It really breaks basically every human spaceflight architecture. It's a two element architecture (with common propulsion, simplifying development for the booster) that accomplishes every goal of virtually every other interplanetary human spaceflight architecture conceived. This simple architecture (while avoiding the huge penalties of single-stage vehicles) means that it can be developed extremely cheaply.
It really is a gamechanger in spaceflight. All of spaceflight.
400 satellites per launch? For maybe an incremental price of about $40 million near-term and $4 million long-term? That's, um, $10,000 per satellite. That breaks every model of space development.
And it's not like all of this was unforeseeable. Even Werner Von Braun proposed refueling-dependent human spaceflight architectures in the 1940s (in his fictional book about exploring Mars) that would enable low cost. But for historical reasons, human spaceflight took another path.
from wikipedia "In late 2001, Mueller began developing a liquid-fueled rocket engine in his garage and later moved his project to a friend's warehouse in 2002.[1] His design was the largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine, weighing 80 lb (36 kg) and producing 13,000 lbf (58 kN) of thrust.[1] His work caught the attention of Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, and in 2002 Mueller joined Musk as a founding employee of SpaceX."
that's a hell of a lucky find by Musk and a hell of a roll of the dice by Mueller. Around the same time is when Shotwell joined, she's equally incredible but in a different way. i don't now how Musk found her.
Even then, what followed has been black swan territory. Every major development announcement at SpaceX is met with "you're crazy" and laughter from the industry and yet, a few years down the road, there it is working. Again, i really want to know what went so right.
The reason he was tinkering on small engines in his garage instead of designing big engines for his employer, TRW, was that after designing the best American first stage engines (the TR-106 and TR-107), it became clear that it didn't matter that his engines were better, for political reasons it was impossible to kill the RS-25 program (also known as SSME, or Space Shuttle Main Engine), and therefore any future vehicle would use them instead, despite them being strictly worse for any use other than for the Space Shuttle. This was immensely demoralizing to him, and he was considering just quitting the industry and doing rockets as his hobby. Then Musk managed to convince him to work at SpaceX, for a much lower wage (and stock options, but the rational early valuation for rocket company stock is $0), mostly on the promise that at SpaceX, his engines would actually fly.
The NASA program of record heavy lifter, SLS, is still using the designed-in-70's RS-25 now, 25 years later, and plans to toss 4 of the $40M engines into the ocean on every flight. SpaceX is what happens when you build rockets with actually modern technology, instead of all the components NASA is forced to use because some senator needed to maintain employment in his home district.
NASA did no such thing. They were ordered to use the engine by the Senate.
(When the Constellation program was canceled and the SLS program was created, Senate ordered NASA to pick solutions that "minimize contract cancellation costs". Not minimize total costs, minimize costs related to cancelling contracts. This of course means that the contractors you are already using can offer any solution they want, at any price they want, and so long as they are willing to waive the contract cancellation penalties as part of their package, you have to pick that solution.
They all offered a really expensive, really bad deal. I know several NASA engineers who quit in disgust because of this.)
Even when dedicated non-military rockets began to appear, e.g. the Ariane range and the Space Shuttle, they had dependencies on legacy infrastructure that was originally designed for strategic weapons (i.e. it was intended to work at peak performance, just once). The payloads evolved to reflect the launch system constraints, so very expensive, one-of-a-kind comsats and earth resources satellites, each of them a bespoke design (or at most one of a dozen or so).
SpaceX isn't building missiles; it's optimizing for reliability and cost (which means reusability). More like airliners than missiles. This doesn't mean low performance (the efficiency and power density of a modern civil airliner turbofan would have been a jaw-dropper to 1940s military aviation engineers) but it does mean the performance goals are different.
I am still extremely skeptical that Heavy/Starship will facilitate a Mars colony ... but that's because I'm skeptical about the economics and practicalities of building an off-planet colony when the externalities we normally take for granted (like a compatible biosphere) aren't available and nobody's really done the necessary R&D work on self-contained biospheres -- even the ISS is effectively an open-loop system dependent on constant resupply. (Biology and ecology are much harder than they look to a naive outsider.)
Neal Stephenson has a pretty good article about path dependence in space exploration: https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s...
I wouldn't be surprised to see a small settlement for research or something in my lifetime. Maybe something like what we have in Antarctica.
The next step would then be something like a Bigelow B330 module in LEO, which is close enough to get the astronauts home from in a hurry if something goes badly wrong.
(These steps can be commenced with current tech: Heavy/Starship not required.)
Step 3 would be a bigger test hab out beyond the Van Allen belts, preferably a couple of habs revolving around a hub to provide centrifugal "gravity" at Lunar or Martian levels. Goal is to test systems for use on planetary surfaces exposed to cosmic/solar radiation (because outside our atmosphere). Starship is probably mandatory for this phase, because it's a lot more massive and a lot further away. Alternatively: conduct this experiment on the Lunar surface, once astronaut return capability is available (but why waste expensive reaction mass if you can simulate a gravity well?)
Without a lot of R&D work under these conditions, a closed-circuit life support system for Mars is a huge safety risk for the astronauts who set it up (and who are too far away to rush home in a hurry if it goes badly).
And without closed-loop life support, a Mars "colony" is no more a colony than an Antarctic research station reliant on resupply for everything except air and water.
Also his system strategy is : the best design to use is one that doesn't require the design in the first place. Ie get rid of many systems. Keep it simple. Less can go wrong, and the schedule is reduced. "Tight is right. Long is wrong". He did a great talk last month.
You guys might like a video I'm releasing on Halloween, "the actual, physical, reason why time slows at the speed of light". My channel is "TheRainHarvester". Stay tuned...
I don't know much about SpaceX, but I do follow Tesla closely: how much of this is reality versus "things we'd like to be able to do in the future"?
For example: is the rocket really "rapidly reusable"? Or is it theoretically "rapidly reusable"?
In the same way that all Tesla's sold since 2017 have the hardware capable of self-driving. Are they really capable of it, or theoretically capable? Until you have self-driving software or have rapidly reused the rocket, how do you know? In the same sense, until they landed a rocket, saying "we have a rocket capable of landing" didn't matter; landing it did.
I may not be articulating it properly, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding how they test these claims.
We assume Falcon-9 first stages are really reusable, right? Not that they are claimed to be reusable, or they are theoretically reusable, but really reusable.
Then the question is, what is the criteria to be really reusable? Would only direct demonstration be enough? Then of course Starship isn't real. If there are other ways to claim real reusability, then maybe Elon's plans are real(istic). Also, historically, Elon claimed something for SpaceX before which later became real.
There aren't currently proofs that Starship isn't possible to create (with parameters similar to stated).
I think we might just do stuff in space because we WANT to do it. Stuff like space tourism, etc.
To take asteroid mining as an example: The entire platinum group metal market on Earth is only about $10-20 billion per year. Adding a huge supply is likely to crash the market price well before you drive demand up high enough to compensate for the far lower price. So platinum-group metal mining is not huge.
Mining water is also a very small market. You're primarily replacing rocket propellant for launch vehicles or maneuvering, but this is a small market. The entire commercial launch market is about $3 billion per year in revenue. Adding non-commercial launch may more than double it, but you're still talking less than $10 billion per year. And propellant (or propellant services) is going to be a small part of that. It won't help get payloads to LEO, so you're left with just providing services from LEO to GEO or something like that. Maybe for deep space missions... But even that market is very small. NASA makes up the majority of world funding for deep space exploration, about $10 billion per year optimistically. Propellant is a small fraction of that.
So for water propellant, we're looking at maybe $100 million to $1 billion per year in revenue.
For structural materials, the market is even more speculative and less proven.
Space settlements are going to be small revenue, too, for the foreseeable future. NASA human spaceflight, philanthropic, and space tourism are really the only consistent funding sources there. The settlers themselves won't be super rich as they'll need to be sustaining themselves, but let's just say we have 10,000 settlers each able to spend $100,000 for your services per year. That's just $1 billion per year. To get truly sizable, you need like a million people living in space, and it's still only $100 billion per year.
So it's primarily telecom that is the big space market. The others are much smaller and less profitable. It turns out that serving billions of Earthling consumers is where the real money is in space.
EDIT:
There are 3 big (trillion dollar) markets:
1) telecomm
2) energy
3) high speed transport (aviation)
Space can in principle address all three. The first one is the only real "slam dunk," the other two are questionable to one degree or another. SpaceX is pursuing 1 and 3.
The profitability of mining asteroids doesn't come from bringing the metals back to earth and selling them on the traditional market: It represents the ability for spacefaring communities to build their own ships for a much lower cost than building and launching terrestrial rockets on Earth.
Furthermore - Space Stations, orbital manufacturing plants, multi-generation starships, solar arrays - all of these become incredibly cost effective when the metals used to make them become hypersaturated from asteroid mining. It's a means to an end, but by no means is it without value.
Space based energy requires a way to send the energy to the surface for monetization. The three ways to do this would be 1) Wireless transmission -- infeasible with current level tech at the distances required. 2) Wired transmission -- requires materials with very high tensile strength in quantities never before produced. 3) Deorbit batteries -- You spend more energy launching/deorbiting and distributing batteries than you gain.
High speed transport (ground to orbit, and interplanetary) have huge problems in scaling, but it mostly can be solved with current level engineering.
It's just a difference in scale. To get high efficiency, low cost radio amplifiers, you need to operate at relatively low frequency (think microwave oven magnetron, but modified to follow a phase and frequency input). Rectification of this has also been done. But you're going to need an enormous aperture on both sides to make it happen. That means, to me, you need on the order of 10 Gigawatts to be feasible (rough, back-of-envelope calculations). And even then, you need an enormous plot of land, preferably in the desert. So you're basically competing with cheap solar power backed by cheap batteries. Both of those are improving in cost every year. So it's possible. Feasible, even, if we had no other options. But it's not going to be competitive from what I can tell.
So it's the same type of scaling problem as #3. Except the main issue with #3 is safety: passenger aviation is just so ridiculously safe it's extremely hard to compete with.
Not the most ethical business plan, mind you....
Aluminum was a precious metal for a few decades. Royalty used it for their best forks and spoons. Now we make airliners out of it and the aluminum producers are doing just fine.
Space mining is made out to be the pie-in-the-sky paydirt of space dreams, but it's still a much smaller market than telecoms.
1. make more space habitats
2. live
3. breed
4. astronomy
Once you have orions, you can move a lot of heavy stuff quickly around the solar system. Orions can probably go interstellar if we fire off fuel pellets for them to catch up to, or can somehow doe antimatter catalyzed fission/fusion.
Orion drives are great if you just consider performance, but not cost. It gets it's great ISP and thrust at the cost of being very inefficient in it's use of fissiles. If you can lift propellant into orbit at the cost SpaceX is projecting, for any in-system work it is more economical to use much less flashy nuclear thermal rockets with much worse ISP, because the propellant is cheaper than the fissiles.
Other downsides include "using it for take-offs will leave a large crater that will glow blue for several hundred million years, as will everything downwind in the fallout area", but who really cares about takeoff areas? (That's for the silly plebs left behind on the ground to worry about - you're headed to SPACE!)
0: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php...
almost halfway down, the article is long but so well worth the time. https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/