SpaceX closing in on first Starship Super Heavy launch
spacenews.com
spacenews.com
I'm a bit too young for Apollo, so it feels incredibly fortunate to be able to watch the next great step forward for humanity. Starship is both the first true economics focused rocket to production and after F9 the end of the beginning of a shift in mindset for space. The ripple effects of the disruption will be fascinating and exciting as well. And we'll get to watch if live, in beautiful detail.
With the upcoming starship test, it feels like even if it ends up being a 100 meter firework, the engine is still purring.
I mean if SpaceX is a rocket factory company, isn’t Ford a car factory company? We just don’t include factory because it’s redundant.
Before that, you had to have a weird german guy hand build your buggy.
Ford bought out Johansson just to make sure he had access to the gage blocks that were the enabling technology of the day.
Atlas missile ICBM assembly line, Convair, San Diego, 1950s.[1]
[1] https://live.staticflickr.com/7715/17145288136_e217444837_b....
spacex does not sell any rocket factories even if that is what they spend the most money on developing so i'd consider them a rocket company because to me a company should probably be described by what brings in the income
at some level, even a middle man could say that they are a sourcing and branding company rather whatever product bears their name
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I think you could call any company that tries to mass produce something a "X factory company" because from a certain scale on production and supply chains are where the real knowledge is. Apple could be called a "phone factory company".
Could it? It doesn't actually make them. It hires 3rd party companies for that. Where Ford owns/operates factories that produces their products. Unless I'm confused and Ford doesn't own their factories?
Still seems like a phone factory company, even if they don't own everything soup to nuts like early auto factories tried to do.
It's mind boggling how much stuff a Starship will be able to chuck into space and come down and then do it again and again.
Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes using this kind of capability. International Space Station sized habitats are a handful of launches over months, not dozens over decades. A single Starship launch could place multiple hubble-sized space observatories up in a single launch.
How reliable would this really be in practice? I'm thinking of all the times a projected launch has to get scrubbed and rescheduled days later. Not exactly the type of delivery uncertainty you'd want for critical equipment.
Edit: it looks like conventional weapons are not banned by treaties. But I suspect that would make Starship an easy target as well.
Way cheaper to have redundant assets at multiple sites on the ground.
As a former air force contracting specialist... This is completely wrong. Bases are not cheap to build, maintain or defend (Politically, physically and fiscally).
Also, no matter how much money you spend or how many bases you build, you can't get 90 minute asset delivery EVERYWHERE ON EARTH, which is every military strategists' wet dreams since alexander.
Lastly, if you haven't noticed the military doesn't really care about 'Cheap', or they wouldn't have spend ungodly numbers on the f35. They care about effective. The check book is infinite, and slight advantage is everything.
Being cheap was the motivation for everything that led to the F-35 being expensive, so, no, this is wrong: the military cares a lot about cheap, they are just very bad at doing it.
As it turned out “do everything" and “be cheap” turned out to be less compatible goals than originally envisioned.
Nobody suggested building more bases. The proposed problem was launch reliability. A major reason for launch scrubs is weather.
AustinDev proposed staging in orbit [1]. I said it’s cheaper to have more than one launch location on the ground over more than one launch location in orbit.
If war is afoot you’re willing to take far more risks, with the weather and with sensor glitches.
You could spare to blow all that during takeoff. Whatever, let's try again in four hours.
Even if they just stacked a modified Starship designed to stay in orbit (just enough fuel to get into orbit, ability to jettison engine section, some solar panels bolted on) and shot that up, that'd get you as much or more internal pressurized volume than the ISS in a single launch.
The killer app for the military is missile defense. Currently the US has about 4 dozen ground based midcourse interceptors. Each costs more than $100 million and carries one single exo-atmospheric kill vehicle capable of destroying one single incoming threat. The kill vehicle weights 64 kg.
A single starship could carry more than 1000 kill vehicles. A dozen or two starships on standby could carry enough kill vehicles to defend not only against all current intercontinental ballistic missiles, but against all that Russia, China and North Korea could conceivably build in a decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle
Starship also allows for enough mass to orbit to make Star Wars legitimately viable.
Given that it's a reference to a specific California prop, I don't think this is a problem in any way.
That seems like a retcon
On the other hand, I met a person recently who works for Lockheed and I'm pretty sure he was regularly (or randomly) tested at his workplace.
SpaceX does receive other funding as part of various NASA contracts, but that funding is also related to providing services to them, not just receiving money for nothing.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
From that source, SpaceX has about ~$5.515B in contracts. Of that, about $5.411B is from government contracts (military, NASA). That's about 98.1%.
There's probably a good chance it's higher, if they have govt contracts that aren't allowed to be public knowledge for security reasons.
Also, nobody is claiming SpaceX receives "money for nothing" from the govt. They are a contractor who, at least at these relatively early stages, need government contracts to survive. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's the way many nascent industries survive. But we need to call a spade a spade.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ld7Dz__7_VjqMd2uZNgA...
Edit: I did unreasonably make the assumption that you were making the case the SpaceX was receiving subisidies for "nothing" and I see that you weren't now.
Foreign govts would still be govt money; many of those you listed are still public projects. Do you have estimates for those other private launches? If not, it's just speculation. Based on the information we have, it seems like it's safe to say the bulk of their launches are for governments. It's not a knock on them, and I'm not saying this is your perspective, but there's this kinda weird sentiment that they are some paragon of free-market capitalism when in fact they are a company highly dependent on government money. But that's exactly what I think is reasonable to expect in a nascent industry.
No sorry, if you know the numbers you have are clearly bias and wrong then you don't need to work with them.
If you think the data is bad, at best all you can claim is "we don't know"
Put differently, why do you think there isn’t an abundance of people chiming in to say “there’s not enough data to make a claim” rather than jumping to defend SpaceX’s honor? If people were truly rational, the strength of their convictions would be proportional to the strength of the data being it.
When talking about funding in general, you also have to consider that SpaceX has significant non launch Equity funding to the tune of $10B, and that contracts can include potential future Revenue instead of funds received.
Edit: If you look at their launches for 2020 onwards[1], Their number 1 customer is SpaceX (themselves), followed by US and other governments, followed by private companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
While your borader conclusion is probably accurate regarding income, your spreadsheet only 71 of 216 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, for ~$9B total. This is roughly on par with the VC funding they have recieved.
And, yes, we can talk about different ways of accounting. But I wouldn't count the fickle or volatile ones like "potential future revenue" as better than measuring actual contracts. (This is what SpaceX is investing in with their own launches, to be fair, but that's different than actual revenue). People trying to raise capital are always talking about potential revenue and potential market share, but you'll get much more investor money if you have actual purchase orders.
$1B income for Starlink makes sense given they have ~1M customers paying ~$100/mo, and a $4-500 hookup cost.
Lasty, you have to consider that the government contract numbers you have are cummulative going back to 2012, while the Starlink revenue is annual (2022 only). If you look at government contracts for 2021, you only get $1.6B. Using those numbers, Starlink internet would be closer to 40% of revenue, with launch contracts at 60%, which starts to paint a very different story.
I think a lot of the feedback you are getting is a kneejerk reaction based on language. E.g. "government funding" had a very different connotation than "government sales". People think subsidies and then their minds short circut.
> I would also hold it as distinct from pure free-market capitalism that can exist outside of government money. (Which, ironically, is a point many people hold against legacy aerospace). And I think that latter point is relevant because SpaceX (and Musk himself) is often held up as some sort of capitalistic ideal and any counterpoint to that makes people bristle. In all, however, I think that hybrid approach is ultimately beneficial to both SpaceX and the public
I think a lot of people dont really get this nuanced distinction. Rockets and spaceships have always been never been built by the government. Most of the work was always done by publically traded companies. NASA, whomever, would put out a contract, and then be involved in high level diretion of the design process.
The difference with SpaceX is that 1) they not publically traded (who cares?) and 2) they dont take design direction from NASA for their rockets, and built what they wanted. Thats it!
The cool part is that they built somthing more ambitious buy cutting NASA out of the design process, and relied on the fact that it will be so good that NASA will want it when they saw it.
My quibble is that this is very different than the classic case of the government spuring new industires. The government was already buying rockets from established manufactures for a half centry. SpaceX just came in and ate other companies lucnhes by being more focused and more efficienct.
The Army didn’t tell Orville and Wilbur how to build. They dangled the carrot of a lucrative military contract to incentivize their innovation. It’s what transitioned the effort from hobbyists to an actual industry. There was no “industry” until the govt put up money because the govt was really the only entity that could bear that kind of risk. It’s the same with the initial days of SpaceX.
I agaree that the government contracts are a carrot, and broadly speaking supports the entire space industry. Im not debating that at all.
However, I do think there is a narrative difference between companies that that humm along doing the same thing eating eating their carrots, and a new one that beats them at their own game and steals all the carrots. The carrots have been there for decades, and then someone came along and radically shakes up the industry and it makes it jump forward. Thats exciting!
It is like when a chef tells the customer "I wont make what you ordered, But I will make something so much better you can't resist.
It is as if Lockeed were to tell the military I won't build the F-35 to your specs, but when you see it, you will want it more than what you designed.
This is exciting because it marks a transition of industry dynamics. Something changed, and it wasn't the carrots. SpaceX brought something new to the table in a 60 industry, and they deserve credit for that change. The government deserves credit too, but the dynamic is different than if it were year 1 of the space industry.
I still give SpaceX credit that they did a much better job of raising the bar in response to that incentive. I have some reservations about the way they’ve gone about some of it, but at the end of the day I think they have done a much better job than the legacy aerospace companies.
You can literally just go threw the list of their launches on Wikipedia an notice that nothing close to even 80% of them are for the government.
And that is outside of their Starship business, that is by now a large part of its revenue.
The numbers you present are ridicoulus, they have easily more money just from human space flight from Polaris and Axiom.
>And that is outside of their Starship business, that is by now a large part of its revenue.
Starship is bringing in investment money, not revenue that I'm aware of. I don't know what revenue it would be bringing without actual launches. Maybe I'm wrong and you can correct me here, but I think you are conflating some business aspects.
Now if you're saying that the private money will be a bigger factor in the future, I agree. That's the whole idea behind govt money being used to foster along nascent industries: the govt props them up early until a viable private enterprise can exist later.
As I just point at elsewhere, you get 4:1 by comparing cummulative contract revenue with an annual Starlink revenue.
To be absolutely explicitly clear: their business model requires using govt contracts/funding/sales early before they can transition to other viable means of revenue. They could not survive as a company without those early govt contracts, but this does not mean they are dependent on govt contracts into perpetuity.
A dependency on govt contracts early and an increasingly private revenue stream can both be true. This isn't bad, but it also isn't the often-lauded ideal of free-market capitalism.
Honestly I don't get your issue. You can just go to wikipedia and look at the list of the launches. So clearly the 98% is wrong, this isn't a question, its not speculation.
The original claim was “US government can't be more than some low double digit percentage”.
Let’s say it’s by “low double digit percentage” we’re generous and say 20%. (I interpreted their stance to be lower, but they didn’t specify).
We can are there is incomplete data but we have reasonably good data on the the govt side: U.S. govt contacts are at least $5.4B, likely higher. So that means we expect the complementary private side to be 5x, or over $22B. The absolute most optimistic Starlink estimates about $2B through 2023. Do you think the other private streams dwarf Starlink by 10x? I just don’t see how we get there given the govt is still there #1 launch customer after Starlink, and this is the most generous interpretation to steelman the case. The only way is true is if there is some unknown customer launching nearly 3x that of the US govt.
The only way the numbers work out is if the govt is the major revenue stream or there’s some secret launch customer that dwarfs the US space agencies.
It’s a claim based on wishful feeling, not on data.
That is nonsense. Look at their flight manifest and see how many flights are NASA or Space Force. Maybe like 3 launches in the next several months out of planned 25.
The point is their business model is predicated on using govt contracts early, when they were an unproven commodity, because the govt is generally the only organization who can take those kinds of risks. In turn, this fosters the development of a space industry which can transition to more private revenue streams. Musk himself said they were in the 11th hour of bankruptcy before NASA "saved" them with a huge contract.
Even if you want to go against HN guidelines and not read the comment generously, they have still gotten the vast majority of their revenue from the govt in present tense. We can quibble about the exact percentage, and in reality it's probably impossible to pin-point without insider information. But we can use the information we know to estimate that it's still a major part of their business and it wouldn't be viable without it. And they'd still have to keep those customers happy by following their rules.
> A modicum of self control isn't a bad thing.
elon_smoking_with_clearance.gif
Maybe they just want to commemorate the birthday of the visionary leader who recognized and funded the genius inventor that ultimately ended up being instrumental in getting the American space program of the ground?
/s
I can see both sides of Wernher's fame and criticism but nonetheless people love to point out he was a Nazi.
Maybe politicians don't like that reality, but they are not the ones putting people into orbit.
It seems antiquated.
Edit: as cannabis use is transitioning to decriminalized, testing specifically for that will become antiquated. Standing crimes of course will remain leverage for bad guys.
AFAIK, they did not stem from that fact, that was a later rationalization from keeping them around. They stemmed from the fact that being gay was seen as a serious moral failing in its own right, and indicative of propensity for other moral failings.
I’m sure he won’t be smoking weed on podcasts any more.
The only time I was ever tested for drugs was when I started an internship at Toyota back in 2006 or so. I had to do a whole physical. At the time it seemed pretty silly. Later in my career I started a new job, and the new company's background check flagged me for being unable to verify my employment at Toyota. That also seemed pretty silly, considering the company's CTO used to be in the same department at Toyota back in the day!
1134 is the angel number, I think something to do with Tarot. I know there was the calculator trick: 1800-666=1134. Turn it upside down and it spells "hell".
The more you know.
https://www.pomona.edu/news/2000/10/01-mystery-47
https://magazine.pomona.edu/pomoniana/2015/02/13/the-mystery...
But it really depends on the typeface, doesn't it?
Hitler's birthday?
[1] https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1602270207287902209
- Half the size of the statue of liberty is it's base. Not that tall as a statue.
- Seadragon, of which I'd never heard. 1)
Well, the Enterprise from Star Trek is fiction, so legitimate answers would include "zero actual size" and "as big as they say it is".
A true fan would probably reply: "Which one?"
An enlightened person might point out that Star Trek fans are very online, all this info and much much more than you wanted to know is just a google away.
640m / 2000 feet, or thereabouts, is also an acceptable answer.
But the unbuilt rockets in that animation were somewhat legitimate designs, a few steps from actual working prototypes; therefor those sizes had to be somewhat buildable; whereas the Starship Enterprise is FTL fiction, with warp drives powered by antimatter handwavium.
13-year old me would've been gleefully receptive to it – the not-far off 50-year old me... somewhat less so.
The trouble for him here is – I'm not sure who amongst his consumer base would find it amusing.
- ed Also: I, like everyone else, saw that clip of him 'smoking' pot on Joe Rogan's thing. Unlike Clinton, he really didn't inhale... . NASA had nothing to worry about there.
I mean I don't find the farting and 4/20 references funny, but I don't see a reason to be bothered. I'm happy for the people whom it makes smile.
And I think S3XY is clever. I like that it gives the models sort of a canonical order and always feel good when I see them ordered that way by someone other than Tesla.
Sorry, it was absolutely wasted. We could have predictably achieved those benefits for less and quicker, with tens of billions to spare.
There's nothing new in using supercomputers to compute aerodynamics. It's been done for decades with ever further precision. SpaceX has even done talks that can be found on youtube on it themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYA0f6R5KAI
The heat protection technology is literally the exact same material as used on Apollo, except re-formed into tiles, something SpaceX has been doing with their own heat shielding technology for decades.
The landing/pacifying procedures are variants of Shuttle procedures as the same propellants are used (which are also very old). They're even the same engines and fuel used on Apollo and the Shuttle.
(Also, I do not describe "happened to die during period of employment" as people "giving their lives for the program". That's just extreme propaganda.)
So what experience was gained that was not in the form of "re-learning things that were forgotten"?
What’s the FAA considering in approving or denying a request like this?
In this case this is specially hard because the core booster flies back towards the coast.
I have been curious about this and not seen much disclosure on the topic. Would ship 24 also be the largest re-entry vehicle, and largest re-entry vehicle to make ocean landing?
Edit: I was able to find some more information on the splashdown:
>During this time, the spacecraft will hurtle sideways, generating tremendous heat before adjusting to an upright position for a "soft " rocket-powered ocean landing 62 miles north of Kauai. It will sink in the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility, according to plans for the historic flight, and join dozens of warships that have gone down over past decades during Navy "sink exercises " in waters 15, 000 feet deep.
https://weatherboy.com/spacex-plans-to-launch-starship-rocke...
https://www.govtech.com/products/orbital-spacex-starship-to-...
official spacex launch plans with estimated timelines
Its incredibly costly and complex to build things like the james webb telescope and that would be a great problem to have, but are there any measures of the demand for rocket capacity at given price points?