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> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governments.

I really don't agree with this take.

It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever.

The starting point today is very different from the post-Shuttle environment. If Starship fails, it is unlikely to be for pure technology reasons and something else will take its place with perhaps better product-market fit.

SpaceX is a symptom, not the cause.

The true dangers to all of these lofty human enterprises are geopolitics, domestic political destabilization and environmental collapse.

I disagree. If Starship fails, the most likely reason will be technological. Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high).

And if it fails, who will spend billions on a new vehicle?

Stoke Space: They are working on Nova, which is designed for 2nd-stage re-use, and they've got a novel architecture. But they are not well-funded and if Starship fails, it is likely that investor sentiment will shift away from full reusability (you know how investors are). And even if they succeed, their current vehicle can only get 3 tons to orbit. That means each launch must cost less than $1 million to get to the $300/kg target. In contrast, Starship can loft 100 tons, so it can cost up to $30 million per launch and still hit the target.

Blue Origin: They are still working on 1st stage re-use, and even assuming they get that to work next year, they are at least a decade away from testing 2nd stage re-use. And their current designs don't have any of the cost-savings in Starship (like launch-tower catch).

And that's it! There are no other companies seriously working on 2nd-stage reuse.

If Starship fails, there will not be another contender for cheap flights to orbit for decades.

AFAIK there is a bunch of Chinese startups pitching some fully reusable designs and/or ready to clone something that works. There is already some Falcon 9 like first stage reusable booster prototypes in development.

Maybe. There are a few trying 1st-stage reuse. I don't know of anyone actually working on 2nd-stage (beyond concept stage).

> Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high).

There are a lot of other potential technological problems (dozens of engines, stainless steel construction, the belly flop maneuver, etc). Ultimately if Starship would were to fail for technical reasons, it would only indicate the particulars of Starship's implementation don't work. Starship is not the only (or even in my opinion the best) way to achieve full reusability. And partial reusability, which just a few years ago was considered radical, has already been so firmly proven that just about everyone is doing, or trying to do it. The idea of "don't destroy this extremely expensive vehicle after only a single use" won't die for as long as people can see expenses on their books.

If anything, the alternative approach, making a low cost, mass producible rocket has been abandoned, possibly pre-maturely.

Rocket Lab tried the alternative: low-cost, mass-produced expendable rockets, and Peter Beck famously ate his hat when they pivoted to reusable.

Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. And it definitely won't do that and still loft ~100 tons to orbit.

Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen.

There are only two companies that are actively building hardware for 2nd-stage reusability: Blue Origin (which doesn't even have a prototype yet) and Stoke (which has a max 3-ton payload). If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum.

I agree that Starship has lots of other potential technological blockers (although fewer each attempt--I never thought tower-catch would work the first time). But no other designs are even close to fulfilling the promise of low-cost orbital launch.

> Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range.

I don't see why $100/kg is a particularly important threshold.

> Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen.

Falcon 9 reusable is 20 tons to LEO, and the cost SpaceX charges is what customers are willing to pay, not their costs incurred. Before they had reusability, the cost to make a complete, expendable falcon 9 rocket was $50 million. The marginal launch cost for a falcon 9 was approximately ~$15 million in 2020 when they were doing 20% of the launches they're doing now. They are very likely already below $500/kg. Remember this is a system that wasn't initially designed with any level of reusability in mind. A more optimized design that shifted more of the cost to the booster and which was produced at the appropriate scale would almost certainly see a further lower cost.

Falcon 9 boosters can fly back to an onshore landing pad, and Starship has already demonstrated landing back on the launch tower itself.

> If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum.

That's a substantially shifted goalpost. Even if starship succeeds we're still probably more than a decade out from $300/kg orbital costs being a reality. Rockets take a long time to develop, and longer still to mature. SpaceX has been working on Starship for over a decade already. Of course if we assume every rocket currently under development gets cancelled and something new needs to be started from scratch, it will take at least one full rocket development cycle time to bear fruit. But OP was worried that if Starship fails it will cause a loss of faith such that no one even starts working on another attempt for decades.

I would actually argue that Apollo and the space race damaged reusable launcher projects more than the Space Shuttle. Before the mad scramble to the Moon there were many interesting infrastructure projects and incremental manned mission planned as well as partially or fully reusable launcher or variants of existing expendable launchers.

Then everything that was not contributing to MOON ASAP was thrown away & massive spending on space hardware essentially normalized. The end result (Apollo) was impressive and achieved the goal (first on the Moon) - but was also totally unsustainable, resulting in a big crunch and a lot of setbacks and slowdowns.

Another contributing factor has been military involvement - again, wee need that milsat on orbit and we need it now, costs be damned. ICBMs not being exactly reusable does not help. Even the Space Shuttle design being perverted into its partially reusable clunky form can be traced back to military requirements.

Great point! There were many reusable projects in that era, but Apollo budgets consumed everything else.

I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it.

Elon's focus on Starship is to make each iteration as cheap as possible, which means they can radically evolve the design without fear. Think of the (recent) switch to hot-staging or the evolution of Raptor.

If Shuttle had been able to evolve like that, I think they could have gotten the cost down. If you think about it, Starship is basically just Shuttle with the orbiter stacked on top of the booster and with propulsive landing.

> I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it.

I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable.

For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it.

I once emailed Homer Hickam about it, and he was kind enough to reply and said he'd argued the same thing.

Fair enough!

The shuttle is the only rocket system that put part of the rocket above the payload. Were it not for that fatal design flaw, both fatal flights would have been survivable. The first because the explosion would have done less damage. The second because there would have been nothing above the shuttle from which something could have fallen.

I think @WalterBright is probably right and that the Shuttle design was too compromised to be fixable.

Stacking the orbiter on top of the external tank is a non-starter, IMHO. Obviously you'd have to add engines at the bottom, but now your cost goes up unless you plan on recovering the external tank (and how do you do that?).

And now you need another fuel tank for the orbiter, right? Do you extend the orbiter so it can fit an internal fuel tank? Or do you remove the engines and move them to a separate disposable stage?

The Shuttle cannot even fly straight. The engine thrust has to be tilted.

Ouch! These arguments are new to me, and so painfully obvious from an aircraft design point of view. Ouch!

None of that would have been a serious concern had the shuttle actually met any of it's re-usability claims. It doesn't matter that it costs a bit more in fuel and initial outlay for the orbiter if you actually could turn it around with little effort or cost in a couple weeks.

Having to inspect each and every tile after every trip because they basically didn't work like initially designed was the primary failure of the Shuttle program. It also wasn't nearly safe enough, primarily due to a shitty management culture that was taking over America (and is still currently in power in nearly every business).

The thermal tile technology was for some reason believed to be dramatically easier to design, engineer, and manage than it ever came to be in reality. I'm not convinced that Starship has "solved" the problems inherent in tile systems.

That assessment massively underestimates the impact of all that machinery needed to fly it, in terms of design, cost, maintenance, etc. It cannot be wished away.

That's sort of a fallacious argument though because you could say the same thing about every part of a spacecraft that is used only for the return phase of its mission.

It might be more accurate to say that the ratio of mass for re-entry equipment to the entire craft mass is too great.

But with that said I think that the ultimate failure of the shuttle was that the design wasn't amenable to low cost maintenance. A spacecraft could have a crappy payload to orbit as long as it's cheap to maintain and use with quick turnaround.

I have a feeling that should Starship succeed this will be the case with it and it will end up having a substantially lower payload than intended but will make up for it with a design that's cheap to build and maintain.

It's not fallacious at all. Look at the difference in the hardware bringing the Apollo crews back vs Shuttle crews. Several orders of magnitude.

And what's the ratio of that to the returned payload mass?

>It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever.

Really?

SpaceX conducts more than half the world's rocket launches and deploys 80% of the world's satellites.

And that's underselling it. Of the 550 tons of payload launched in Q1 this year, 478 of them were launched by SpaceX. More than 10x more than China's space agency. More than 5x the rest of the world's governments and corporations (including the US government and other US companies) combined.

https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefin...

Why? It's not because they somehow cheat by sending most of their mass in starlink satellites. It is the other way around -- their satellite comms business is only viable because of their advances in rocket technology: cost of mass to orbit has not really come down since the 50s, not until SpaceX which slashed it dramatically.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...

The thing is, there is no demand to get that much stuff into space.

Falcon 9 has massively brought down the cost per orbit, and even with the whole world as a captive market, every university in every country putting up cubesats, they still don't have nearly enough payloads to make the economies of scale kick in. Hence Starlink. The majority of SpaceX payload mass has been Starlink, something nobody was even asking for. 300+ launches.

And the idea to reach the economies of scale for Starship is... Even more Starlink. How much Starlink could we possibly need? When will humanity come up with another use for this glut of payload capacity?

Even with the Artemis deadline looming large, SpaceX are still pushing this Starlink angle for Starship, it's nuts

Demand takes some time to ramp up, especially with quite expensive and complex stuff like Satellites. SpaceX is now even launching competing constellation comsats (project Kuiper), private manned space missions and there are quite a few manned space station projects under development that would be basically unthinkable without the cheaper lift Falcon 9 provides.

As for "How much Starlink could we possibly need?" I think the answer is simply "YES". Even when you possibly somehow satisfy all your Internet access customers, you can start adding other services, like mobile phone coms (already in progress) or maybe imaging or hosted payloads.

Agreed!

Even at $300/kg to LEO there are a ton of new applications that suddenly make sense. If we get to $10/kg we will literally colonize the solar system.

Yeah - while real space development will use 99% of local resources eventually, the cheaper we can get stuff to LEO the quicker we can get things going. Not to mention lifting any complex stuff & humans, that which simply not be available otherwise until much more stuff is operational in space.

Starlink is both a successful commercial service making money hand over fist and a vital strategic asset for the United States. Put simply its one of the most transformative infrastructure projects of the 21st century. SpaceX found a winner and is doubling down on it I don't blame them.

Just wait until the US' low orbit sensing/networking satellite cloud is fully deployed (with radar, GMTI, AMTI).

That's the vital strategic asset, because suddenly the US will have ASAT-tolerant space sensing capability (by virtue of decentralization and numbers) while other countries will still have exquisite assets.

Starlink is interesting, but the above is a game changer at the level of when the Key Holes were launched or the GPS constellation was completed.

The Ukraine War has already proven that Starlink as it exists today in civilian form is already a game changer. If sensor satellites could make a constellation that was over target 100% of the time and could track a ship to support a missile lock (not sure if this is possible with the constellations being built today but it sure isn’t possible with a old style system like the yaogan) then that would be transformative for a Pacific War scenario.

That's essentially the goal: weapon targeting quality tracks, across 100% of the planet, 100% of the time. (Albeit probably with limited simultaneous tracks)

Haven't the economies of scale already kicked in a little? Starlink is profitable. I'm not sure if spacex minus all starship costs is profitable. I'm pretty sure they're quite good at building them faster, better, and for less now. Please show me otherwise. I guess you could call that more learning curve, but that's a fuzzy line.

I guess overall I don't understand your point. What does it matter that the majority of their payload mass was their own? And nobody asking for something is certainly not the same thing as nobody wanting/needing it. See: cars, computers... Starlink now exists and I'm quite certain people love it and rely on it. Wouldn't exist without falcon 9. Starlink basically solved the last mile problem, surely you'd agree rural folks having access to Internet is a good thing?

They made their own demand for falcon 9, with that scale bringing down costs enough to raise demand for basically every research org needing satellites to contract with SpaceX.

I don't think we can definitively predict the demand either way for payload at $300/kg or whatever without first getting there, but Jevons might have some ideas.

Demand comes at a curve, the cheaper you make it, the more demand there will be. The demand for satellites and eventually human travel is practically infinite if the cost is low enough.

If Starship cuts cost to orbit by at minimum 1/3 and at maximum 1/100th demand will skyrocket (pun intended) either way.

The key step change for space demand is probably when launch cost decreases (in terms of $/mass) and availability increases (in terms of max freq of launches) enough so as to make private industry space resource extraction and processing profitable.

Once there's a usable supply chain at the top of the gravity well (or on bodies with lower gravity), a lot of other launch demand is unlocked, because you can do truly interesting things (colonization et al).

> The thing is, there is no demand to get that much stuff into space.

You mean no other company except SpaceX has such a demand. But SpaceX does in fact have such a demand and are using it to make a profit.

Small governments don't understand that they can have space science programs rivaling NASA for super cheap. That's what's holding demand back imo.

Starlink, at scale would be able to replace the telecoms and broadband internet providers with a superior product globally. So that total addressable market is in the trillions.

"Space would remain the province of the military and large governments."

Falcon 9 launches are already only ~10% government payloads, ~90% commercial payloads. They're already vastly not military/government launches.

Fair point!

I should have said that the space economy would remain small.

Sure, not directly. But most of that is imaging and communications payloads, and the vast majority there is being purchased by militaries and intelligence agencies.

Government still props up this whole market.

With the ability to lift more weight, it also means that the travel time to Mars could be shortened considerably (by using more propellant).

The minimum propellant travel times are a major barrier.

Question for the audience, because I've always been curious.

Have there ever been any historical plans for a permanently-transiting interplanetary craft?

A large craft is built, accelerated up to speed (since time wouldn't be a factor, high Isp/low-thrust engines could be used), then left looping between Earth and X at constant high speed, with smaller (and shorter-term) craft accelerating to meet it (e.g. underway replenishment with crew and fuel transfer) or decelerating at the destination.

Heck, if you've got something optionally-crewed, you could have it continuously burning for years to build up speed.

Or do solar system astrodynamics make waiting and then burning like hell from orbital speeds during optimal transit windows more efficient?

Yup, someone thought of it. That man's name? Buzz Aldrin.

https://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-ma...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101102073607if_/http://buzzald...

It is indeed more efficient to perform the usual Hohmann transfer, but the advantage of the Aldrin Cycler concept is you can accelerate a large vehicle once and then 'amortize' that over multiple trips.

The problem with an Aldrin Cycler https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aldrin_cycler is that you pretty much have to leave it unoccupied for several years at a time because the planets are in the wrong place on most orbits. Then after 20-30 years the gaskets start to leak and the electronics get glitchy. Look up how much elbow grease it takes to replace the expired components on the ISS over a 5 year period.

Why do people talk about data centers in space? Heat management is wayyy harder in space.

Common folk assume that the space is super-cold, so it must be good for hot servers.

I don't know about common folk, but I've heard about radiators, which can be as large as you want if you can get mass to orbit cheaply.

Sure, but also much less efficient per unit of mass than regular cooling using the atmosphere or hydrosphere here on Earth.

Well. 2.7K is cold

Lots of things are harder in space; maybe even everything. But it has some benefits, like abundant solar power, lots of room, and line-of-sight to large chunks of Earth.

Almost all the problems can be solved by cheaper access to space, whereas the benefits cannot be easily recreated on Earth.

Is it guaranteed to work? My point is that we don't know, despite confident assertions one way or the other. If it does work, the benefits are clear, and that's why it's worth trying.

Simple: VC money. The only thing surprising to me about that is that the pitch wasn't "AI in space".

My take: The idea that heavy computing in LEO is better than sending data down to Earth sounds very naive. Starlink is great proof that the bandwidth is plentiful and the latency is good, once the equipment is modern. Definitely cheaper and easier than cooling a datacenter.

> The only thing surprising to me about that is that the pitch wasn't "AI in space".

"enabling the future of AI by deploying the largest training clusters on data centers in space."

https://www.starcloud.com/

> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades

Did it really stop for decades? I think SpaceX and Blue Origin were both already working on re-usable launch systems around that time

After the Challenger disaster (1986) it was clear that the Space Shuttle was never going to accomplish its cost and reliability goals. The US military had bet everything on the Shuttle, so it needed a new launch vehicle. The one clear requirement of the new launch vehicle was that it had to be expendable. In fact, the name of the program was "Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle"[1]

Remember also that when SpaceX started to develop Falcon booster reuse in 2011, every major aerospace company said that reusable vehicles would never make economic sense. Even after the first Falcon 9 recovery and re-flight, most aerospace companies thought reusability was a dead-end and that belief came from the refurbishment cost that Shuttle had to go through.

I count from 1994 (start of EELV) to 2021, when NASA launched astronauts on a reused booster and Peter Beck famously fulfilled his promise to eat his hat if Rocket Lab ever worked on a re-usable launch vehicle.

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

SpaceX started with the business plan of low cost, mass producible single use launchers. Falcon 9 was not designed with any level of reusability in mind. There was a major redesign to add landing hardware, but the whole reason for Starship being a totally new design was the reusability that a Falcon "super-heavy" derivative could never achieve.

Good point! I don't think Falcon 9 is large enough for full reusability.

I don't think Stoke's first vehicle will be large enough either (beyond proving out the technology). They will eventually need to build a much larger one.

They tried to use parachutes to slow the boosters down on the first two flights. Turned out it didn't work: the boosters burned up/disintegrated before the parachutes could deploy.

In the 80s, the reusable spacecraft people got sidetracked into SSTO designs, which have horribly small payload fractions. The Delta Clipper and DC-X families were meant to be reusable, but they never scaled up to something that could deliver decent payloads to orbit.

Assuming it doesn't trigger Kessler Syndrome.

With one company being so far ahead is actually a good thing: No tragedy of the Commons. Or reckless gambling on unproven technology.

Agreed!

Also, Kessler Syndrome is over-feared, like the China Syndrome from the nuclear age.

At Starlink orbits, space debris renters in years, if not months. And even then, having cheap access to orbit would allow us deploy replacements quickly.

At GEO, the distances are so vast that Kessler Syndrome is much less likely (though not impossible).

In between, there is some danger, but again, cheap access to orbit gives us the possibility of clean up.

Well, SpaceX originally wanted 1000km+ orbits for Starlink, which would basically never have decayed.

Said fear was relevant.

Starlink satellites are so low in altitude that Kessler syndrome could not occur because their orbits would decay within weeks and reenter the atmosphere and burn up.

> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades.

“ended in failure” sounds harsh in this context. Or is that just me whistling past the sunk cost fallacies?

oh good, Wall-E levels of space polution

Even trash disposal is possible! Dispose all trash in space !!