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Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

Remarkably prescient. Any public knowledge whether Musk has cited this as an inspiration? This arstechnica article feels like a direct descendent: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/elon-musk-spacex-needs...

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The fictional book The Rocket Company, by Patrick J. G. Stiennon and David M. Hoerr, is a basic narrative about creating a space launch services company designed around a two-stage rocket, with both booster and second stage manned by a single pilot each, and able to launch and land fully reusable.

The book has paper-thin characters whose whole purpose is to explain and counter-point a long list of technical explanations for why the company, vehicle, and manufacturing processes were designed the way they were. The book has a copyright date of 2005.

I really enjoyed reading the book.

The book, in the front, has a section called "Blurbs for The Rocket Company", which has some comments left by John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Foust of The Space Review, Gary C Hudson of HMX, Inc, Eric Laursen of International Launch Services, and Elon Musk.

To quote the blurb directly: "This is an interesting approach to the greatest problem in space exploration: the cost of getting there" -- Elon Musk CEO, Founder Space-X

It's not really that novel.

the novelty is how to handle such scale.

Sure, if we build a million rockets it'll be cheaper, but how do we USE those rockets and get funding at "relative peace time". SpaceX's real innovation was starlink in allowing it to "Soak up" excess production. Besides the obvious of reusability, which wasn't that "Obvious" considering the temperatures of reentry.

> SpaceX's real innovation was starlink in allowing it to "Soak up" excess production

SpaceX had a lot of real innovations. Starlink is one of them, but it’s not in the top five.

Might be referring to top "business plan innovations".

> Might be referring to top "business plan innovations"

No. 1 and No. 2 are positing a private space company and mass manufacturing. Those are, hands down, SpaceX's transformational business plan innovations.

COTS, No. 3, is a business-engineering hybrid. Using NASA funds as stepping stones, versus treating them as the ends, No. 4. Maybe we can slot Starlink into No. 5, but it wasn’t unpredictable; telecom was always the moneymaker in space. (I’d argue published pricing with online ordering nudges it out.)

Starlink isn't even a new idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic

As always, ideas are cheap. SpaceX is doing well because it's actually managing to successfully implement lots of old fantastical ideas.

Actually, reusability was an obvious idea from the start. For example the Space Shuttle and the McDonnell Douglas DC-X are examples of attempts at reusability in the USA, and other countries had their own experiments.

It just became non-obvious that it was the right approach after a long history of failed attempts at it.

The Shuttle was the only serious attempt. And even then, they dropped the largest structural part and used solids that can't practically be reused anyway. The DC-X is just a research project, that they would ever develop a reusable launch was basically fantasy.

The same in other countries, very little actual large investments.

The Soviet Shuttle was even less reusable then the US one. And that was actually pretty smart of them.

So I don't think that were that many real failed attempts. There was practically speaking one real attempt.

it was always the "Right approach" and everyone knew that there was nothing in the laws of physics that prohibits this. But you are writing that as if it's still be solved.

No one has ever had a fully reusable orbital rocket.. still to this day. Althought starships got a shot.

It should be noted that reusable rockets are fundamentally less cargo per trip than non-reusable ones, since the reusable rockets have to carry extra fuel for re-entry. The sweetspot of having enough mass to orbit so that this reduced capacity is still worth it is not at all easy to reach.

In general, if rocket building costs could really be reduced to almost nothing, reusable rockets would be useless. The only case where reusable rockets have a chance is if building rockets is still very expensive.

Even if building rockets can be cheap, not all rockets/use-cases can be solved cheaply.

or if you can reduce the total cost of the payload.

That's what blue orgin is doing with the blue ring concept. Take avionics, data telemetry, battery's, and solar panels out of the design and let the customer focus on what end goal they are trying to achieve. I think blue ring is a very good business innovation as well.

I would argue there were far too few actual previous attempts at reusability. :P

All the while many early concepts from the dawn of the space age often had some sort of partial or even full reusability as part of the design.

Did it not pan out as other things suggested back then as it was not realistic with the technology of the time ?

Or was it perhaps due to usable space rockets mainly developing from ICBMs, which were single use munitions ? The military was also not that cost sensitive, especially at the top of the Cold War + possibly pushing on putting stuff to space sooner than the other side, instead of experimenting with some newfangled reusability concepts.

Well, in any case good thing this is over & things are finally at the right track. :)

Starlink wasn't really considered for years until SpaceX already was well underway.

It was fortuitous but unplanned, not a factor in the original vision of the company when it was founded.

Before Starlink, SpaceX assumed/hoped that a mass of new customers would come out of the woodwork when cheap launches became available (the easyJet strategy!). When they didn't, they came up with Starlink to be that customer.

Although, aren't they launching something pretty much daily or weekly, even without accounting for Starlink? It just isn't in the news much.

I picked September last year [1] more or less at random; SpaceX launches by day of the month:

  01 - Starlink
  02 - military
  04 - Starlink
  09 - Starlink
  12 - Starlink
  16 - Starlink
  20 - Starlink
  24 - Starlink
  25 - Starlink
  30 - Starlink

A skim through the other months suggests that per month, there is usually one US government launch, zero to two commercial or rideshare launches, and a bunch of Starlink launches. There is an amazing range of stuff on the rideshares!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_i...

There are lots of new costumers. The thing is just that most of those don't need the huge sats of the past.

And also people lose perspective. What we have to remember is how few launches other large rockets used to have. Ariane 5 the commercial success story peaked at 7 launches.

So yes, new costumers, but not enough to go from 7 to 100+.

Sure, they might have guessed the scale or ramp-up wrong, I would still argue there is quite a few more launches now happening than there would be without Space X jump-starting the whole thing.

Still, not being fully dependent on that certainly helps. :)

Oh, there are definitely more! The question is whether, without Starlink, there are enough for SpaceX's vision to be viable.

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