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.
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.
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, we’ll see if another price cut will actually drive up the demand.
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.
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.
I could see the incumbents being very reticent to do so.
It is possible that there is a cap in how much stuff people want to put into space.
(EDIT: I do think it’s possible for SpaceX to exist as an entity that is simply smaller and not wasting its time trying to make its CEO Baron Harkonnen , but hey corporate ownership law amirite?)
I very much get the picture that New Space has an if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach which is soon facing a reckoning. It is very important that the whole of society pivots their thinking to the only thing that will give Earth a long-term future.
I used the wrong word there. I was thinking more in terms of: SpaceX enables higher volumes, etc..
I know it's not a perfect analogy but cheap and predictable global shipping enabled business models which were not possible before.
Maybe cheap and predictable access to space will do the same.
I’m still trying to figure out if Earth is the slave planet or Mars is the slave planet, and how that’s gonna play out.
Either way, lots of stuff to move.
Have you heard about SpinLaunch? SpinLaunch really came out of left field for me as a serious contender.
Really curious how they plan to re-balance a multi-ton spinning mass when half the mass gets ejected at 10,000 RPM.
That sounds nuts but the scale test went OK, so I guess they have a handle on that?
https://www.planet.com/our-constellations/
They started with this strategy before Starlink was started.
As far as how long it will take, it didn't take long for a single company to revolutionize the industry, I expect that those that want to keep up will fill the gap. It's honestly probably going to be mostly new names, some of which we have not heard of yet.
Even a really big telescope doesn't seem to need more than 50 launches, $2.5B. A moonbase needs fuel depot runs in the tens per year, and the occasional crew exchange, all under $1B/y.
At issue is whether and when their planned launch capacity ever finds other customers. Once all 30k birds are up, will there be other uses for the launchers, besides going to Mars? Do they need more than a dozen or two, for the job?
So yeah, if they ever launch the whole 30k, they'll be flying quite often; the first replenishment will likely happen before the constellation is complete if the start slow.
If you lower the dollar cost of going to the dentist by 10x, you're not going to see people going to the dentist 10 times more often.
We can anticipate some businesses would benefit from having low-cost access to microgravity environments - right now you carefully select your experiments, because it's extremely costly, but, if it weren't, you wouldn't need to.
While satellite/probe/crewed-craft building has an extensive industrial chain with multiple bottlenecks that would hold it back if launch costs plumeted, there are others that have few and that would be enabled.
We'd probably need a lot of barriers so that people don't launch cubesats for $100 in volumes that make LEO dangerous.
Nobody cares about satellites themselves. What they care about is using them for something useful. Communication and imaging. At some point, both markets will become saturated.
I don't know what level of demand there is for them, but it's entirely conceivable that it will be long-term limited by something other than launch costs.
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...
(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...
...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.
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).
Um, SpaceX. Private. Volunteers for the jobs are plentiful. They'll have a harder time culling the list than filling it.
Travel time to "home" seems close enough in terms of months long voyages. Haven't decided which journey is the more treacherous option.
The 15th century colonists came to a place that was resource rich in whatever a colony could need: food, water, building material, etc. Martian colonists will not have that luxury.
New world colonists faced an indigenous poplulation that Martian colonists won't have. Probably a good thing, as the examples provided by the new world colonists on how to interact with indeginous people does not bode well (at least for those who continued to follow).
Communication time back to home is actually in the Martian colonist's favor. As is the fact the area will have been surveyed quite exetensively in advance of arrival, so preparations can be better made with that knowledge. Full detailed maps will be available as well. This will help finding more barren wasteland even easier than just wandering around looking for barren wasetland. Effeciency will be key with the constrained resources.
But this is the key point: there were plenty of desirable things in the Americas. There is absolutely nothing of any value whatsoever on Mars that can't be found much, much more easily on Earth.
Also, alien artifacts.
Indigenous people artifacts. Let's not be rude. ;-)
Ungoverned land.
Once the powers that be regarding the colonists realized ownership issues were going to be had with the indigenous population, those relationships didn't go so well though. that's what I meant by those who followed. "Hi, here's a lovely friendship blanket" doesn't speak well for relationships with those indigenous people.
Don’t get me wrong, when Musk first announced this I was very interested, and could just about afford the target price. But then I tried a much more minor relocation — Cambridge to Berlin — and found myself much lonlier than I’d been primed to expect by my experience moving to Cambridge in the first place after I graduated.
It might be fine, I just wouldn’t assume that now.
If SpaceX hit something like that, we enter a whole different paradigm because a trip in relative comfort to orbit becomes comparable to middle class holiday prices.
If you can send an average person to orbit for the price of a trip to Disneyland, your launch demand functionally becomes infinite. This would become the thing to do for so many people.
It's sort of like CPU manufacturing: making a CPU is a peak technology, multi billion dollar undertaking - but because we can sell the things for like $250, everyone on the planet now has one.
Space access may go the same way if SpaceX get anywhere near those lower numbers. Blue Origin did one interesting thing recently, and that was launching William Shatner suborbital - if you can send a 90 year old, you can send anyone.
Building the official hotel would become the next obvious thing, complete with spin gravity. It would be a while new dimension.
Bring on the space hotels though! For the right price, that's absolutely a trip I would pay to make.
There are plenty of people here here who could benefit, possibly even financially, from research there. Paying what is essentially a monopoly on research capability on mars would be one avenue of profitability for the project.
Also think about this: once there's a profitable economy there of some kind, you'll get all sorts of capital interplay that doesn't actually need physical financial instruments to make happen, only networking.
We've had the technology to colonize Antarctica pretty cheaply for quite some time now. I don't see any self sustaining cities there; just small research bases. Why should Mars be different?
Musk talks frequently about a self-sustaining Martian city becoming a "backup for humanity" in the case of some global extinction-level event (Asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc), which is all well and good. But who's going to pay for it? In order for Mars colonization to actually happen, it needs to be not only affordable, but profitable!
It's like saying we should colonize Antarctica because then we'd learn things that would make it easier to colonize the North Pole. Doesn't really answer the question.
So far, it's private money moving that direction. It's not tax dollars. If some uber rich asshole wants to spend his money on this, so be it. It's his money. If it doesn't work out, okay, we learn from it. But not going is just not going to happen. It's part of the human experience to ask "what's next" and then do it. Less adventurous can sit at home. The meek shall inherit the earth, the bold are going to space!
The only way I can see large-scale Mars colonization happening is if there's a strong economic incentive for that. It isn't going to happen just because a few people want it to, or think it's the "next step for humanity".
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217986505513172992
[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217993568482025472
My guess is, that short list of volunteers will get a lot shorter.
Why cut further when you're already the cheapest?
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'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.
Henry Spencer at least helped to popularize the idea (if not invented the phrase himself), that Space Shuttle wasn't reusable, but rather refurbishable system. Both 1st stage boosters and 2nd stage engines had to go through detailed inspection and maintenance after each flight.
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.
Cheap for whom? Governments with unlimited budgets? It was not cheap for commercial entities designing products for sure.
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.
It kills me every time I remember what could have been. We could already be multiplanetary.
I think that by the time they actually built flyable hardware for that mission, they'd learn to properly shield the crew. They could at least hide behind the propellant tanks.
Except that the 3rd stage would be empty by then :-(
BTW, it'd be a cool movie, even if a bit Apollo 13-like.
> Alas, the Shuttle turned out to be a white elephant with a couple of lethal design flaws
Indeed. The Shuttle shouldn't even called "reusable", but merely "fixable" or "rebuildable", if you got lucky.
In any case, I'd have loved more Skylab workshop launches and the AAP permanent lunar presence. The modules were huge compared to ISS ones. It was a tragic loss to have Skylab fall to Earth because they didn't have the money to build something to boost it up a little.
Skylab wasn't great, but if it hadn't re-entered prematurely it could have been fixed up (new solar panels FTW!) and refurbed internally (methane scrubbers!) and used as a learning platform for a new space station, rather than the USA going nearly two decades without one.
What happens when launching a Saturn-V sized payload becomes cheaper than launching an Atlas V sized one?
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...
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...
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.
humans are really good at finding ways to use excess anything. Look at the explosion of software use cases thanks to improved hardware
We'd also need to invent new uses for sattelites, things we don't do now because launching is too expensive. Their suborbital passenger transportation is one such new demand generators, but only if they can solve launching and landing near population centers.
They are planning a solution for that: offshore launch platforms [0] 30 km at sea, directly accessible by high-speed train, à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_offshore_platf...
Because that's Tesla's business. Plus halo effect - you don't want to board a spaceship by flying on a helicopter designed 30 years ago.
Remember that battery weight scales linearly with number of passengers, so building a larger battery operated helicopter just needs more motors and batteries. We don't have large e-copters because it costs a lot of money to certify one for 20 passengers and, until now, there is very little demand for that.
Starship turns everything upside down and, suddenly, makes the cheapest rocket a Saturn-V class heavy booster. With it, it's cheaper to add a huge kick stage to your Neptune probe to make it get there faster, put more solar panels so you don't need to deal with compliance around an RTG, or just use steel for structural elements (because why not?), and so on.
If it were easier - say, if Starships were locally available within all the other states on Earth - then we'd be witnessing a massive move to space. This may yet come, but its not going to happen at the magnitude we'd all like, for as long as the US Government is gate-keeping things.