Not into space things and while this is cool i wonder what the great significance of this is? I see lots signaling how great this is and it's lost on me.
Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.
Other use cases include launching and maintaining satellite constellations (Starling / Starshield), and launching singular large payloads like space telescopes.
Even for smaller payloads, having both the first and second stages be reusable will reduce launch costs.
In the near term the biggest reason to do multiple launches in a day will be orbital refueling. This is required for sending much, much larger payloads to the Moon and Mars. It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit, and obviously doing that as quickly as possible will be beneficial. NASA has already committed to this plan for Artemis.
Require, or just make comfortable? Saturn V had the lift capacity of "only" a couple of Falcon Heavies, but was enough to carry astronauts, a car, a lunar lander with enough fuel to take off, and a command module.
If you really got order-of-magnitude gains from an expendable upper stage, it wouldn't be that exciting to have reusable rockets (which are more complex and still only fly one order of magnitude more times) in the first place.
200 years ago, there was no need to use electricity. 100 years ago, there was no need to use a programming language. 30 years ago, there was no need for gigabit wireless Internet.
Counterexample: space stations. We've had small manned space stations for decades now, but no real application for them. They're national prestige items only.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-res...
We have the means to build pyramids or moa statues (Easter Island-style) much more quickly and efficiently that the ancients did, but we don't feel the need anymore.
It takes a heavy launch rocket to launch heavier things into space or missions, refueling, and to goto other planets.
The HLS (Spaceship) will need many refuels at orbit in order to get to the Moon and back. That means at least a dozen of fully-loaded Heavy launches to LEO just so each one of them can load a bit of fuel into HLS. The fuel in orbit can't sit idle for too long, or it deteriorates; I haven't found a limit on days for that, but a week-long launch window is considered a dealbreaker, we're talking a dozen Heavy launches in a week.
It's either a short launch window, or at least 6 Starships built and launched twice in ~10 days. Don't count out on SpaceX building 12 Heavy Starships just for that Artemis mission.
We are insatiably curious explorers. The cosmos calls to us. Many are willing to do anything they can to answer that call.
Besides, Elon is the first to go after supervillain territory.
That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
When they manage to do the intended landing it should be pretty unharmed, but I'm sure it will take a while before same-day reuse is attempted.
Starship has work to do, but it's hard to argue they're not at least on the right path.
It's also worth noting that Booster (the first stage), Starship (the second stage) and Raptor (the rocket engine) were all designed with the benefit of the above experience and with the goal of same-day reuse in mind. They know where all of the refurb time went and where the bottlenecks are.
I have no doubt that they can reduce the turnaround further, but the goal of same-day re-flight does seem mighty ambitious.
[0] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-new-booster-turnar...
It was never a fully reusable design, just more reusable than before.
SpaceX plans to have no parts that are lost each flight and is working to make the tiles mostly standardized and less sensitive to faults.
No doubt SpaceX has very smart people working on this and I'm not an expert in material science, but I just find it hard to believe that same day turnaround could be possible. If true, that would really make us a confirmed space faring civilization. We could actually start colonizing Mars.
Falcon 9 has reflown in just over 4 hours [1]. (EDIT: Operational turnaround. Nozzles have been turned around allegedly without refurb in 3 weeks.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_...
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-launch-doubleheader-ju...
They've since done two flights in about an hour with https://spaceflightnow.com/tag/starlink-9-5/ and https://spaceflightnow.com/tag/starlink-8-10/
I think the first-stage turnaround record is something like two weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
> B1062 booster holds the record for fastest turnaround at 21 days. It launched on 8 April and again on 29 April 2022.
Seems like the actual record for turning around the same booster is 21 days, which is still quite impressive.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-new-booster-turnar...
Other factors that work in SpaceX's favor are 1) that most launches will be unmanned, meaning they can take bigger risks than the Space Shuttle program; 2) that the steel body of Starship can handle higher temperatures than the Space Shuttle's aluminum, so a compromised heat shield is more tolerable; 3) for now they have a secondary ablative heat shield below the tiles (that does have to be replaced when it gets used, but that should only happen when tiles fall off)
Consider operators living on Mars and operating drones near their habitat each day. It would be like modern day drone operators and robot assisted surgery. Like remote operators of mega-trucks today.
Those robots could interact with the operators - driving into a "garage" that can be pressurized for maintenance, upgrades or science.
StarShip promises to reduce the cost of mass to orbit, making larger and more complex scientific, industrial and habitat options feasible.
You can go to the official govenrment website and look at the contract, it tells you exactly how much has been paid out and how much has not been. The money is getting out as SpaceX hits development milestones.
I don't remember, exactly but about 2.x billion $ were paid out so far. The money is spread over 40ish milestones. And they have done like 25 or so by now.
To get the full pay out, they will be required to land on the moon and take off again. Those are likely the last couple milestones.
Until very very recently the roughly bus sized ISS modules were the largest habitable spaces we could ship to orbit (although Skylab in the 70s were basically repurposed Saturn V fuel tanks and also big) so now it's possible/probable we can ship 20 people to space, and have moderately comfortable accommodations for them.
We can also ship mining equipment and substancially more supplies to the moon. Or mars. We went from using pack goats to 18 wheelers to ship stuff in space. The pack goat can ship a handful of hand made silk scarves and Faberge eggs over the Himalayas, but the 18 wheeler can deliver everything from socks and tshirts to cell phones and big screen tvs and trucks and lawn mowers. This really opens up space to more than the highest, most bleeding edge science and we might actually see more than 100 humans in space at the same time, in our lifetimes.
some of the best weasel words ever laid to print. Enron accounting vs PWC vs your mom using Quickbooks for her side hustle type of depending?
SpaceX has demonstrated being able to fly the same rocket stage dozens of times with minimal refurbishment with their Falcon 9 family of rockets, but they still have to build and discard the second stage of the Falcon 9 for each launch.
Starship scales that up in magnitude and adds second-stage reusability.
[0] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
- Starship is actually launching now
- Boeing's reputation and credibility are in tatters
- Trump won with heavy support from Musk.
Expect a new head of NASA who is pro-Musk, and a cancellation of the Senate Launch System.
On the other hand, it's not clear what a Moon base is good for. The ISS isn't very useful.
not letting China do it first
Great article, but that's not what economists do. It's more what cost accountants do.
So, for the cost of a single SLS launch ($4B), Starship would be able to put the mass of the battleship USS Texas into orbit.
If the cost is reduced to $1M/launch, it could put the mass of four Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers into orbit.
That'd be pretty cool right? The dawn of a new era in global trade.
This is that, for space. (Booster as container ship, Orbital vehicle as container, launch tower as literal crane, launch complex as port)
Why is there a port here? Because of the unusual tidal pattern? Deep water? No. People. The other reasons are reasons to put the port here maybe in particular rather than a few miles in either direction, but the people are why there's a port. In 1024 there were thousands of people, today perhaps closer to half a million depending on how you count.
There are no people on Luna, and no people on Mars. Visiting these barren rocks is like going up Everest.
This damp rock is where our species was born and it's where it will die. It's not much, but its ours, and there's nothing like it within any plausible travel distance.
Similarly, moon or Mars bases will be where they are if the location has some useful(1) industry and sufficient resources to support a population servicing that industry.
(1) 'Useful' to them, and not necessarily to everyone everywhere all the time.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg.
And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.
We are going to see massively increased space activity of all sorts. It is almost impossible to predict all consequences thereof.
Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space or nestled in a crater on the Moon. We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.
It's just an outlandish overly optimistic mishmash of different concepts.
Let's start with your analogy:
> Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right?
If you mean to use this to explain that what today costs X will in the future cost 0.01X, you're probably right.
But a more accurate analogy is "Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn't cost $50,000,000, but only $500,000, unbelievable, right?"
Same ratios, but deeply different implications.
Today, the idea of setting up a continuously settled Mars colony - hell even a Moon colony - is unfeasibly expensive. It's ACHIEVABLE - we have the technology and the money - but it would cost an intolerable percentage of the GDP of the world to accomplish.
A 100x reduction in costs means that it becomes a fundable endeavour that countries like the US could still justify.
We're still talking about generations - maybe a century - away from someone being able to just pop over to Mars for a summer vacation, the way that a college student could to do today with an intercontinental flight.
> Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality.
For a very generous definition of soon and for a highly implausible definition of what a "cruise ship" is - it'll never be as accessible to the average person as earth cruise ships. Not as long as you keep using rockets.
Regardless of reusability, there are realities of fixed FOSSIL FUEL costs associated with getting into gravity. They're not cheap, and they're not frivolous. If you want to be able get things into orbit as cheap as you're suggesting, you need to start investing in a space elevator, which noone is right now.
> Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space
Cool, yeah, that's true, that becomes more available.
> or nestled in a crater on the Moon.
..why?
> We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.
And the final cherry on the cake. Humanity becoming inter-planetary is important on a macro scale. And trying to go further and further into space will INCENTIVISE research into these concepts.
But in no way does getting to orbit cheaper make it easier to figure out any of these concepts. There's nothing we can do from Mars or on the way to Mars in terms of this science that we can't do from Earth.
Don't forget the dynamics. Costs of all such projects drop further when early steps become affordable. Like, with 100x reduction on the sticker price, US might feel Mars colony is still too expensive a project, but 100x reduction on trying out some adjacent space tech may just be in range of NASA budget or some private interest. Steps get made, iterated on, making next steps cheaper and more likely to happen. Derisking compounds.
I do agree it'd still be a decades long project at least (with a settlement established early on; it's the tail end that will drag on).
>> or nestled in a crater on the Moon.
>..why?
Having some gravity and hard surface to build on simplifies engineering challenges, particularly on large scales, as in free space, tension becomes a big issue. And, perhaps more importantly, the Moon would shield the telescope from all the electromagnetic noise produced on Earth, and also by the Sun.
A little less, if nestled in the crater as the quoted idea would have it.
I hope you don't mean hydrogen and methane. Those are downright easy to make without fossil fuels. And kerosene isn't all that hard.
It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebration for their accomplishments. It has the potential to lower costs and increase the capacity for greater commercialization, militarization and exploration of space.
I think the extent you see that as something positive is subject to your faith in humanity. I tend to think technologies connection to social progress is a three steps forward, two steps back sort of thing. We have certainly made gains in my lifetime but we could have gone a lot further.
But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight.
This is what Musk is doing.
An operational Starship should be very impactful on space exploration but it won't be shipping cattle back from Mars. There is a difficult to discern line between reality and bullshit that Musk likes to blur. The "vision" stuff is there to hype up the troops and investors. You don't need to swallow it to appreciate the technology. It isn't narrow minded to reject stuff that just doesn't add up. The scales, time, distance, energy, investment involved in space colonization are incomparable to settling the USA. The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
> The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
That's what people thought before the railroad was completed.
See "Nothing Like It In the World" by Stephen Ambrose:
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...
Quite bizarre how some people genuinely think he's just some guy who allocates capital. Or rich dad or whatever. I guess his dad was probably rich but that's clearly not enough.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...