Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

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I'm excited to see how RocketLab's Neutron could maybe add a second real player. Somebody's gotta do something! But yes indeed, Starship being operational and reusbale will absolutely dominate.

We're looking at multiple Starship launches per day, right? Eventually. Each with far more mass-to-orbit capability than anybody else, and per launch. It's going to be 1,000x the rest of everyone combined.

We will need more useful metrics though. Many of Starship's tonnage to orbit will be fuel for other missions, and this will clutter the stats. Of course, tonnage-to-orbit will still be a metric. Even "useful tonnage to orbit" (which is even an Elon-touted metric I think) will be tainted by the large number of fuel launches (Which are useful of course, but not the same as active hardware).

Other than RocketLab/Neutron, realistically, what other competitors are there in reusibility for the next 10 years? Is BO going to burst on to the scene with a surprise cadence of useful orbital launches and flip the discussion a bit on strategy? - I mean, so far SpaceX is so ahead in the game based on their iterative development that any suggestion that BO has the right idea is falling flat. Clearly SpaceX has the right idea.

But gosh!! There's gotta be somebody! to compete. Neutron isn't even quite at F9 level - there is no Starship competitor at all AFAIK.

If Starship starts to work as advertised, everybody else except maybe Blue Origin (if New Glenn also works as advertised...) will be out of the business.

The government backed organizations will continue as well, but commercial launch providers will need to find billions of dollars to build competing platforms without being able to start small and build their way up like SpaceX did because small boosters will no longer be economically viable. Blue Origin might be able to pull it off since their backer has very deep pockets, but their track record so far is dogshit so I'm not betting on them.

> The government backed organizations will continue as well

Including SpaceX.

I'm talking about Arianespace/etc, SpaceX won't need the government to keep them from being pushed out of the business by themselves. ULA might be put onto life support just so the US government has a fallback. Alternatively, a forced ULA/Blue Origin merger could be viable.

I suppose you probably mean that SpaceX owes their success to government contracts, but the point I'm making is that nobody but SpaceX will be able to win contracts except through acts of charity motivated by national security. France and the EU will continue buying rockets from Arianespace even though those launches will cost orders of magnitude more, simply because they don't want to lose their domestic capabilities.

The Chinese will try to copy it eventually but there’s no other entity that can even compete once starship is up and running. The price per kg for LEO is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper than conventional rockets. Startups can’t compete and only a government can afford to waste money at that magnitude. In order to compete with starship you need to build a rival starship but it took 25 years and many many mistakes to get to where SpaceX is now and no one can afford that runway.

The reason NASA's attempt at a modern launch platform has had so many problems is because they were required to base everything off shuttle systems in order to keep congress happy. The shuttle, somewhat infamously, had parts from every single state in the country - which again was done to keep congress happy. It was a giant flying barrel of pork, and so is SLS.

Nothing like using fifty year old technology; the SLS is four shuttle engines bolted on to the bottom of the orbiter fuel tank, with orbiter solid rocket boosters...but because there are four engines, and the orbiter tank didn't have four engines worth of thrust under it, they've had to modify everything, and it still doesn't work properly.

It doesn't help that NASA has an institutional allergy to actually developing, or even using, new technologies.

Disposable LM5 looks already price competitive with F9 at $3000/kg. Good indicator PRC commercial space can drive down costs once they figure out reusables at scale. LM9 might rival Starship in 10 years. IMO, SpaceX delivered new capabilities, but it's still delivering them on TBF rookie American scale, rotating through 40 launch vehicles is really not that much. Once PRC figures out renewable then can probably do to space what they're doing to shipbuilding - explode into magnitude more capacity that can eclipse lifetime spaceX tonnages in a few years. Question is if there's enough demand for sending much payload into orbit outside of rolling out and sustaining mega constellations. SpaceX/US is ahead because they can secure developed country customers with more space demand. Worry is when payload to orbit is cheap, and there's no demand, then only thing that's left is using excess delivery to weaponize space.

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