Starlink's disruption of the space industry
thespacereview.com
thespacereview.com
Not just money, but data also
The idea that a marketplace could turn around and sell their own products that directly compete with third party sellers is insane. Come to think of it, I assume Walmart would fall into this problem as well.
Amazon is more similar to a flea market organizer that sets up their own massive both. They can put their items in front of customers first and decide what to sell based upon what they see people carry away.
You'd think the government would be the Goliath in this battle, but it's the other way around. FTC is more of a nuicanse than an actual problem, and it's gonna remain that way for as long as FTC keeps operating on a shoestring budget.
Don't conflate AWS with the Amazon Sellers program.
Honestly, I wonder if Tesla will be similar. They just won the charging standard war. Watching the battery presentation a while back, they're chipping away at battery technology, and every % adds up.
The ICE car companies have "embraced" EVs, but are losing money on every car right now. Will tesla start making their cars cheaper and cheaper while the other companies eventually try to buy their way out via tesla batteries?
On the other hand, the Biden administration has done a lot to throw wrenches into Tesla's gears.
[1] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
If Tesla has received "billions", the only reason other carmakers haven't received the same amount is because their cars aren't as popular.
That's just the way China operates when it's about anything it considers strategic.
We probably won't ever know the whole extent this is happening.
Here's one study that claims BYD has received 3.4B: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/byd-got-3...
That's just the way the US operates when it's about anything it considers strategic.
from an economics professor who examines the evidence about what is causing the trade war between china and the west.
The main thesis is that car manufacturing (and associated manufacturing such as batteries, electronics etc) is "strategic" enough that the west doesn't want to build a dependence on china for it.
In the event of a war, china can cripple the west by cutting off the exports, and/or potentially install backdoors into the devices and shut them down to disrupt etc.
Not to mention that by allowing china to own the manufacturing, they will have built up the massive industrial capacity for which it is easy to convert to a war time factory. The west's dwindling manufacturing capacity would mean that china will out-produce and win - lessons that is learnt from WW2.
Isn't that a good thing? This makes the all-out war between China and the US much less likely.
As for the Pacific ocean, it's not an American gulf, it's literally half a planet. Nobody can control it, even the US with all their military bases on Pacific islands.
The war that russia is waging against ukraine is clear evidence used to support this point - that being dependent on russian gas/oil was a mistake and europe is paying dearly for it.
You mean like in the Middle East during the Arab spring?
>The west's citizens would not want to make sacrifices
That's how democracy works, right?
>europe is paying dearly for it
Some would say that Europe is paying for American "Fuck the EU"[0] policy.
Like, mandate any radio receiver in a car is air gaped from the cars operation (and easely removable).
These connected cars are really bad from a safety perspective.
And soon they will have brake and steer by wire to cut costs too ...
Tesla was not invited to the administration's August 2021 EV vehicle summit. <https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white-hou...> The government excluded the nation and the world's EV leader from participating.
If the administration could have figured out a way of excluding Tesla from the EV tax credit system, it would have.
Oh, but they actually really tried at first. Like for example by considering Tesla Model Y as a sedan, thus not qualifying for a higher tax credit ceiling.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/4/23586035/tesla-model-y-pri...
https://dialogue.earth/en/business/life-after-subsidies-for-...
I’ve done a little bit of reading around and the term subsidy is often used without further clarification. For example, is it direct payments, or business tax breaks, or tax breaks on sales of EVs, or something else?
BYD is really selling heaps of cars
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/chinas-b...
ETA: If believing that this is “winning” causes Tesla folks to encourage further positive-sum behavior, ignore everything I said: Tesla kicked everyone’s ass. Rah.
Another thing: Not the whole world adopted the Tesla connector, only North America (that's why it is called NACS). Europe uses CCS-2, including for Tesla cars. CCS-2 is better than CCS, and arguably better than NACS in Europe as it supports 3-phase AC.
AC chargers here (Belgium) are usually 11kW or 22kW capable (at least nominally). This is 16 or 32A. A normal household socket ciruict is 20A here, so this is not very abnormal wiring wise. Most homes are actually hooked up to three phase power, but just have a single phase meter, so an upgrade is usually affordable.
If you want to offer 11kW or 22kW single phase, you'd need 47A or 95A service, with massive cables etc. Hence why most single phase chargers are 7.4kW limited here (32A). Also: Almost no cars would even take that in on 1 phase as far as I know.
Higher amperage is what costs more in terms of losses and cables, so less amps is good.
3x230V also exists, but at least here, is being phased out.
No on the distribution network (aka up to the transformer in the street usually, but for sure not on the xxx kV lines) because there the lines are balanced.
In your house, you do, because the voltage between 2 phases is 400V, but the voltage between 1 phase and N is 230V. So you have "low" voltage for "normal" appliances, but high-voltage (and thus high-power) available for high power applications. For example: EV charging, induction cooking, home heating / AC etc.
For an EV usually the N wouldn't be needed, if you always charged at a balanced power on all phases. But from my experience, the full 3 phase power is only used when the battery is empty. At some point the charger switches back to single phase to better modulate the current I guess.
Sidenote:
On a 3x230V net, you don't have an N, but that means you also don't have a non-power conducting wire either! Meaning: double pole switches and breakers are required to prevent shocks. This is why these are generally required in Belgium btw.
See also Y vs Δ distrubution nets: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/alternating-curren...
Thanks for the explanation!
The neutrals in either of these situations are used when you want to use some partial multiple of the power, instead of a full multiple for some or all of the load. For example, most US electric clothes dryers will use the full split phase 240V for the heating element, but 120V for the light and sometimes the motor. Same with US electric stoves. So they need a neutral to be able to do so.
If they don’t need that 120V (half the voltage), they can just use straight 240V, and no neutral.
Same with 3 phase - if connected in a delta configuration, you have three distinct loads, each connected phase to phase.
Same as in split phase, if you have two 120V phases, each connected to one half of the split.
When designing AC->DC rectifiers a key concern is ripple (aka how consistent the DC output voltage is per unit time). 120V half phase AC is particularly terrible for this, but a single phase of a 3 phase system will also be not great. You spend a lot of the cycle with no meaningful power available, and need to smooth out that very spikey output with capacitors or the like.
The ripple on three phase (if using all three phases) is going to be a lot lower, and power flow will be much more consistent, as you’ll have 3 waveform ‘peaks’ per cycle, unlike split phase which has 1, or tapping a single phase of 3 phase which has one. (Depending on your definition of peak - some would double the count as the negative voltage side of the waveform technically counts too!). That means with only minimal additional component count, you have a nearly perfect continuous flow of power.
See some graphs [https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/671693/how-a...]
At the type of power levels we’re talking about, the capacitors for smoothing out the ripple (assuming it’s needed when charging the batteries - I would assume so, but I’m no EE), will be enormous and expensive if using single phase.
I know for industrial motors, the smoother/more continuous waveforms are a huge help in making smoother and more powerful (for their size/weight) motors. Almost all industrial motors run on 3 phase AC, and it’s common for even small hobby machine shops to either get 3 phase pulled in, or use phase converters.
It's better in general because it can deliver continuous power rather than power at twice the line frequency. If you're going to convert AC->DC and want a constant current to the battery, there will need to be a rather large capacitor to smooth the 100Hz or 120Hz power coming in.
Important change is that NACS is the Tesla connector with the open CCS protocol. That means can use dumb adapters for CCS-1. And chargers can change to better connector without changing electronics.
Every other company on Earth had a chance to make a superior system and failed. Tesla said fine use this based on ours, and they rightly recognized it was superior. Win for Tesla, win for consumers.
Nobody really lost there, either, which maybe why it doesn't feel like a typical win.
If your argument is that they were afraid of a competitor, that may be valid, but doesn't make their actions any less voluntary.
Whereas in other markets, the business case for converging on CCS2 was more compelling. Europe chose to compel CCS2 as their standard, but in Australia, Tesla pivoted to CCS2 without any government pressure.
But yes, it was all done through encouragement and coordinated coercion. Nobody showed up at Tesla's HQ with guns and forced this to happen.
It's a win for Tesla insofar as they won't have to bear the burden of transitioning to a different plug standard, and their customers won't bear the burden of consumer confusion and frustration which come with transition.
> Nobody really lost there, either
One might argue that the main losers are the charging networks which invested in CCS1 infrastructure. They'll have to work even harder to remain relevant, all while gaining Tesla as a direct competitor and having to deploy NACS across the country.
The infrastructure is the same. North America has picked CCS as its charging standard. All that's changing is the plug on the end.
Here's a practical example:
It's also not true that all other manufacturers are losing money on EVs. BMW and VW notably have been profitable on theirs.
Lastly stop giving so much credence to what Tesla claims in presentation and start paying attention to what they actually sell. So far they have sold 4680 cells in two cars and both have had disappointing charging curves. Not impressive at the moment especially compared to what Chinese companies are offering.
Musk also fired the Raptor team at least once.
And the market price of launching the 6528 satellites that they launched is around 11.3 billion dollars (67 million dollars per Falcon 9 launch, 169 launches). Assuming this is more or less the density of satellites they will maintain, that amounts to 3.7 billion per year just in constellation maintenance costs (to which we should add peering costs, personnel, ground station costs, etc). It's really not an easy business to maintain, unless it really does grow massively, and in a distributed manner (since lots of people in a small area will compete for bandwidth).
By that definition it was impossible for anybody to "win", which means it was never a war in the first place.
Odd.
Tesla gets most of their battery technology from either Panasonic [1] or CATL.[2] This allows those companies to operate in the US to avoid tariffs.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2022/07/13/teslas-l...
[2] https://www.electrive.com/2024/03/25/catl-and-tesla-launch-c...
"...so they're better than you?"
"Their service is so much better than us, that if you keep using them we'll go out of business and you'll have to use them, and they're a direct competitor to you." That's enough to make a business think about their strategic interest, not just about the current expense.
Blue Origin still has only achieved sub-orbital flight, a far cry away from reusable super heavy orbital flight. Meanwhile SpaceX is launching satellite constellations and Starship is looking increasingly real.
What is the path to victory for other space companies?
Source: The Expanse.
Hopefully there isn't one. We need a Pepsi here, not an Amazon.
I'm skeptical.
Like Amazon, SpaceX is a fountain of ex-employees who have tired of the required workload. I don't see a few extra on top of the current constant exodus changing much.
The primary issue for other companies is culture and institutional ability to foster innovation and take risk.
The old space organizations like ULA or Boeing et al and government funded are extremely risk averse and are also optimized for other priorities like having presence in as many states as possible or using old designs/ components to keep jobs funded and so on which limits them.
The new space companies do not have the resources to be as aggressive or fast although they are trying, they do not have free cash flow of SpaceX or extremely wealth and committed sponsor. Blue Origin+Amazon(Kuiper is theirs not BO) have resources but are not fast or aggressive and most likely chance to compete if they can get their culture sorted.
Private rocket companies were not successful businesses before SpaceX for a reason, its success has inspired capital inflows but problems are the same.
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Astra, Rocket Labs, Relativity and Firefly are the only ones with some track record of orbital launching vehicles, Astra went private at 99% down round for just 11M in March-24 and are probably going to be either acquired or shutdown.
Firefly has no immediate reuse plans. Terran R and Neutron are the realistic contenders for reusable vehicles if successful(big IF) then will have Falcon 9 equivalent competitor commercially available by end of the decade (13 years after Falcon 9 landed regularly in 2017). Starship will be active well before 2030 and be a generation ahead again. SpaceX when Starship launches commercially say in 2025 are at least 20 years ahead of everyone else and currently 10 years ahead with Falcon 9.
The last time space industry had this kind of disparity were the few years after Sputnik and other soviet first launches, to catch up the federal government spent multiple % of GDP and made it the national priority and employed 400,000 people to do it. SpaceX is not Soviet Russia it is a domestic company NASA and Space Force benefits from and Trump/Biden are not Kennedy so that is not going to repeat.
Realistically next 40-50 years will be dominated by SpaceX in both satellites and rocket vehicles, even if they stop innovating soon.
I have no claim to knowing what SpaceX's secret sauce is, because the problem I think you run into immediately is that any sort of logical explanation then bumps into issues like the ones I'm mentioning here.
Mike Griffin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin
Legend had it Musk hired Mueller after meeting him and seeing a liquid biprop engine he was building in his garage. That sounds exactly like the type of person you describe. “I can’t do the cool shit I want to do at work because of forms/approvals so I’ll just do it myself at home”.
He set an implausible but interesting ’mission’ from early on. He set the culture of the company from the start such that the concept (borrowed from the tech world) of failing and iterating fast actually happened (rather than just being talked about in corporate presentations). He brought naive but effective ‘first principles’ thinking to many of the questions or problems which probably helped avoid the conservatism of ‘old space’. He brought enough money to start, but it was little enough that they had to be scrappy and lean for survival, which probably fed into the culture and built a great team further. And (by luck or judgment) he hired the right people, like Tom Mueller, who was already a rocket engineer, but was frustrated by his previous industry experience.
(And of course, back then he didn’t have the baggage he has now, which made these things easier to achieve.)
The reason NASA was doing that was because of risk aversion and lack of innovation!
The shuttle was shut down because NASA couldn’t afford another disaster like Columbia and there had been absolutely no meaningful progress to replace it .
Without spacex, that would still be the case , Dreamliner is still not done a demo flight and Boeing would have held NASA by the balls and renegotiated from fixed price to cost plus contract as they have been doing for decades.
SpaceX forced the hand by delivering on commercial crew (CCS)
The shuttle had bunch of older parts designed for other programs and was 30 years old in 2010.
SLS flies on engines that are decades old from shuttle era with no plan for new engines and still costs in multiple billions per launch !
If not for spaceX we would be cheering BO for successfully delivering the Vulcan engines and being proud of that as pinnacle of private space .
BO official Moro is step by step ferociously. They were always culturally tuned to be risk averse and careful
I think it's inevitable that that's SpaceX's fate in the fullness of time.
But it seems like it'll be a while for them. They aren't indulging in typical market-leader behavior. They have kept their prices low - the market leader there by a substantial margin (based on $/kg to LEO). And they clearly have no problem making their best product obsolete via internal innovation. From what I recall, those are the 2 big pitfalls that entrenched market leaders tend to indulge in.
Starlink is becoming a core component of their business model which presents its own issues. The service is attractive today, but cellular or wired connections have inherent advantages in most situations and could seriously eat into their customer base fairly quickly. T-Mobile/Verizon/etc 5G wireless home internet for example is generally a better choice for most people.
Which isn’t to say SpaceX is in any kind of imminent danger, rather the company has significant long term risks.
I dont know if it will be starlink but I do expect(hope) ground based telecom to go the way of floppy disks in the coming decades
Satellites however move so you need to accept the network sucks in moderate density areas or you have vastly more coverage in low density areas than you need.
Wired connections inherently provide a lot more bandwidth, and in dense urban environments the last mile isn’t a mile it’s within a building.
Some of that is provided for free when covering higher density areas which satellite networks like Starlink simply can’t handle at any kind of reasonable constellation size.
A quick search suggests that the range of a 5G tower, operating only at low/mid-band spectrum (so in other words, below peak speed - but at higher range) can only operate in the 1 to 3 mile range. [1] We'll say 2. That's an area of pi*2^2 = ~12.5 square miles, we'll say 13. The area of the US is 3.8 million square miles. So your number would provide coverage for (10,000 * 13) / 3.8 million = 3.4% of the US. That maybe enough to cover the most exceptionally dense urban locations, but you're missing a lot of people there.
And, again, this is just for the low/mid-band stuff. And then you need to regularly maintain those towers. While you could get global coverage with relatively few satellites that can just be trivially remotely launched/decommissioned. A quick search there [2] turns up a current practical (not peak/theoretic) bandwidth for Starlink in the 100+ Mbps range + ~50ms latency. I have difficulty seeing a logical argument for ground based telecom, beside as a hedge against WW3 when probably the first thing that will happen is a huge chunk of all satellites going poof.
[1] - https://dgtlinfra.com/cell-tower-range-how-far-reach/
[2] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-speed-tests-2023-vs-2022
Before you ask if 10,000 * 2,000 = 20 million square miles is high, handoffs require you to be in range of multiple towers so there’s a lot of overlap and hills, ocean, etc that reduce useful range.
Ultimately there’s 142,100 cell towers in the US, but that’s including density from urban areas and redundancy from multiple cell networks. Anyway, the point I was making was that Starlink is targeting low density areas by necessity they simply can’t target NYC density for any reasonable constellation size. However, if you’re a cellphone company and you’re already covering anywhere in the US with 50+people per square mile extending that to anywhere with 5+ or even 0.5+ people per square mile and killing Starlink just doesn’t take that may towers.
https://www.benton.org/headlines/us-cell-towers-and-small-ce...*
Each upgrade with telecoms entails a sacrifice. You can have really fast signals that can't go far and have difficulty penetrating obstacles like walls/buildings/hills/etc, or you can have really far reaching and high penetrating signals that can't go fast. So for instance Verizon's max speed towers can only reach 1500 feet [1], so I think my estimate of ~2 miles was a pretty reasonable meet in the middle.
All that said I agree with you in principle. Obviously space based telecoms are much better for less populated areas than heavily populated, but I'd argue that that space based can scale much more easily. The ground based telecoms aren't just those 140k towers, but also the other 450k nodes on top. And that's to cover a pretty small geographic area. And each of those nodes not only needs land and construction permits, but they also need to be be regularly maintained, and so on. It's a pretty big deal. For space based coverage, you can just launch your satellites from Texas and have them providing coverage on the other side of the world in a matter of minutes.
Put another way - imagine we were creating a civilization from scratch and these technologies were all 'unlocked.' I don't think we'd be using ground based stuff much at all. In the present when the infrastructure already exists, there's no reason not to take advantage of it, but in general it just doesn't scale so well.
[1] - https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach
The thing about high density places with a ton of infrastructure is that wired will always be the best because you have close access to infrastructure and its likely to already be built in. For rural areas or even suburban areas the equation starts to tip to orbital wireless for the reasons you state above and also geographic realities make ground based wireless unreliable in places where there are mountains valleys canyons etc.
There’s a 4 orders of magnitude difference between high density areas and low density ones. So no you don’t need millimeter wave everywhere. You can increase bandwidth per tower, but you can also the number of cell sites.
Further every frequency you add removes users from other frequencies. IE: At 10 miles you can use a subset of frequencies, but those frequencies don’t need to cover for people 100m from the cell tower because those are on 5G.
Thus double the number of cell sites means there’s an extra circle of people on mm wave frequencies around the new towers. Thus you more than double effective bandwidth in low density areas when you double the number of towers.
Meanwhile the reverse happens with satellites. For a given number of satellites there’s some areas where you have sufficient capacity for the density at those area. Suppose you have enough satellites for ships and aircraft over the ocean, add new satellites to handle higher density and the time those satellites are over the ocean isn’t getting you new customers. IE the percentage of time the average satellite is at 90+% capacity drops when you add more satellites.
You can’t just put 50 satellites next to each other over a suburb and call it a day you need a ring(s) of satellites circling the entire globe to reach whatever your target density is along their full orbit. Unfortunately, most land has really low density North Dakota only averages 11 people per square mile, while Florida a mostly empty state sits at 422.
Target 10 people per square mile (adjusting for household size and rates percentage of people signing up) and just about all your satellites are useful across the entire US.
But Pick 100 people per square mile 90% of your time over North Dakota is wasted. Worse large chunks of Florida are also nearly empty as most of its population is along the coastline in places like Sweetwater where 8,800 people per square mile live. So your wasteful 100 people per square mile in ND still only covers a small fraction of the population in Florida.
Cellular is the reverse the first 10k towers are largely “dead weight” that cover few people per tower, but the rest of the 130k are really useful because you optimize locations for density. Swap that to satellites initially the constellation has very high utilization, but the ratio keeps getting worse as you add more satellites.
PS: Starlink could try to vary speeds or prices more based on density, but people really want predictable results for their money.
By contrast SpaceX: build satellites, launch satellites, done. They can launch tens (and soon hundreds if not thousands) from their base in Texas with a single launch. There's still some bureaucrazy they have to deal with, but this is overall just a many orders of magnitude greater difference in terms of scalability and overall ease. And when satellites start hitting end-of-life - no problem, just deorbit them and continue expanding the swarm.
That's not really a problem, and is already the case over most of the world (particularly oceans.)
So, for any square mile of land, you can have at most some small number of subscribers. Sure, you can cover a huge surface, but only with a very low density. Conversely, the vast majority of the world's population lives in huge clumps in small areas.
Starlink should (annd perhaps anlready do) approach commercial high rises with a single uplink for the building, shared through the building network. Even as a backup data system, still very valuable system.
Starlink has ~1 million customers in the US from ~6,000 satellites so you’d think they could do 10x that with 10x the number of satellites. But much of the US is low enough density that their current constellation is already sufficient and effective bandwidth per satellite is maximum bandwidth * percentage of orbit in useful locations. Which means 10x satellites are closer to 3x useful bandwidth and it gets much worse the higher density you’re aiming for.
Ahh you might think just offer lower bandwidth per customer in urban areas, but people will pay less as the bandwidth drops and Starlink is already fairly slow.
Outside the US there is major major FTTH rollout going on everywhere. UK will get to ~90%+ penetration within a few years (it's at 66% now, 83% if you include HFC DOCSIS3.1 and growing at ~1% a month, including some very very rural areas).
All of Europe is basically like this, and will have/already has overwhelming FTTH coverage. The same is happening in Asia and even in the more developed parts of Africa.
So every month the addressable market for Starlink IMO declines. There will of course be places that are extremely rural that won't get FTTH for a long time (but I think they will eventually), and underdeveloped countries will struggle to roll it out for a long time too - but there is a lack of capacity in these underdeveloped places to pay for starlink.
What Starlink as actually amazing at is bringing the price of fixed line connections down. A lot of countries have ridiculously high fixed line/mobile data costs (I would assume some level of corruption is happening to keep competition out). Starlink will push those prices down and force providers to offer unlimited data packages in those areas. However, I'm not convinced Starlink will see the benefit of a lot of that.
Don't get me wrong - Starlink is an awesome service that really benefits humanity. However, I think the long term economics for it are poor for it to grow substantially more (this may be ok as I believe it is EBITDA positive now). And I think churn will be a problem in developed countries as more and more of them get FTTH.
I was speaking with someone from US Cellular at a conference recently and they were saying their whole advantage over T-Mobile was spectrum in rural areas. Which explains why they were bought out by T-Mobile.
T-Mobile is also in the process of rolling out fiber home internet to compete with AT&T because 5G isn't that great.
T-Mobile's network might be good enough in suburban areas but it's lacking in rural areas. This is where Starlink is competitive, and also places like the middle of the ocean.
The issue is it’s rolling out enough places to start hurting Starlink because speeds are generally higher and it costs 50$ vs 120$ / month.
I probably would have been fired if I said that out loud in front of the client.
They are just one of many hopefuls in the industry.
There's a big difference. Virtually all rocket startups are doomed regardless of whether their rockets succeed or fail because of the competition from fully reusable Starship and/or Terran R and/or Stoke.
Relativity and Stoke actually have a chance of success. It's small, but non-zero.
The $/kg doesn't matter that much in practice in the real world. Maybe in the future where people are launching only fuel. But not now.
The reality is Spin launch requires people to build sats 'for' launching on Spin launch. And that's simply not happening. No major consumer is gone do that.
Spin launch is borderline a grift.
A cellphone experiences higher peak acceleration when hitting a floor when falling off a table but they are generally fine. So yes some sats would need modifications, but not necessarily significant ones and you can trivially test those conditions prior to launch. A Starlink competitor would happily design for such if it reduced their launch costs by 90%.
This simply isn't something that anybody would do unless there is a huge benefit to it. Spin Launch still requires a rocket, and one that will likely not be reusable one anytime soon. So the idea that its going to massively reduce cost is a fantasy.
To even have any cost saving at all they need a huge number of launches. There simply isn't a market for that many tiny sats. There is a reason all the constellations have moved to larger sats that are not SpinLaunch compatible. Micro launch is a tiny market and companies like SpinLaunch are just lying to their investors, just like Astra did.
If we are looking at things like consumables, it would take 500 SpinLaunch launches and that doesn't even match a single Starship launch. How anybody could think this would be cheaper is beyond me.
They currently rely heavily on small hypergolic rockets. It's really hard to tell just how scared people should be of China's rocket program. On the one hand, they undoubtedly have a lot of very smart people. And they don't seem to fall in love with boondoggles like SLS/Orion. But on the other hand, they seem to be really stuck in the past for a country with so much advanced space tech.
Ship building is not the same technology level as spacecraft. China famously exclaimed in 2019 that they will be able to duplicate EUV in a few years, when dutch introduced EUV restrictions in China in 2019. Still nothing from China on EUV. Still nothing from China in terms of plane engines. Their new carrier in 2024 is still just a "demo" carrier, not to be used in real combat.
With the 50-70% youth unemployment [1], private enterprises dying [2], and dictatorship in China, scientists will either become disillusioned with work and lay flat, or flee to other countries.
[1] Chinese professor says youth jobless rate might have hit 46.5% (2023) https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4N3960Z5/
[2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-private-sector-is-lo...
Nevertheless they’ve got their asses kicked by Starlink so I’m sure they’re trying to figure out how to make their own.
The closest competitor is Peter Beck's Rocket Lab. That's why SpaceX is using their monopoly position to attack them.[0] As I said in a different post, Beck is a combo of Musk and Tom Mueller.[1] The "only" things that Rocket Lab is missing is first-mover advantage, and billions of investment.
Falcon 9 funded Starship. Now there is little funding for a competitor, ignoring the fact that Starship will sink that even closer to 0 with such low launch costs.
Or "Space Travel is Utter Bilge"[0], as they say
0: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AAS...203.2801Y/abstra...
I think companies will have difficulty competing against SpaceX, so long as SpaceX is ideologically motivated. Right now their goal isn't to make a ton of money, but to create a stable civilization on Mars. So once we start headed to Mars them making next to no profit on launches, beyond what's needed for development and basic sustainability, would be perfectly fine. So you not only need to hit technological parity, but then somehow also go well beyond them in terms of cost reductions - at least if your motivation is profit.
Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX! And of course Boeing has been around since the dawn of spaceflight. And on a smaller scale lots of brilliant people, including John Carmack, have tried their hand at aerospace, and failed. No idea what SpaceX is doing so well, but whatever it is - it seems extremely difficult to replicate.
I’d say that it wasn’t a failure at all, and more impressive than just about anyone else’s side project I can think of offhand.
I remember an earthquake in LA caused a freeway interchange to collapse. The government offered an incentive of something like a million bucks for every day the rebuild was completed ahead of schedule. The contractor got it done in a stupendously short time.
Which is still something that CA sometimes does, with apparently good results: https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-contractor-earns-8m-bon...
The USSR and it's space program would argue differently.
I am also not launching rockets. It seems like I am launching exactly as many rockets as Carmack, thus by simple math I am just as successful/good at launching rockets at Carmack.
No, he didn't, or perhaps more generously "much smaller scale" is doing a LOT of work in your sentence. The core challenge of real rockets is all about scale/speed, and in particular getting to orbit which is where the vast majority of the value starts. The Rocket Equation and material science makes that a completely different scale of challenge to do at all, let alone with a sufficiently useful mass fraction, let alone with reuse, vs anything suborbital. Neither Armadillo nor the DC-X were going to orbit. Hobbies are neat but going from that to something real represents a huge huge amount of work and skill.
His co-founder at Oculus, Palmer Luckey, talked about how he did on the Arthi and Sriram podcast (both hosts with considerable big tech experience and VCs at A16Z). He said the company was
> "very successful, probably the most successful (rocket) company in its time in it's budget range. They were doing better things than companies spending 100x more money. They moved very fast, building a vertical take-off and landing rocket, actually long before SpaceX did."
They can't just say 'well lets start from zero and copy SpaceX'. They have space station program that needs to continue and they can't wait until they have a next generation reusable rocket. Just like NASA they also do other things, like moon landers and so on.
And despite what people think, China can't infinitely invest in everything and don't. I'm sure the battles for money within China budgeting process are not that different from US congress.
Looking at ESA, getting budget for a new rocket is incredibly hard and ESA member states are richer then China.
Also I think its wrong to say there is no hardware secrets. Developing a very advanced rocket engine is really fucking hard, and to build one and be able to 'mass' produce it like SpaceX does is incredibly hard. Getting there took SpaceX a decade, and government run engine programs are nowhere near as fast usually.
The exact details of the heat shield and reentery of something like Starship also isn't exactly easy to replicate. Doable, but would still require quite a bit of reverse engineering.
SpaceX Starship production line isn't about 'one big secret' but about iteratively improving each part to make it cheaper and better over time. And you can''t replicate that without doing the same.
I worked in a project where an architecture was very flawed initially and took almost a decade to move away from it.
So often management pushes for incremental updates on an outdated architecture because the risks are too high since the new architecture might have all new problems of its own.
Both traditional US aerospace and European launch curry political favor by spreading work around to subcontractors. This can't help but slow things way down and make it more expensive.
Indeed. SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. Boeing/ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too.
Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Paying for a product is not a subsidy any more than you buying a Ford car is giving Ford a subsidy.
I do not disagree.
I hate to say it, but maybe Musk is onto something. SpaceX hires top people who work a lot, efficiently. This seems to work for them. Duh, I guess?
Also recent funding for LEO-based missile interception, mostly Republican led,
- https://www.science.org/content/article/decades-after-reagan...
> recent funding for LEO-based missile interception
This has nothing to do with SpaceX.
Terrence J O'Shaughnessy also runs Starshield at SpaceX. He was in charge of U.S. homeland missile defense.
Kuiper (the Amazon competitor) has another four-star general who focused on missile defense: John Hyten.
Starshield is Starlink for the military. It came after Starlink. It is neither a root of Starlink nor a missile-defence project at this time. (Maybe it eventually gains that capability. But that’s not currently in play.)
Starlink came about because SpaceX built cheap, high launch frequency rockets for, at first, NASA. It doesn’t shoehorn into an SDI origin by any stretch. At the point we’re contorting to make that connection, it might as well be part of our ballistic missile programme.
> The full report
Yes, people want missile defense. That doesn’t make everything in space is missile defense.
In 2005, he was appointed NASA Administrator where he pushed for commercial cargo and crew transportation services that saved the company from bankruptcy.
"In February 2018, Griffin was appointed as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering by Donald Trump. One of his first actions was to create the Space Development Agency.[13][14] The organization was tasked with procuring a proliferated constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to detect Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. Commercial contracts for the constellation were given to L3Harris and SpaceX."
Starlink’s future is enhanced by contracts rooted in the SDI. Its history has little to do with it.
You’re skipping the $400mm NASA COTS contract that came a year earlier.
DARPA bought the first two launches for hypersonic delivery system research, but it was primarily aimed at prompt global strike. As in what it says on the tin. Interception was tertiary at best, to the point that it’s mostly unmentioned [1][2].
Starlink is not rooted in SDI.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_Prompt_Strike
Any launch vehicle would. I have no doubt Griffin may retain his SDI roots. That doesn’t mean they transferred to SpaceX, much less Starlink.
The most we can say is SpaceX’s founders and allies were influenced by SDI. And that influence peaked in the 2000s, when SpaceX was dependent on grants versus launch contracts.
> Starship seems optimized for mass to LEO rather than Mars
That’s where the money is.
Given Starship’s flexibility, concluding much about a secret purpose is untenable. (I agree it would seem to need sizing up for Mars. But if in-orbit propellant transfer really nails, LEO and Mars are practically neighbours. (9.4 km/s to LEO, another 3 to 4 to Mars. More to the Moon.)
Who is related to Starlink in what respect?
The link between Starlink and SDI is about as close as it is to anything space related the U.S. government has done. It’s equally correct to say Starlink has its roots in space planes. Like, sure, I can draw tenuous links between the two. But that’s like saying Juicero was a military project because Silicon Valley was seeded by the DoD.
Not even remotely true. You can broadly classify SDI proposals into two categories; ones that require scientific breakthroughs, and ones that are really big engineering projects. The problem with scientific breakthroughs is you can't reasonably predict when and how they're going to happen, so these aren't serious proposals.
The other sort, the large engineering problems, require tens of thousands of satellites (e.g. interceptors). An oldspace style rocket with a few launches a year will never move the needle on such a project, it needs a rocket like Falcon 9 or Starship. Michael Griffin's background is in this category of SDI proposal, there can be no doubt that he knew how many satellites it will take and that doing so without cheap reusable rockets would never work.
Rockets like Vulcan are similarly capable for SDI purposes as the Falcon 1 was.
I'm open to being corrected by anyone else who was involved with SpaceX in its early days. But the SDI connection to Falcon reusable, much less Starlink, is an expert exercise in retconning.
Now, you said that even Atlas rockets developed after 2003 are technically advancing an SDI agenda. I don't know which Atlas rocket you're talking about (Atlas V Heavy development?), but it definitely isn't true. There was never any pretext of the Atlas rocket family being a step towards reusability, and therefore it has nothing to do with any serious SDI proposal.
You have it backwards, the DARPA Falcon project was awarded in 2003 (before Falcon rocket was even named!) COTS was 2005, and in no small part due to Griffin as mentioned.
You’re right. I ignored those because at $500k they’re immaterial, particularly against the $100mm it took to develop Falcon 1, but they did precede even Falcon 1 being named.
Against that I put literally every engineer at SpaceX in 2003 giving zero shits about that grant other than as a funding and legitimacy source. Because it wasn’t a strategic guide. And it was for building a missile, not an interceptor.
It's pretty cool to be vindicated by this.
COTS was designed to complement the majors. Few pre-2010 thought of replacement.
COTS was a massive risk that most thought was absolutely crazy.
I've very recently seen numerous posts starting to show up on both reddit and various websites as well as anonymous wikipedia editors pushing this conspiracy theory. They all repeat the same thing. They'll claim Griffin as basically a founder of SpaceX (who in reality had almost no involvement with starting SpaceX) and they'll claim Griffin basically "gave" SpaceX its first government contracts even though NASA administrators have almost no sway over where contracts go (that'd be illegal). They'll also claim other things like that Starlink is somehow developing weapons to be put in orbit to reproduce SDI.
That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive, especially since in testimony last year the SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, indicated that the private funding involved was not more than $200 million. $100 million of his own money that he had brought in from a prior enterprise, and then he alluded to the fact—I’m trying to recall the testimony on an ad hoc basis, but the point is that there’s less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion of government capital."
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...
A fucking bargain!
NASA spent $11.8 billion to develop SLS
SpaceX got paid to provide services, and they did so. It had little to do with SDI or any long term demand for missile defense.
Most of the money is from experimental NASA program to find a cheap way too get money for ISS.
SpaceX got almost no money from DoD for quite a bit of its history.
> That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive
Its not 'excessive'. You can't just say 'excessive' without evidence. You actually have to show that they got overpaid for the services provided. In reality, they got underpaid and lost money on those contracts.
The thing is, most of that money was performance based. Go look up how COTS and Commercial Crew actually worked. You only get money once you reached specific milestone. Having such a contract requires you to raise private money (can be stocks or lending), and then you can try to execute, if you do, you get paid. If you don't, you wont get paid.
Look what happened with Kistler Aerospace for example. They failed to raise sufficient private capital and were kicked out of the COTS program.
So for this argument to make sense, show what contracts SpaceX got, and explain how the government could have achieved the same results cheaper.
Most experts agree, and pretty much everybody calls COTS the most successful NASA program in decades. And Commercial Crew as almost as good. NASA achieved a huge amount with little money.
> less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion
Again, you don't just get 1.2 billion. You have to raise private capital, and then execute on your development program. Some of those 1.2 billion $ took years until they arrived at SpaceX.
For example, Griffin included 400 million $ for CCiCap. Guess what, that money didn't fully arrive at SpaceX until way after 2013. Griffin only account for Musk private funding, not all the other money raised by SpaceX.
Griffin is a very opinion person that often goes against what most people believe. I would not his interpretation and evaluation as gospel. He is a politician and a bureaucrat.
His whole spiel during the last 15 years has been that government should own the intellectual property for things like capsules and such. The thing is, most of NASA simply doesn't agree with his opinions.
And most expert that look at NASA performance, seem to agree. He is very much outside of current thinking at NASA.
https://golden.com/query/list-of-funding-rounds-for-spacex-3...
Mike Griffin often tries to make himself appear bigger than he actually is. He's a politician after all.
> Satellites positioned closer to Earth in LEO can swiftly target and track objects on the ground, providing both low-latency communication and high-resolution sensing capabilities. They also hold the potential for offensive actions, such as deploying interceptors to shoot down rockets or ICBMs during their vulnerable boost phase.
How much is this going to cost? Considering this system can be beaten by scheduling a regular ICBM test and pretending until it's too late and the missiles split into dozens of warheads and destroy an equal number of cities.
When I first heard of hundreds of billions going unaccounted for in pentagon spending each year, that was 30 years ago and the images of f-117s bombing Serbia (and getting shot down) still fresh, that-s where I believed that money went to. I was around 12 back then, so don't me judge to harshly on my naivete.
It would seem Musk doesn't mind.
As usual the government isn't actually as smart as people pretend.
And contrary what people like to believe. The government is not the only organization that has a brain. The idea of having many sats and having constellations has not only occurred to the government. So the idea 'constellation' therefore its invented by the government, is brain dead dumb. Its a logically idea based on the physics of the situation.
And Griffin in these stories is way more involved and fundamental then he actually was. He was doing some consulting but he and Musk frequently clashed and didn't get along. Before modern SpaceX really got of the ground he had left. And after that he was not that favorable towards SpaceX. And today Griffin is giving talks how the government should be giving SpaceX money for Starship.
It was absolutely not Griffin that pushed for the Commercial Crew, that came out of other parts of NASA. Griffin wasn't the driver of it. Neither was he much involved with Commercial Crew.
Starlink happened literally more then a decade later with no involvement from Griffin. And Starlink primary revenue is from consumers, not from the military. And it was primarily funded by private funding rounds that SpaceX did.
The reality is Musk achieved something nobody thought was actually gone happen. And once he did the government was like 'oh shit we should jump on this'. Just as they did with reusable rockets.Yes Starlink/Starshield will make money from governments in the future. But that doesn't actually validate this story.
The idea that the US government had a long term coherent plan is utterly delusional if you understand anything about the history of SpaceX and space flight in the US.
The main evidence seems to be 'Mike Griffin' was vaguely involved in various ways.
So the whole narrative is just nonsense and doesn't even remotely hold up.
Literally 90% of all space starups are full of former SpaceX people. Of course every now startup in space is recruiting people from SpaceX. That utterly meaningless for your argument.
> As someone else said, follow what these people DO, not the self-serving narratives they/Elon gives biographers.
You mean actually verifiable facts rather then conjecture based on a narrative that you tell yourself. Yeah why would we want facts. You are observing all the typical conspiracy theory hallmarks. Congratulations.
If you actually did some more research, if any DoD program is responsible for small launch companies like SpaceX popping up, it would be 'responsive launch'. After 9/11 the realized that they didn't have enough assets above the Middle East and started to investigate small launch to address cases like that.
That is when work like that stared and small launch companies mostly hoped to get into that. Of course it never actually turned about to be a big thing. But DoD is still working on stuff around that but it never been a big market.
https://fireflyspace.com/news/firefly-selected-to-demonstrat...
2) We all know that Ukrainian sea drones are using Starlink. They wouldn't do it if it was that easy to detect.
Sounds like a good investment to me. Too bad it's a private company; I would have loved to buy some shares otherwise.
Other companies, like Boeing, are in fact spending lots of money as well on rockets. They just have less to show for it. Boeing has wasted many billions on a rocket that is basically not going to be very competitive given that SpaceX has cheaper ones.
A quick google search suggests they had a few billion in profit last year.
If its so easy for companies to get billions of $ why don't other companies just do that?
BlueOrigin is currently losing 2 billion $ a year, and somehow all these people who gave money to SpaceX are not willing to give it to BlueOrigin. So Bezos has to pay if from his own pocket. Why is that you think?
The reality is SpaceX achieved fantastic results with they money people invested. Both in terms of technology and in terms of revenue growth and profit on operation. And then they presented new plans for expansions and achieved fantastic results again. Then they ask for more money again. And so on and so on.
If you build large infrastructure its gone require a lot of up front money. SpaceX really only start to raise major money when they started major infrastructure projects like Starship and Starlink.
Frankly, the its absolutely absurd that they only raised 11 billion $. For reference the SLS rocket alone is so far running at 22 billion $. The SLS/Orion together so far cost 55 billion $ and they will cost a lot more before they are done.
The fact that they raised 11 billion $, built cargo and crew space craft for ISS. Also build the most successful rocket family in history. Built the largest constellation of sats in history, plus ground stations, plus distributing millions of terminals. Built and design the best rocket engine in history. And also built the largest rocket in the world. Plus of course multiple launch sites. Plus a number of major factories to build all that stuff.
Your claim that every company could do this for 11 billion $ is frankly laughable for anybody that knows anything about the space industry.
So not bad. Just in case anyone else hesitated to look, after the bad taste of today's NYTimes front-page SpaceX hit piece trash. I wish we could leave behind the journalism concept, that ill intent and cluelessness can be fixed by low-level wordsmithing. You get "if you know the topic well, you can see there is a way to closely read and interpret this bit so it's not quite incorrect... even if most everyone reading the whole will be misled". Ah well.
Under Avoiding apocalypse, I might have mentioned LEO vs MEO drag lifetimes (years vs millennia). Under Ukrane, IIUC, that all starlink service is geofenced on borders, and finding your export unexpectedly a weapon system can be problematic.
[] https://www.thespacereview.com/ [] https://spacenews.com/