I'm guessing Starlink will get less expensive to operate - but will it be to the point it'll displace cell towers?
Earth observations satellites would be cheaper to put up... so maybe we'll get a few more than before. But are there any real game changers?
With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.
I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space.
There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either
I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives.
The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining
Everything else is on taxpayer dollar
Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.
When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.
The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly.
The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.
I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.
As Italian, we're still profiting from what the Romans built and from their general hegemony.
Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.
Figuring out how to get large nearly pure metallic asteroids in earth orbit would go a long way in figuring out that profitability.
I love the challenge of space technically. My concern is confusing technical challenges with profitable/worthy pursuits.
I say this as a collector of inertial guidance systems.
That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.
Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)
Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.
Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:
> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude
For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).
https://www.issnationallab.org/redwire-space-3d-prints-menis...
It really depends on what we mean by "offworld base". There is extensive literature on how this might be done "on a shoestring budget". Start here: https://www.marssociety.org/concepts/mars-direct/
There’s no private business in Russia, almost all economy is state owned in practice. That particular conference is organized by Sberbank.
By speaking at the conference, Musk is directly collaborating with Russian government.
Tell me which of Elon's companies would exist today without heavy government subsidies or largesse?
He is a modern day Ross Perot. No more, no less. Maybe he wants to make the world a better place - but only if he can get extravagantly wealthy on US taxpayer dollars doing it.
He's obsessed with Mars because it represents the fattest international government contract that ever existed.
He's also more recently said the revenues from Starlink, aiming to be at least $5+ billion monthly recurring revenue, will fund his Mars colony.
The reality is though he's now tapped into accessing the full abundance of the universe, and he's at least 1-2 decades ahead of everyone else, in part due to the synergy of his various projects: Starlink, Boring Company, Tesla, etc - all are technology that he'll need for Mars - so he can funnel revenues/sales back into those companies]; and Musk understands exponentials of scaled paths, and so him being 1-2 decades ahead, with the synergy of the multiple companies he owns/controls, every year he has the chance to leapfrog ahead another decade of any other competition.