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Comment by QuotedForTruth | Hacker News Reader

The US government won't allow that to happen. Its a national security risk to have only one launch provider available.

And this is true for many other launch providers; most foreign launch providers in particular. But it does make competing for commercial satellites really hard for those firms. ULA basically gave up on commercial launch.

We'll have national firms emulating Starship within 5-10 years.

You really think that ULA etc is going to be able to catch up to SpaceX in a decade? For the US, I see SpaceX dominating launch just as Boeing dominated passenger jets. Eventually Congress will realize the fiscal futility of hamstringing NASA. The only thing that Boeing etc will be building will be ICBMs/SLBMs.

ULA will have engines from Blue Origin, and both ULA and BO will have second mover advantage in designing their own fully reusable launch systems.

Once SpaceX has got Starship working even only for LEO missions, China will have a clone up and running within two years. ULA might be a bit slower due to overly zealous bureaucracy.

Eventually these launch providers will mean SLS gets cancelled with NASA funding switching more to pure science (eg: building missions to look for life on icy moons, not the rockets to get them there).

Congress will continue to hamstring NASA even as their best and brightest depart for commercial operations with bigger R&D budgets.

China can't even manufacture military grade jet engines. You think that they'll be able to clone Raptor? I haven't looked at BO's engine tech since there's so much vaporware with them, but is it close to Raptor?

They don’t have to clone Raptor, just use an open cycle hydrolox and suffer a weight penalty of extra insulation. That will still give them a reusable LEO launch vehicle with tens of tons payload capacity. Raptor is what it is because SpaceX wants it as part of their Mars project, meaning hydrogen is off the table due to long term storage requirements.

As for the jet engines, is that what you know or what you have been told? What is the provenance of that data? Is there any chance that you are victim to a Chinese disinformation campaign?

The Chinese have been trying to manufacture fighter grade jet engines for over 20 years, with a pretty dismal result. They tried to clone the various Russian engines that have come with the Su-27's they've purchased, but they've had trouble with the metallurgy. Even their latest stealth fighter (J-20) is using an upgraded version of this engine (Saturn AL-31).

And considering BO had previously said they'd have manned missions by 2018, I'm skeptical of anything in their forecast.

The government thinks it's a national security risk to have only one launch vehicle available. They seem comfortable with having one launch provider as long as there's two vehicles with different enough heritage.

Especially given that launches become cheaper - even without SpaceX.

In USA there is obviously BlueOrigin (well, they have to get to orbit; will they in 5 years?), so no too much worries.

They promised New Glenn launches in 2021. They have a history of meeting promised dates.

http://spacenews.com/blue-origin-on-track-for-human-suborbit...

I'm not sure they have quite the history you're implying.

John Cusack in his podcast with Joe Rogan made an interesting point: that BlueOrigin's slow and steady approach might be counterintuitive to space flight. He said that you want to be fast and test out as many crazy ideas - moonshots - as you can, and that having essentially limitless money can actually slow your progress down.

Can I have a link to the podcast? I haven't seen that one and for some reason I can't find it through search.

I'm an idiot. I wrote John Cusack when I wanted to write John Carmack. I don't know how I could even confuse the two names.

Here's the Carmack podcast where he talks about it. Fantastic listen for anyone honestly. Carmack is a fascinating guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udlMSe5-zP8

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