What wouldn't it be useful for?
1. bigger and much more capable interplanetary probes
2. a much cheaper Webb telescope
3. build a base on the moon
4. make a mission to Mars possible
1. bigger and much more capable interplanetary probes
2. a much cheaper Webb telescope
3. build a base on the moon
4. make a mission to Mars possible
BlueOrigin suggested station does have modules far larger then current ISS, but its attended to be launched on New Glenn, not Starship.
One of the things I'd dearly love to see in lifetime is a return to the ice giants (ie Uranus and Neptune). We've only visited once and it was in the 1980s with the limited tech of Voyager 1 and 2. Think of what we could learn with a Cassini-level mission and Cassini itself is now ~14 years old.
But these missions take a long time to develop. We actually have a launch window coming up in the early to mid 2030s where we could feasibly reach the ice giants but the development period is so long and no proposals are at an advanced enough stage that we've likely missed it (which makes me sad).
> 2. a much cheaper Webb telescope
Would we make a cheaper version? Or would we take the opportunity to make an even bigger version? I suspect the latter. And JWST took 20 years to develop.
> 3. build a base on the moon
I actually believe we'll see a man on the Moon in the next 20 years. It could be much sooner but these are still government programs subject to change at any moment. I mean think where we could be if the SSC had been completed.
Apollo was driven by Cold War era competition. Our appetite for risk has changed. This means we may not see a Moon mission until rescue in the event of a catastrophe is actually possible. That will delay things.
> 4. make a mission to Mars possible
There's a thread about this from earlier today. IMHO a manned mission to Mars makes almost zero sense. Despite Musk's wildly infeasible and impractical predictions about Mars colonization, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see men on Mars before 2050.
All of the things you've listed here though aren't really commercial enterprises. Or at least they're far from it. They're flagship missions by governments because they're so wildly expensive. This creates some demand but is it sufficient to justify the program? I don't know.
I do suspect we need to find commercial enterprises to justify the Starship economics and I'm just not sure what that looks like yet.
Likely a great deal of that was trying to optimize it for weight. Also, it was a government program - not known for cost or time efficiency.
Let's say Microsoft wanted to generate goodwill in the scientific community? What could be better than funding a space telescope?
Goodwill isn't going to cut it. There needs to be a tangible incentive.
But if you want to spend $23 billion for a collider, you're probably going to need to forcibly take the money to do it. Of course, it's worth it if it's someone else's money.
Whether it "makes sense" or not, there are a lot of people that want it to happen, and it also happens to be the express purpose of SpaceX and Starship. That's it's raison d'etre.
At $1 MM per launch with 100 t per launch puts Starship roughly at $10 per kg.
Asteroid mining: Will be a huge industry. Especially with growing environmental concerns all around Earth. Waste can basically be disposed of very cheaply into the atmosphere or sun.
Starlink, Kupier, etc constellations: will continually need maintenance. Including similar constellations across the Moon and also Mars.
Entertainment: Assuming 500 kgs per human (because of life support, seats, luggage, food, etc), that is $5000 per ticket to LEO. This is a very reasonable price point for luxury vacations, especially considering an "all inclusive" trip like a cruise or resort. In line with this, a space hotel/casino is very reasonable to get constructed.
> All of the things you've listed here though aren't really commercial enterprises. Or at least they're far from it. They're flagship missions by governments because they're so wildly expensive.
You're using past data to predict the future. Which is typically a good heuristic. However, when it comes to game changing technologies you can no longer use past data to predict future performance. SpaceX will continue to make margins off Starlink and regular F9-like flights. These profits are all going to be reinvested until a Moon and Mars colonies exist and regular trade begins.
Finally, other companies like Relativity Space are creating amazing 3D printers for rockets. These new technologies are only used in a small way in Starship, but could greatly reduce costs for Starship or the next ship. If the 2010s were about F9, and 2020s are about Starship, then the 2030s call for another SpaceX ship that gets even better tech advantages.
Starship will represent a total paradigm change in space superiority on economics alone. I'm surprised China and Russia aren't loudly complaining about this. It would enable an actual space fortress to some degree. 10 billion dollars for a 1000 tons of hardware in space? Um, that's less than an aircraft carrier.
An aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons...
As stated, space tourism will be HUGE. If 5g/ticket is true, I mean, who on hackernews wouldn't go on that trip? Even if 1% of people in the world take only one flight that in our lifetime that's 80 million people.
How many people want to do the Red Bull parachute from space? I would guess: A LOT.
Just wait for the private Starships. Hey they should be cheaper than megayachts. Show up at starport, anywhere on earth in an hour.
My biggest dream: starship payloads to get a moon-launched 1.5 million ton Project Orion pulse nuclear ship. That is serious equipment payload to do real asteroid mining. One heavy metal/rare earth metal asteroid will pay for that round trip.
But really, I'd argue we just need to enable:
https://space.nss.org/technologies-for-asteroid-capture-into...
Why fly it out of the gravity well? Need material? It's out there. A bit hard to catch, but it's out there.
Any space rocket can turn the whitehouse, the Kremlin or 10 Downing street into a crater withing 30 minutes, with minimal chances of air defence to stoping it. If we start handing out starships to random shady conpanies registered in tax heavens, 9/11 will look like a peacefull day in comparison
They'll be highly expensive and highly vulnerable targets. You can't armor a space station.
Traditional naval theory is that you can build a battery onshore 10x bigger than the one on a battleship. Things change when you are in space though. Missiles have to escape the gravity well. Lasers have to get through the atmosphere. Sure it's expensive to get up there, but if you have space superiority, you do have certain advantages.
Space will be rounding error on suburbia in emissions. At this point it's necessary because population and resource consumption growth has exceeded Earth's footprint by quite a lot. We need people and resources moved to space in the long run.
The military sucks as a funding source morally, but it is as big as you can get as a practical/politically achievable one. Where else can you get a trillion dollars? We need asteroid mining, space habs, launch loops to get humanity to space.
GW has to be addressed through urbanization (centralize people in cities), electrification of transport, artificial meat, synthfuels for long haul transit, alt energy for power gen. I'm not saying we'll make it with those, but at least all of that is somewhat underway.
Consumer culture seems to be defraying birth rates. So while consumer monoculture is bad in many ways, if it perversely constricts population growth then it's good. Kind of like if the oligarchs effectively starve everyone of money needed to have big families... it is perversely good for the environment.
But you're talking to someone who's political alignment is "despotic environmentalist".
That's certainty not an opinion most people interest in space agree with.
And Musk doesn't want to start with a colony.
The limitation there is capable RTGs, not launch vehicles.
> 2. a much cheaper Webb telescope
Webb couldn't have fit into a Starship fairing either.
> 3. build a base on the moon
For whom? Launching stuff is one thing, but you'd need to design, build, maintain, and supply such station. If you think the ISS was expensive, a Moon base would dwarf the ISS costs. Even if launches would be cheaper, there's still a lot of logistics and support behind such station, which is one of the reasons no one did it yet.
> 4. make a mission to Mars possible
That could be done without Starship - as much as I think Zubrin has drifted into the nut job corner over the past decade, he still has a point: crewed Mars missions would've been possible since the 1980s.
It turned out to be the biggest moneymaker ever for Boeing - and the people who bought them.
Per seat the A380 is still the cheapest way of moving a person by air. The 777X should beat it, but it's not in service yet.
The problems with the A380 were (1) it wasn't aerodynamically radical enough to maintain that advantage beyond one generation of airliners and (2) you need to fill it to compensate for (1)
Let's all quit at the very first obstacle!
Did you know that a lot of things don't fit into a 747, either?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuttle_Carrier_Aircra...
The lunar lander also didn't fit into a Saturn V.
Don't tell engineers what they can't do.
I don't - just a small hint there: Webb fit just fine into an Ariane V fairing...
Atlas V has different fairing sizes for different payload types as well.
Sure, a bigger fairing will simplify a space telescope, but you still need to fold it and the bulk of the costs went into developing instruments and the mirror.
There's nothing "simple" about a state-of-the-art scientific instrument. If you want Hubble 2.0, NASA has two of them just lying around for over a decade now; gifted to them by the NRO.
You know how much converting them to useful scientific instruments costs? According to the latest report, it's about $3.2 billion so please give me a break with your "simpler and cheaper because fairing".