between national-level telcos; Telstar didn't actually get under way with operational comsats until the 1980s. Similarly, Inmarsat, the maritime comsat company, was founded in 1979. The first GPS prototypes weren't launched until the 1970s, and the civilian use of GPS didn't take off until the late 1980s. And in the 1960s, the only people with Earth Resources Satellites were national-level spy agencies.
Short version: civilian space applications barely existed until 1-2 decades after the Saturn V was cancelled. The current efflorescence of communications, positioning, observation/meteorology, and broadcasting satellites were foreseeable and foreseen, but the entire manifest of commercial satellite payloads through 1990 could probably have fitted on top of a single Saturn V (although the need to deliver them to different orbits, over a 30 year period, would have made this a non-starter).
Finally, NASA had a program for Apollo science missions (from 1966 onwards), the Apollo Applications Program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program
Only two AAP missions eventually flew -- Skylab (plus three crew launches aboard S-IB stacks, and a spare "lifeboat" stack), and the Apollo-Soyuz Mission (IIRC ASM used the "lifeboat" stack for the US flight). The proposed Venus fly-by was cancelled, the Saturn V launcher to carry the Viking Mars lander was cancelled, and so on.
Cheap by the metric SpaceX is optimizing for, i.e. mass to LEO / price of launch.
> One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued
What happens when launching a Saturn-V sized payload becomes cheaper than launching an Atlas V sized one?
If and when that happens I'll re-evaluate. I don't buy the SpaceX marketing about the Starship for a millisecond. (And I'm baffled why a government contractor that isn't publicly-traded is marketing to the public in the first place.)
Even without Starship it would make sense to switch from current model of unique single item satellite production to a library of standard cheap mass produced designs. Instead of one JWST that takes multiple billions and decades to complete, we can have 10 or 20 less capable satellites built on the same budget. Same logic could be applied to communication, weather, terrain mapping and other kinds of satellites.
> Instead of one JWST that takes multiple billions and decades to complete, we can have 10 or 20 less capable satellites built on the same budget
These 10 or 20 telescopes can be as capable as the JWST. And not only because they could just be manufactured copies of the original. Remember the original budget for it was about 500M. A lot of the ballooning price was because they had extremely tight weight and size constraints (for example, the sunshide had to be insanely light, because almost all of the weight budget had already been allocated)
By using Starship, weight can absolve many sins...
> By using Starship, weight can absolve many sins...
This is one reason I always liked sportscars with small engines - it's much more fun when you have the same acceleration with a smaller car. There's also little subtlety in a 10 litre V-12...
On top of that there are many new small to medium launch vehicles in the pipeline.
Astra just made it to orbit a few days ago. Firefly almost did, and might very well do so on the next attempt. Relativity is supposed to launch next year. And then there is Blue Origin New Glenn , which also may (eventually...) be ready.
The launch market hasn't really grown much, despite Falcon 9 lowering the cost quite a bit. SpaceX gets a majority of revenue from government launches.
I wonder what will happen to all those new companies.
Let's maybe see the magic rocket fly first, at the promised cost to orbit. Musk enjoys making promises about doing stuff at huge scale and fractional cost.
The entire article seems to hinge on taking all of Starship's promises for granted (not just the ridiculously low cost to orbit, but also in-space refueling and other sci-fi ideas!). I think skepticism on this very premise is more than warranted, as you're also saying. The ampunt of people who just want to believe is almost astonishing.
I don't disagree that skepticism may be warranted, but I think that people are also willing to believe in SpaceX's ability to solve hard problems, given their track record.
As far as I can tell and have heard other people much smarter than me say, there's no real physics-level barrier to any of Starship's goals. There's plenty of tough, tough engineering problems to solve, but it doesn't require unobtanium in order to work.
SpaceX has already pulled off landing an orbital-class first stage (not to discount the prior work in the form of DC-X and others, but they weren't orbital), and they've gotten to the point where they can refly those stages many times in relatively quick succession. Seems reasonable to believe that they can figure out Starship, even if it may not be in the exact form or on the exact timescale that they want.
It's important to distinguish engineering promises (where SpaceX has a great track record) and economic promises, where Musk just applies the same algorithm over and over (promise 10x performance for 1/100 the cost). I don't doubt SpaceX's ability to build an amazing rocket, but I wish there were more realism about the claimed costs of mass to orbit. See hyperloop, cheap tunnels, electric cars, batteries, you name it.
The thing is though, Starship is so radical that even if it only delivers on some of its promises (I think it will fly in one form or another), itâs going to be a game changer.
So for example if itâs not as cheap as expected, itâs still huge that it can deliver volumes larger than the interior of the ISS to orbit in a single launch â that alone means much less of a need to resort to exotic materials and expensive engineering to cut down on weight and volume on projects like the James Webb Space Telescope. It could also have huge implications for which types of orbital stations itâs practical to build.
The previous article in the series (linked at the top of the article) discusses this. The author discusses the track record and suggests that while the system is not proven yet, there is a good chance it will succeed.
SpaceX has a good track record of success with their rockets and with this project in particular. They seem to have the skills and backing to make it work, and they aren't discouraged by setbacks. Of course it is not guaranteed to succeed, but it seemed clear to me that the point of this article was to explore what could be done with starship if it does succeed.
I don't follow at all closely, but my impression of SpaceX's track record vs. Musk promises is that they're usually late but usually get there in the end, in functional terms if not in exact approach. Is that wrong?
My take is, they tackle problems whose difficulty is increasing exponentially. Making a rocket that flies, from scratch, is X% harder than building one that already exist. Making it land again, X%. Reusing it, X%. I'm also skipping intermediate points here - like about the engines have a particular closed-loop design that is more fuel efficient.
Starship seems to, again, require a few of these X% improvements. And the thing about exponential growth, as Covid kindly reminded us, is that eventually it is overwhelming.
So I don't think you can simply extrapolate from "they have a good track record of solving hard problems", because the problems they tackle are getting harder and harder.
> I know dozens of astronomers who would donate half their meager salaries in perpetuity so they didnât have to endure That Guy dragging Jill Tarter and insisting that it was an alien artifact, ever again.
This is accurate.
This sounds mind-blowing, except that current public sentiment seems strongly against space exploration and that may catch up with budgets.
Even though SpaceX does the launches, it is government agencies that deal with launching missions, and government budgets are influenced by public opinion.
I would caution against giving to much credit to social media / leftist politicians railing against spending money on space when we can use the money on earth. These people have a loud platform but I don't think most people agree with them. Similar to how so many loud 'woke' people make you think democrats are all focused on forcing workspace equality no matter the cost or anti cop. Social media and indeed traditional media (both for and against) looking for clicks has spotlighted these people but their influence is limited amongst the majority. I think most people are excited about space and mars and all for it, understanding that creating a base on mars or the moon is a completely unrelated thing to fixing global warming here on earth. I say this as someone that votes democrat.
Iâm not sure why you think current public opinion is opposed to space exploration? Itâs definitely opposed to space tourism for the rich, but thatâs a separate thing.
There's a strong anti Mars settlement sentiment going on, not just anti "space tourism". The idea, which I don't really subscribe to in this context, that we should utilize whatever resources we assign to space towards fighting climate change and fixing problems here on Earth.
It is one thing to be against a Mars settlement and another to be against space exploration.
E.g. it would serve the latter better if we would explore Venus, Europa, Titan, etc. than trying to live underground on a dead poisonous planet.
I, for one, think permanent Mars settlement is a dumb idea, but I look forward to watching someone try it.
I think mars settlement is an eventuality, someone will be there. I also think that settlement of mars has a huge first mover advantage, maybe unlike anything else in human history. It may even come before that with the first permanent lunar base and launch platform.
There were always people that opposed space exploration. Theyâve been wrong every time.
>>> public opinion is opposed to space exploration
It's always been true ;)
If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!
I donât really think thatâs the case - itâs more nuanced. Most Americans are pro space exploration [1], but against manned missions and colonization efforts [2]. I have a strong feeling most people are probably also against boondoggle projects like SLS and seemingly-constant massive cost overruns on things like JWST.
This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesnât make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a...
[2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exp...
> Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant.
When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed.
Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.
I honestly donât understand why public opinion matters so much for space exploration while the military budget is not held to the same standard.
Honestly though several really nice space exploration projects have been well founded by several governments (including India, China, Europe and North America). Some really silly projects have also been privately funded (e.g. space tourism for the rich). People are rightly questioning how people get so insanely rich that they can afford this. They ask if they are paying their fair share of taxes, if they pay their workers fairly, and which contracts the government have offered them.
If you separate those two classes of space projects I bet you would find way more support for the former (or at least some indifference) while you would find that people vehemently oppose the latter.
If you put it to a vote, majority of Americans will allocate public funds towards stimulus cheques and not the military.... what majority of Americans would allocate funds towards is not necessarily the thing that gets done.
But doesn't Starship dramatically reduce budget needs for exploration? The whole point of the essay series is to try to get institutions and researchers thinking about the economics of exploration with a steady cadence of reusable Starship launches.
Oh I get the purpose of the article and it got ME excited. However, I'm concerned about other voices which may speak out against it in the context of my original reply.
It'd be interesting to follow this thread and see if this sentiment can be heard here.
It's hard to blame the public for feeling that way when space projects run two decades behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget.
I don't know anything about this, but I was surprised to read about the light sails proposal for heating Mars.
> Mere dozens of such Starship launches would be needed to substantially increase net insolation on Mars and begin raising the temperature, without the emplacement of any surface infrastructure.
Heating sounds like a good step, but aren't the major challenges a lack of atmosphere and magnetosphere? Having one without the others seems a bit useless to me. What am I missing?
Heat should help add atmosphere to some degree. Solid co2 could gasify and some frozen water could enter the atmosphere.
If you can heat the planet up, you can start redirecting comets or asteroids rich in water ice and frozen CO2 into it to get a thicker atmosphere.
I'm looking for the day where 1000 Starships pull a million ton ice asteroid into Mars in order to thicken its atmosphere.
A million tons of ice would add more or less the water content of a medium-small fishing pond on the whole planet (or a cube with 100 meter sides).
The order of magnitude of would require stripping Ceres of it's mantle.
This writing reminds me of when popular science was good.
It really does. Brings me back to when I was kid and would pour over every issue and to learn about what the FUTURE would bring. Very impressive thoughts about the what the power of cheap scale can do: âQuantity has a quality all of its ow â really hits home.
The post mentions an expendable version at 15m d but that can't be done on either the current iteration (9m) or v2.0 (12m). The original plan was for 15m but that would require around 100 raptors to get it off the ground!
We should expect to see a bunch of alternative configurations for Starship. A big fairing is just one possibility.
On Falcon, and in the future with conventional Starship, Starlink launches are volume-limited, not mass-limited. Thus, a Starship with more interior space would allow them to send up many more satellites per launch.
When they get their production line up, we might see them launch Starlink in disposable second stages, dispensing with heat shielding and landing engines, and with substantially smaller fuel tanks, leaving room for more Starlink cargo. They could park the carriers in orbit, and gather up the Raptor engines to bring home once enough have piled up there; and maybe turn the empty hulls into a fuel depot.
Launching, say, 150 satellites at a time, that's more than a hundred launches to fill out the constellation. It should not be hard to find a use for some fraction of those hulls given they have already been boosted to orbit.
They'd need a stage0 systems built specifically to support a 15m large fairing. I'm not saying this will never happen, I just don't think it will be on the cards for a long time, if at all. Basing things around 9m/12m may be a better idea if they want to get something in the sky sooner, rather than later.
I am thinking now that if they want Starlink to be a demonstrator for their freight service, they will more likely eat the cost of launching on non-customized vehicles, and of landing, refurbishing, and re-using them, instead of leaving them in orbit.
Can you elaborate on why it can't be done? Edit: I mean 15m fairing on a 9m starship.
You'd need to build an entirely new stage0 system. How would a 15m fairing fit onto the current orbital launch pad?
Not saying it can't be done, just that it's not as simple as just whacking a larger fairing on, there are lots of considerarations to deal with. Perhaps it's worth it for 15m, but then again even a 9m would be a vast improvement from 2.4m
Could you elaborate on what that would be? You're thinking of a Starship with a disposable fairing on top of it?
TFA elaborates:
> For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
Did you read the same post I did? TFA talks about a "15 meter diameter payload fairing". I don't see why Starship couldn't do that. Full quote:
> For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
I've never heard it mentioned by anyone working at SpaceX or any commentators (bar this person, it seems).
You'd have to build an entire new stage0 system, for starters, even if you've built a new one for starship 2.0 as it wouldn't accomodate the larger fairing size.
Considering it took them roughly 2 years to develope Starship from scratch, even if that's the case, it would still be an order of magnitude lower cost than anything else, wouldn't it?
They made the Raptor work, maybe they could design a 15m fairing that would only add $50M to the price tag�
I like the idea of a ringed station made of starship shells. But I wonder if instead of making hollow starships and then having to deal with all the engines and fuel tanks when converting to a ring segment, perhaps it would be possible to make a tubular section which fits over the outside of starship like a sleeve? I suppose it would need cutouts for the flaps since that starship would ideally be reusable, and it would need to be two halves since there is no way to slide it off if there are flaps there. But IDK maybe it could work!
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