She is not really unsong at all. She is very, very recognized in the industry and everybody that is seriously interested in space travel knows here. She has been on my list of influential woman and given many talks and speeches all over the place.
Of course she is not Musk famous, but nobody is.
People who hate Musk sometimes try to claim all SpaceX is because of her. That is certainty wrong and she herself would not agree to that. But she is certainty amazing at what she does and starting out doing sales she increased here power and responsibility over the years until she was the clear 2nd in command.
She allows Musk to focus on the new development, innovation and strategy.
It's most strange to me, and I am not saying this applies to you, that one can have legit concerns about Musk and they are simply dismissed as "hate" by so many.
Why some refuse to hold him responsible for his statements is just weird.
I assume it's because the conversation is pretty tired at this point. Post anything musk related on reddit and maybe HN and you'll get comments about Musk calling that diver a pedo, musk got his wealth from his dad's mines, musk having aspergers, or that musk can do nothing wrong.
We've all seen it a thousand times and I'd rather just read about what SpaceX/Tesla/Musk is doing currently than past shit.
The reason is that there exits a large anti-Musk crowd and the ledge on to any even remotely disparaging thing about Musk. And the Shotwell is the real hero very, very often gets used by people who are known to act like that.
When somebody else brings it up, out of genuine believe that she should get more exposure, its easy to throw those groups into the same crowd.
I have very deliberately tried not to do that. Shotwell should get a lot of exposure and a lot of credit.
> Why some refuse to hold him responsible for his statements is just weird.
I don't think most people actually do that. Sure its exists and there are very vocal people out there who do that.
However in general, most people don't agree with some of the things he said or does. On the other hand, I also don't think some of those statements make him the literal devil who should be in prison or even killed is a statement that is often actually made.
Musk is certainty a flawed human, and I have many criticism of him and his companies and his conduct. However, online I am far more often defending him because most of the attacks are not actually well informed and spout the same misinformation in the same over the top way.
Where people just flat out wrote their own history of events and then argue it was the truth.
Hyperloop is a good example. Musk said he would make an idea public, but he wouldn't work on it. That was his position from the beginning. However now when this is brought online people act like he promised Tesla would build a Hyperloop between LA and SF in a year or something like that. Or they just point to companies like 'Hyperloop One' and act as if Musk had anything to do with them.
Any statement that history has shown keeps being repeated with very little factual support to back it up. His comments on FSD come to mind as do some of his comments about how far along Tesla is on various products.
You win the sour grapes award. Amazing how Tesla is worth a trillion and SpaceX over a hundred billion now, but it's all just a trick right? Each company conning investors for almost 20 years now. Look at all the things they haven't accomplished.
Tricking investors isn't exactly a high bar to clear either. But sure, you go on ahead and keep telling yourself that Tesla is worth more than the entire, combined auto industry when they can't even make cars with proper joints and door alignments.
We tend to think investors love to chase clouds. These ideas have existed for a long time, and making them a reality - of course - isn't easy. I tend to believe an investor is looking at how good a company can sell the idea to consumers, even if the tech isn't there yet. The company tricks the consumer - not the investor. People buy the half-finished tech, the company appreciates in value, and the investor very likely planned for this. Maybe the investor is more interested in snake oil than full self-driving automation.
There are stupid investors out there, but they won't be investors for long.
>There are stupid investors out there, but they won't be investors for long.
Softbank seemingly hasn't ran out of money, despite making about the worst investments anyone can have done. The people who don't last long are you or I, people who can put 10k max. The large investors have more money than sense, and can afford to do so.
> The company tricks the consumer - not the investor.
If I give you the money to commit a crime, I am partly responsible for the crime. I don't know why, in your mind, investors should be treated differently, aside from hoping that you'll one day be the one that invests into a company and make loads of money tricking people.
> Softbank seemingly hasn't ran out of money, despite making about the worst investments anyone can have done.
Classic armchair expert. It’s amusing that when they made a fortune with Alibaba many people here dismissed it as luck, and yet when they lost money they became the worst investors ever.
That's not the point. Softbank has been bleeding money for years, pissing it off on some of the worst possible investments. You know what's happened to them ?
Fuck all, because they simply have so much money that they don't really give a damn.
>There are stupid investors out there, but they won't be investors for long.
Not if the federal reserve has anything to say about it! Apparently that'll be changing soon, but the last 15 years or so was all about subsidizing stupid investors.
Solar roof tile shingles are a real technology. And unlike Telsa Solar, which mostly buys it's cells from China, market leaders (in terms of technology) like Meyer-Burgers will present similar products this year. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/29/meyer-burger-plans-to... those will be able to be installed by any roofer and are compliant with German safety standards and are much more robust then Tesla Solars models.
The hardest part is selling a compelling vision that connect with people and motivates a whole new generation, not to mention investors and the gov to invest.
One of my favourite passages in the SpaceX book is from Gwen after working with Elon for a couple of weeks.
She worked really hard on a proposal about how they would go about selling the Falcon rocket to potential customers. Elon took one look and said "That's great. I don't want you to write reports and proposals, I want you to do it.".
My god, I would give anything for a boss like that.
The book is titled Liftoff. It's the best SpaceX book there is and is very accurate involving many interviews with early employees. Musk is in the book but he's not featured majorly. It's mostly about all the employees who worked on the early rockets.
Yup. And the biography by Ashlee Vance is also pretty good (I consider it definitive although it’s several years old, now). One nice thing about Liftoff is it's mostly about the other employees, most of whom we haven't heard much from publicly (although people who have followed SpaceX closely will recognize some of the names like Mueller and Shotwell).
> My god, I would give anything for a boss like that.
You probably wouldn't. A boss that won't give explicit approval for aspects of a project is going to throw you under the bus at the first opportunity. They're not going to take any responsibility if you miss a target. They will however take all the credit for your success.
I don't think I'd be that much into a boss that at least isn't a little curious about the planned strategy for breaking into a very small, tight-knit, expensive market. Like I guess the only time this would make sense is if the boss had absolutely no clue how to market their product and specifically hired me to figure it out. I could see how my boss doesn't really care about how it's done because he knows he's already clueless about it anyway. But even if he doesn't really care, he should still be aware as that is kind of the job of a boss. You don't need to know all the fine details but you should be able to explain to someone else what your underling is doing and how.
Maybe that the system requires starts at sea because of destructive noise levels, but most of the destinations listed in the video are either land-locked or don't have that kind of access to free coast lines? You can argue future technicalities, but not geography.
The person thinks it's fraud because they watched videos by a propagandist who goes by the name "common sense skeptic" who makes videos that sound a lot like the people who make videos about flat earth. I say this as they quote all the same talking points of that person.
Honestly, I don't know what to think of a CEO, who publicly puts her authority behind a video suggesting that doing anything off the open coast line of Zürich may be a viable business proposition. (It's a bit like selling a technology driven by the glaciers of New Mexico.)
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk. I can absolutely see regular passenger service on Starship by 2028. Obviously that's a very aspirational price-point but I don't see how even a strict ruling on fraud would uphold that charge.
Really? In 5 years ROCKETS will be as safe as airplanes? And as cheap? And possible to fly over cities etc (talking about Shotwells promises here)? You really think this?
I hate framing it this way but your passionate hating has me doing it - do you build rockets? Or cars? What exactly do you do that gives you such certainty in bringing down these people who have already achieved so much? Their "dream big" mentality is sorely lacking in a society full of cynical, dead eyed and uncreative drones focused on nothing but financing their own survival or excesses. Applaud it, don't try to bring it down. There's literally no point. At a minimum they inspire others to get out there and get after it tackling problems.
The real problem with Musk is that he seems to be a narcissist and a good hypeman.
His achievements are that he invested in the right companies and then he ousted the original visionaries / founders... and finally claiming he is the founder... see Tesla.
Also a real leader usually gives credit where credit is due. Not once have I seen where Musk has credited his team.
And don't get me started with how he's calling a rescue diver a pedo, because his idea of his rescue submarine was rejected. Fragile ego is a dangerous thing.
He wants to be seen as a real life Tony Stark. It's more about him, not really about moving humanity forward, that's just a side effect.
From what I can tell Musk is literally a founder of SpaceX. I know he was a dick to the founders of Tesla, and he deserves shit for that, but it is a fact that Tesla has come very far since then under his leadership, and any claim that the founders would have done better is pure speculation. And of course the teams at these companies deserve credit, which he consistently admits. People who are obsessed with tearing down Tesla/SpaceX are often inconsistent in that any good thing these companies do cannot be attributed at all to Elon, because “he’s just a grifter hypeman, the team/other founders deserve the credit”, but any bad press they get is somehow entirely Elon’s fault. The truth is just that he’s partially responsible for all the good and the bad.
From accounts of people who have actually worked with him, he’s a legitimately smart guy with a laser focus on executing, albeit a micromanager. All the people I’ve seen saying he’s just some idiot MBA type who doesn’t actually believe what he’s selling are random media personalities and pundits. I can’t claim to know which is true, but one is certainly more credible than the other.
What I was trying to get across is that a founder's own value system and motivations of why a founder is doing a thing are an important factor for the longevity of a company.
To me it appears that Musk is only in it for himself and his legacy. Eventually this will become more apparent and the loyalty and followership he's enjoying will drop.
He's more of a hypeman than a true visionary.
See how he hyped up his other ventures... solar city, self-driving cars you can make money with, electric trucks, hyperloop, etc... still waiting for that self-driving car which should be available 'next year' and that was in 2018 or something.
He has a fragile ego and weird behavior on the social networks. At the same time, SpaceX is by far the most successful of all the space startups that have emerged in this century. Most of its competitors are not even unsuccessful, but outright dead. Blue Origin, financed by Bezos, hasn't yet managed to reach the orbit after 22 years of operation.
Yes, it is possible that random forces of luck selected SpaceX for a string of successes. But I think it is deeper than that. Musk has an ability to attract engineering talent and give it enough leeway so that interesting concepts may emerge. Shotwell has an ability to keep the company financially sound and on track.
SpaceX is in big part successful through what looks like corrupt self-dealing and fraud. They bailed out SolarCity with NASA funded bonds and then instead of taking the L when SolarCity was to go bankrupt, Tesla bailed them out with a fake demo of non-functionable solar shingles followed by an acquisition.
SpaceX has delivered fundamental breakthroughs in commercial space launch. Any analysis of the company that omits this is extremely disingenuous and makes me suspect ignoble motivations behind the critique.
Reusable rockets aren't coincidentally many orders of magnitude safer though. They would need to be just to come even with airplanes. It would also involve acceleration forces far beyond anything a normal passenger would accept. I'd be glad to be wrong, but I have yet to see an analysis that actually does the math and doesn't result in something along the lines of "this concept is insane and doomed to fail". Spaceship would probably make a good spaceship. But using it for quick flights between cities is less realistic than airlines reviving the Concorde.
Very true. Though the high costs historically associated with rocket launches have precluded the kind of scale needed to achieve extreme safety. This will change if SpaceX succeeds with Starship, though of course it will take a long time to iterate enough on safety to achieve the extremely high standard seen in aviation, or at least as high of a standard as is possible with rocket transportation, and then establish a long enough track record that consumers can trust it.
I'm just a bit of a fan of Elon Musk. It won't happen by 2028 of course. Price isn't a problem at all at scale, but regulatory pressure will be. If a cargo point-to-point flight will happen, it already will be something, but I don't know of any cargo, military included, that requires such a speed.
You can't think of any military use for 100 tons of cargo delivered anywhere in the world in 45min? Lats a pretty acute lack of imagination. DoD is already funding it too:
In 1940, the French lost half their strongest armored formations, and subsequently their country, through an inability to supply fuel in a timely manner under combat conditions.
An F-35A is a ~$150M weapon system. An F/A-18E/F ~$60M. Both useless without fuel.
The last failure in flight was 2015. Since then there were 120 successful launches and no failures. There was one payload lost in 2016 during a static fire test.
In terms of rocket launches Wikipedia is very good. I certainty don't know about a better source. Maybe SpaceX has a list public somewhere but I would not sure that is as up to date and detailed as Wikipedia.
Real question: Do you think that Space X (PR) employees primarily manage that Wiki page? It seems possible. No, I don't think that is weird or sinister. All of it could probably be verified with an afternoon of YouTube searches! It seems like something that Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell would publicly discuss / support. Both are quite intellectually direct in their public media appearances (less b/s than most corps).
I don't think so. Wikipeida is really good at all other rocket launches too. Pretty much all rockets at least in the West that I have looked up are very up to date.
The information of all that is public and the people who maintain those pages are one it. Maybe they have even atomized it.
The real problem for Starship (IMHO) is Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most reliable launch vehicle ever created. With reuse the may well be $10m per launch or even less by now and likely to continue to drop. F9 can deliver ~22t to LEO and smaller payloads to geosynchronous orbit. The payloads F9 can't deliver are quite small.
What people forget is that payloads are deeply coupled to their launch vehicles. The launch vehicle will dictate the maximum weight and dimensions of the payload. You can't just take a payload designed for one vehicle and put it on another.
The evidence for this is the relatively few Falcon Heavy launches we've had and are planned.
So now SpaceX has all this launch capacity without the matching demand for it. It's a big part of why Starlink exists.
Cheaper and larger payload capacities will ultimately change the industry and create demand but that takes years.
It's likely Starship will launch ISS replacements but is there sufficient demand there for this ambitious launch vehicle? What else will it be used for? That's a bit of an open question.
> What people forget is that payloads are deeply coupled to their launch vehicles. The launch vehicle will dictate the maximum weight and dimensions of the payload. You can't just take a payload designed for one vehicle and put it on another.
This is generally (but not always) false. SpaceX has been negotiating a lot of their commercial contracts in a vehicle agnostic fashion. Namely that SpaceX can pick which vehicle to launch a given payload on. This will allow them, as soon as Starship is flying reliably, to swap Falcon 9 payloads on to Starship. Also payloads that were designed for one rocket have been swaped on to Falcon 9. One example: https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-contract-to-launch-nasa-sm...https://twitter.com/B_Garelick/status/1291029153119178754
> It's likely Starship will launch ISS replacements but is there sufficient demand there for this ambitious launch vehicle? What else will it be used for? That's a bit of an open question.
Starship is being designed with the intent that it will cannibalize all Falcon 9 launches eventually. I don't think it's an open question at all. It's been stated to be the case explicitly in fact.
> This is generally (but not always) false. SpaceX has been negotiating a lot of their commercial contracts in a vehicle agnostic fashion.
Here's another way of putting that: SpaceX has designed it so F9 and Starship payloads will be interchangeable. That's not quite the same thing. You can't just take an F9 payload and bolt it on top of an Ariane rocket.
> Starship is being designed with the intent that it will cannibalize all Falcon 9 launches eventually.
Sure but that's just going to take a long time, particularly if F9 is, say, sub-$15m per launch. There's a lot that still has to be done for Starship (eg the landing system, the crew component).
> Sure but that's just going to take a long time, particularly if F9 is, say, sub-$15m per launch.
This rests on the assumption that a starship launch costs SpaceX more than that. The whole starship program is a gamble that they can make cheap, fully and rapidly reusable rockets. If the marginal cost for a starship launch is more than for a partially-reusable falcon 9, then the project has failed (or is still in development)
> but that's just going to take a long time, particularly if F9 is, say, sub-$15m per launch.
1) SpaceX isn't a public company; among other benefits, there's substantially less pressure to maximize profits.
2) Starship launch costs don't need to compete with F9, they only need to compete with the other competition.
Also, it's worth repeating that the goal of this entire endeavor is reaching Mars. The above state of affairs isn't a coincidence, but a very deliberate part of Musk's plan. (Also, luck.)
Last I heard, reusable F9 launches cost SpaceX ~$30M. The goal is for Starship launches to cost about $2M, for ~5x the payload mass. Starship is also necessary for Starlink launches to be economical for the full constellation deployment.
The target cost for starship is $2M per launch for a much bigger payload.
If they achieve that (but even if they arrive to several multiple of that) Falcon 9 is dead. It’s as simple as that.
> The target cost for starship is $2M per launch for a much bigger payload. If they achieve that (but even if they arrive to several multiple of that) Falcon 9 is dead. It’s as simple as that.
I wonder if that is entirely true.
There may still be a market for smaller bespoke launches that SpaceX won't want to cede to competitors (though this depends on the cadence of Starship launches, the latency of getting a payload included, and so on), and SpaceX may benefit from keeping F9 around as a platform that allows further iteration on the engines (though this depends on estimates of the increased risk for Starship launches that have a mix of engine versions).
What does the crew component have to do with payload launches a la F9? They can work out a lot of the kinks with Starship while still launching satellites.
I find that utterly mad why would you combine multiple small launches into a big one?
The tyranny of rocket equation suggests to me that you will have to burn a lot more to lift a lot more things to burn for the payloads that would have been in a different rocket.
I would like to be shown the math that it actually takes less fuel with a bigger rocket.
Economies of scale at every stage of the game. Fuel is basically the cheapest part of a launch. Last I checked, the cost of maintaining infrastructure was on roughly the same order as the fuel per launch. More launches per site drives the cost-per down.
Reusability is a spectrum. Falcon requires a nontrivial amount of inspection and refurb between launches, while Starship is aiming for jetliner levels of prep.
Musk is also aiming to drive down the capex costs as well. There's less complexity for unmanned cargo hoist missions. I think the target for Starship is low tens of millions USD, basically cheaper than Falcon Heavy, but more reusable, with more capacity.
I think the only thing that's not cheaper, is liquid methane is a bit more expensive per kJ. They are roughly the same price per kg, with RP-1 being more energy dense. But then again, I could see SpaceX vertically integrating and driving that cost down too.
Falcon Heavy was specified relatively early in the Falcon 9’s development cycle. They were originally going to do more Falcon Heavy missions but in the meantime, blocks 3 and 4 of Falcon 9 came out and the Merlin kept getting better and better, and with block 5 the Merlin D has almost double the thrust of the Merlins on the early Falcon 9s which is kind of nuts. So many of the missions conceived for Falcon Heavy were ultimately flown on a different rocket- a more capable single stick Falcon 9.
>Cheaper and larger payload capacities will ultimately change the industry ... is there sufficient demand there for this ambitious launch vehicle? What else will it be used for?
extended weekend around Moon in cattle class for say $100K/person. Suborbital flight LA to Shanghai in 1 hour for $5-10K. Though it seems that the first years the SpaceX Mars program will gobble almost all the capacity (according to that recent update Elon wants to launch non-stop several times a day to get several million tons into orbit), except for the high margin and/or already contracted stuff like NASA Moon.
>The real problem for Starship (IMHO) is Falcon 9.
F9/Heavy are cheaper than competition, yet not that cheaper to enable new revolutionary uses. They also will never be made to the airline level of safety/robustness/operational simplicity/etc. which is one of the goals of Starship and its Raptor 2 engine.
In particular - according to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor#/media/File:Rapt... the full flow allows them to run turbines under 600 C for fuel and under 500 C for oxygen pump on Raptor 2 - it feels like cheating :) being like steel temperatures, and they of course are using Inconel which gives them great reliability here, like in order of magnitude better than on other engines. That naturally translates into capability to perform many reuses with very frequent launches with minimal operational costs.
If anything i think with Elon having blazed the path there is an opportunity to quickly start and ramp up SpaceX copycats(s) as whatever capacity the industry would produce at the Starship level low prices and high convenience the demand will still be bigger.
> extended weekend around Moon in cattle class for say $100K/person.
But how long does this actually last? The amount of people that can afford to pay that is minimal, I dont see space tourism driving any serious markets for an extremely long time (if ever).
And there is a reason point to point transfer isnt being mentioned anymore. The logistics and regulatory hurdles are going to be massive, and I seriously doubt we see that outside of maybe military tests for cargo transport.
>The amount of people that can afford to pay that is minimal
average American wedding is close to $30K, so i think there is a large market at the top. Plus corporations with their outings/offsite/etc. for S/E/VPs flying business class to nice places, influencers/promotions/raffles, midlife crisis and retired doctors, lawyers, execs as well as tens (if not a hundred) of thousands of young FAANG employees making $500K+/year. It is just that Virgin Galactic and Bezos unfortunately don't do justice to the coming space tourism.
>The logistics and regulatory hurdles are going to be massive
That really hinges on whether Starship will reach airline level of safety which is a huge undertaking and naturally at least several thousand of launches away. Those coming several thousands of launches anyway are planned for bringing into orbit those several millions of tons destined in particular for Mars. I.e. i just don't see any spare capacity from Starship. As far as i see it will be utilized 110%.
The logistics do not just revolve around safety (although that is a major factor), its also stuff like noise and environmental pollution. Residents werent happy with the Concorde noise, people are going to be furious with the noise of a Starship taking off. All of the launches are going to have to be done offshore essentially to avoid this, so now youre also looking at spending probably a couple hours waiting on ferries to come and go, and at that point, who even wants to deal with everything related to that kind of point to point transfer? Thats not even mentioning stuff like being uncomfortable while riding.
All of this plus even if it wasnt too loud, you need countries to let you fly your rocket over their airspace constantly.
We can mention the launches to put millions of tons on Mars, but personally Ill believe that when I see it. That is going to have a massive cost, and I dont see that happening particularly soon at all, even if Starship gets to be completely operational.
They solved this problem with F9 too, with their ride share program.
Starship will make it even cheaper to deliver small payloads too (you'll likely have to wait for enough payload to get lined up to make sense financially), however with the need to continuously deploy starlink satelites, they'll probably fill loads as required with them to fill starship up.
You raise a good point: taking multiple payloads could help bridge this gap. But I still believe it'll take quite awhile to match the economics of an F9 launch (assuming that payload is within the launch parameters).
Falcon Heavy is again evidence of this. We're not seeing ride-sharing on FH. We're seeing large (primarily military) payloads that F9 just can't do.
Not necessarily. I'm not a rocket scientist or economist, but it is possible that FH is less cost-effective per kg on LEO than F9. You need to accelerate three boosters to several thousand km/hour and then to decelerate them to 0 km/hour at ground level. And then to do all the maintaining on those boosters, which takes about a month. Does it allow for 3x payload?
There are other potential issues, like a volume: a payload is not just mass, but a volume too. It needs to fit into fairing. Adding two more boosters doesn't increase available volume.
> I still believe it'll take quite awhile to match the economics of an F9 launch
Musk says that he relies on Starship launches to make it work reliably as expected. And yes, I believe that it will take years. Maybe it will be faster than with F9, but not an order of magnitude faster.
Gravity and atmospheric drag does most of the slowing down of those boosters for free. The first stage uses something like 87% of it’s takeoff weight in fuel to get it and the second stage up to speed, but only 0.5% of it’s takeoff weight in fuel to slow down and land at sea.
The economic case for Starship is even better for small payload customers. At the moment if your launching a cubesat from anywhere but the Nanoracks ISS deployment facility attached to the Japanese Kibo module, then one of your launch costs is a PPOD which gets thrown away
These deployers can cost $10000, or even more depending on the specific cubesat size. So when Starship allows small payload aggregators like Spaceflight Inc to recover the PPOD/deployment hardware then it’s going to provide even further cost reductions beyond the simple dollars per unit mass lifted to orbit. The reusable nature of Starship will be a big part of how it changes the economics of space related industries.
Nobody seems to think about space stations. You could launch much bigger modules with Starship, and many more of them, so you could create a much larger space station for a cheaper price.
You can actually repurpose a starship as a space station.
ISS is 915 m^2, starship should be around 1100 m^2.
Now imagine using several repurposed starship as space station modules..
Possibly, with bigger modules, you could build it in a way that each module is fully redundant, has its own power, thrusters, docking, etc. That way you'd have a fully operational station from the first module, and great redundancy if there was ever an accident.
The ISS orbit naturally decays without regular boosts due to atmospheric drag. I'm hopeful that Starship is fully operational by the time the ISS reaches EOL, maybe a few Starship launches would have enough delta-V to push the ISS up into a graveyard orbit.
> 1. bigger and much more capable interplanetary probes
One of the things I'd dearly love to see in lifetime is a return to the ice giants (ie Uranus and Neptune). We've only visited once and it was in the 1980s with the limited tech of Voyager 1 and 2. Think of what we could learn with a Cassini-level mission and Cassini itself is now ~14 years old.
But these missions take a long time to develop. We actually have a launch window coming up in the early to mid 2030s where we could feasibly reach the ice giants but the development period is so long and no proposals are at an advanced enough stage that we've likely missed it (which makes me sad).
> 2. a much cheaper Webb telescope
Would we make a cheaper version? Or would we take the opportunity to make an even bigger version? I suspect the latter. And JWST took 20 years to develop.
> 3. build a base on the moon
I actually believe we'll see a man on the Moon in the next 20 years. It could be much sooner but these are still government programs subject to change at any moment. I mean think where we could be if the SSC had been completed.
Apollo was driven by Cold War era competition. Our appetite for risk has changed. This means we may not see a Moon mission until rescue in the event of a catastrophe is actually possible. That will delay things.
> 4. make a mission to Mars possible
There's a thread about this from earlier today. IMHO a manned mission to Mars makes almost zero sense. Despite Musk's wildly infeasible and impractical predictions about Mars colonization, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see men on Mars before 2050.
All of the things you've listed here though aren't really commercial enterprises. Or at least they're far from it. They're flagship missions by governments because they're so wildly expensive. This creates some demand but is it sufficient to justify the program? I don't know.
I do suspect we need to find commercial enterprises to justify the Starship economics and I'm just not sure what that looks like yet.
> I do suspect we need to find commercial enterprises to justify the Starship economics and I'm just not sure what that looks like yet.
At $1 MM per launch with 100 t per launch puts Starship roughly at $10 per kg.
Asteroid mining: Will be a huge industry. Especially with growing environmental concerns all around Earth. Waste can basically be disposed of very cheaply into the atmosphere or sun.
Starlink, Kupier, etc constellations: will continually need maintenance. Including similar constellations across the Moon and also Mars.
Entertainment: Assuming 500 kgs per human (because of life support, seats, luggage, food, etc), that is $5000 per ticket to LEO. This is a very reasonable price point for luxury vacations, especially considering an "all inclusive" trip like a cruise or resort. In line with this, a space hotel/casino is very reasonable to get constructed.
> All of the things you've listed here though aren't really commercial enterprises. Or at least they're far from it. They're flagship missions by governments because they're so wildly expensive.
You're using past data to predict the future. Which is typically a good heuristic. However, when it comes to game changing technologies you can no longer use past data to predict future performance. SpaceX will continue to make margins off Starlink and regular F9-like flights. These profits are all going to be reinvested until a Moon and Mars colonies exist and regular trade begins.
Finally, other companies like Relativity Space are creating amazing 3D printers for rockets. These new technologies are only used in a small way in Starship, but could greatly reduce costs for Starship or the next ship. If the 2010s were about F9, and 2020s are about Starship, then the 2030s call for another SpaceX ship that gets even better tech advantages.
The military wants a C-130 payload anywhere in the world in 1 hour. Military up the wazoo in contracts. Militarization of space is inevitable, they'll want bases up there. If the payload costs are true for starship, they'll put big ones up there.
Starship will represent a total paradigm change in space superiority on economics alone. I'm surprised China and Russia aren't loudly complaining about this. It would enable an actual space fortress to some degree. 10 billion dollars for a 1000 tons of hardware in space? Um, that's less than an aircraft carrier.
An aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons...
As stated, space tourism will be HUGE. If 5g/ticket is true, I mean, who on hackernews wouldn't go on that trip? Even if 1% of people in the world take only one flight that in our lifetime that's 80 million people.
How many people want to do the Red Bull parachute from space? I would guess: A LOT.
Just wait for the private Starships. Hey they should be cheaper than megayachts. Show up at starport, anywhere on earth in an hour.
My biggest dream: starship payloads to get a moon-launched 1.5 million ton Project Orion pulse nuclear ship. That is serious equipment payload to do real asteroid mining. One heavy metal/rare earth metal asteroid will pay for that round trip.
Um, China is pretty vocally going after Starlink which is part of what makes this financially feasible, so it's not like they are doing nothing. And not to be all conspiracy theory but their complaint sure is being amplified on the interwebs. I think their bigger issue though is it's going to be a whole lot harder to hide things in they want to do in orbit with so many satellites up there all of a sudden.
"Just wait for the private Starships. Hey they should be cheaper than megayachts."
Any space rocket can turn the whitehouse, the Kremlin or 10 Downing street into a crater withing 30 minutes, with minimal chances of air defence to stoping it. If we start handing out starships to random shady conpanies registered in tax heavens, 9/11 will look like a peacefull day in comparison
You're not wrong, but a private 747 could probably pose a similar threat to your stated targets, but who knows if they actually put in a worthwhile air defense after 9/11.
Sub marines can't turn the Downing Street let alone Washington DC into rubbel. Rockets launched from submarines can. No one but nation states have this capability today.
Umm, what is the CO2 cost ? Oh I forgot, the world is burning up, but it's buisness as usual...
I do appreciate the discussion, though , it's justsad to see a lack of concern for real existential worries...
You're talking to a diehard Anthropogenic GW proponent, at least 20 years.
Space will be rounding error on suburbia in emissions. At this point it's necessary because population and resource consumption growth has exceeded Earth's footprint by quite a lot. We need people and resources moved to space in the long run.
The military sucks as a funding source morally, but it is as big as you can get as a practical/politically achievable one. Where else can you get a trillion dollars? We need asteroid mining, space habs, launch loops to get humanity to space.
GW has to be addressed through urbanization (centralize people in cities), electrification of transport, artificial meat, synthfuels for long haul transit, alt energy for power gen. I'm not saying we'll make it with those, but at least all of that is somewhat underway.
Consumer culture seems to be defraying birth rates. So while consumer monoculture is bad in many ways, if it perversely constricts population growth then it's good. Kind of like if the oligarchs effectively starve everyone of money needed to have big families... it is perversely good for the environment.
But you're talking to someone who's political alignment is "despotic environmentalist".
That's why you capture an asteroid... link at the end of the post. A million tons of rock is GREAT armor.
Traditional naval theory is that you can build a battery onshore 10x bigger than the one on a battleship. Things change when you are in space though. Missiles have to escape the gravity well. Lasers have to get through the atmosphere. Sure it's expensive to get up there, but if you have space superiority, you do have certain advantages.
You can’t really get better than starship with the current chemical rocket technology.
The reason is simple: the Tiranny of the Rocket equation.
Starship exists just because of Raptor (2). An incredible engine, the first full flow engine to ever fly and that should be capable of about 230t of force.
> IMHO a manned mission to Mars makes almost zero sense.
Whether it "makes sense" or not, there are a lot of people that want it to happen, and it also happens to be the express purpose of SpaceX and Starship. That's it's raison d'etre.
They did before the government got involved in it.
But if you want to spend $23 billion for a collider, you're probably going to need to forcibly take the money to do it. Of course, it's worth it if it's someone else's money.
> 1. bigger and much more capable interplanetary probes
The limitation there is capable RTGs, not launch vehicles.
> 2. a much cheaper Webb telescope
Webb couldn't have fit into a Starship fairing either.
> 3. build a base on the moon
For whom? Launching stuff is one thing, but you'd need to design, build, maintain, and supply such station. If you think the ISS was expensive, a Moon base would dwarf the ISS costs. Even if launches would be cheaper, there's still a lot of logistics and support behind such station, which is one of the reasons no one did it yet.
> 4. make a mission to Mars possible
That could be done without Starship - as much as I think Zubrin has drifted into the nut job corner over the past decade, he still has a point: crewed Mars missions would've been possible since the 1980s.
You know what costs even less? Building a larger fairing.
Atlas V has different fairing sizes for different payload types as well.
Sure, a bigger fairing will simplify a space telescope, but you still need to fold it and the bulk of the costs went into developing instruments and the mirror.
There's nothing "simple" about a state-of-the-art scientific instrument. If you want Hubble 2.0, NASA has two of them just lying around for over a decade now; gifted to them by the NRO.
You know how much converting them to useful scientific instruments costs? According to the latest report, it's about $3.2 billion so please give me a break with your "simpler and cheaper because fairing".
> because it turned out smaller planes are more economical
Per seat the A380 is still the cheapest way of moving a person by air. The 777X should beat it, but it's not in service yet.
The problems with the A380 were (1) it wasn't aerodynamically radical enough to maintain that advantage beyond one generation of airliners and (2) you need to fill it to compensate for (1)
> With reuse the may well be $10m per launch or even less
That is a very low estimate. Most people assume more like $20m per launch. Some say $15m.
You still need to manufacture a complex upper stage and complex engine. Reuse of the Merlin is not perfect. It involves a lot of transportation. It involves having a substantial navy and so on.
All in all including fix cost, I would say the can't make it much cheaper.
To get cheaper a next generation rocket is needed.
> What people forget is that payloads are deeply coupled to their launch vehicles. The launch vehicle will dictate the maximum weight and dimensions of the payload. You can't just take a payload designed for one vehicle and put it on another.
While somewhat true, its not universal. Many adopters are standards. And as long as the conditions are not so different. Like if you move between a liquid and a solid rocket, the environment is not that different.
> The evidence for this is the relatively few Falcon Heavy launches we've had and are planned.
There are 5 Falcon Heavy launches planned.
And the thing with Falcon Heavy is that most payloads are volume constraint, and the Falcon Heavy doesn't actually increase that over Falcon 9 while being strictly more expensive.
At the end of the day, the worst case is Starship is a marginally cheaper Falcon 9.
> What else will it be used for? That's a bit of an open question.
Certainty a problem but only once you get to the very high launch rate musk wants. If on a per launch bases its cheaper then Falcon 9, it will have a reason to exist. And from there you can hopefully increase rates over time as the industry takes it into account.
While I don't agree that reuse will bring the price down further, I can 100% get behind the other points.
Even the argument that demand isn't there because launch costs are high doesn't hold - the bigger the sat, the more expensive it is and the trend goes towards smaller and cheaper sats.
Building commercial space stations (plural!) could be done using all-up launches and that would be like what - one launch every couple of years?
It's still early days, but it's not as if 100t to LEO is novel or anything - the Energia rocket could do that 35 years ago. The Soviets and later Roskosmos abandoned the vehicle, because they couldn't find a use for it either (after Buran was axed).
> While I don't agree that reuse will bring the price down further
Why? If you have to spend almost 10M$~ on an expensive high tech upper stage you your just gone throw in the ocean its clearly give you a price lower bound.
> it's not as if 100t to LEO is novel or anything
Starship does 150t in its early version while being fully reusable.
> The Soviets and later Roskosmos abandoned the vehicle, because they couldn't find a use for it either
The Soviet union collapsed and they didn't have the money for it.
I thought the cost per launch for Starship was going to be even less than the non-heavy F9 because it's more reusable.
> The evidence for this is the relatively few Falcon Heavy launches we've had and are planned.
I don't think that's very good evidence. The first Falcon Heavy flight was only 4 years ago and there have been 3 launches until now. Presumably people design their missions around what's available and proven reliable so I would expect it to ramp up. Looks like there are 5/6 Falcon Heavy launches on the cards for this year.
It seems like the thesis is if cost per kg fall enough then the implausible becomes plausible. F9 reduced costs to make starlink possible, what will starship make possible?
"The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong."
Seems to me as if Starlink without Starship isn't all that great.
Also, OneWeb - despite being smaller in scope - managed to do a similar thing without reusable rockets. Now that doesn't make F9 bad - it's still a great machine - it's just not the game changer many hoped it to be.
No, OneWeb didn’t do anything remotely comparable. Starlink satellites are currently more than all the human satellites ever launched.
Smaller in scope is a euphemism, you are comparing a mere 650 satellites with 42k, 2 orders of magnitude more.
OneWeb is not even in the same category. Their technology is several generations behind in both their sat and ground terminal tech.
There is a reason they went bankrupt and were mostly solved by government bail-outs. Because its in fact not viable as a business if you have to launch on traditional rockets and have contractor produce your sats.
I suspect it could disrupt at least some form of earth transportation. The fuel costs are not that different than a transatlantic 787 flight, and it's likely simpler and with fewer moving parts. In similar style to Tesla's vertical approach, they could own the full stack (rocket, fuel production, launch/landing facilities).
There is no way in hell a huge ICBM would get international overflight rights.
The logistics of such system would be hell, too - Concorde only had limited routes due to noise. A rocket of Starship's size is another thing entirely. You'd basically have to launch and land it offshore so the logistics getting to and from the launch site and into the vehicle would kill all benefits.
Not to mention the simple things like weather, closing airspace, and the lack of cross-range capabilities, which would make emergency landings or evading bad conditions on the landing site pretty difficult.
That wouldn't be possible - first, Starship cannot take off without significant support infrastructure, so it'd be a one-way trip.
Additionally, have you seen the hatch on the Lunar Starship? That thing is ~30m above ground and only has a small platform. Loading and unloading that thing would be slow and dangerous compared to simply dropping cargo from a flying aircraft that doesn't even need to touch down or just driving on and off the ramp in case of landed planes.
The concept of rocket transport isn't new either - it has been considered several times and always turned out to be a bad idea.
To see where some of this comes from, look here: [0]
> Starship cannot take off without significant support infrastructure, so it'd be a one-way trip.
Well it needs fueling infrastructure but if the mission is designed sich that there is enough fuel left to fly to some air craft carrier protected barge nearby the rocket might not be stuck there
That, anyway, will not happen. Once one has landed somewhere not a spaceport, it will not be launched again without a huge production. More likely the valuable engines will be removed and shipped home, the rest left as so much scrap metal.
If dry weight is 85 tons, with ~11 tons of engines, that leaves 74 tons of scrap. At 15 cents a pound, that's worth $22k. Maybe more as souvenirs.
The flaps & actuators might be worth taking, but the top ones are inconveniently high up unless you tip it over. Probably the electronics is worth shipping home if it's easy enough to strip off.
I don't know why the thrust plate isn't titanium. A 30 ft diameter thrust plate would in any case be inconvenient to ship home, from most places.
Oh my gid, do you understand that these rockets carry Millions of liters of fuel? Thats the energy of a small nuclear bomb.
Unlike planes, they carry oxidiser and fuel, so they do not burn, they detonate. Minimal safe exclusion zone is measured in square miles!
Simpler? The fuel is chilled 2/3 of the way to absolute zero, and the engines are at several thousand degrees. Tiny manufacturing error and everyone dies.
A 787 holds 127,000 litres of kerosene and a Falcon 9 holds 175,000 litres of kerosene. That 787 will travel 13,500km on that fuel (1/3 the circumference of the Earth), whereas the Falcon 9 can go all the way around the world on its fuel.
Is this true yet? I'm honestly unaware of it. I've heard they were planning on it to be quite cheap when they find a way to extract it from the atmosphere, but don't know how far they are through that.
A Starship can't land at any random commercial airport, a 787 can. The 787 can also divert to any other airport due to aircraft issue, weather, or whatever. Starship doesn't have anywhere close to the same cross-range capability.
Does it need to? Sure, if it is trying to make the 787 and other such aircraft obsolete, it needs to have infrastructure everywhere, but there are a dozen far flung coastal cities for which it could be useful. NYC to Tokyo, Sydney, or Shanghai would be useful. Might be a while before SpaceX could fly to China but other coastal destinations that currently are exhausting flights would have a customer base if the price/time ratio was right.
So you are saying space ports will need to be far out from civilization, and connected to cities by some sort of high speed transport, maybe one located underground for safety reasons?
The terms "nuke" were used which conveys the entirely wrong message. Even if you release the energy of a nuke, if you release it slowly you can even generate electricity from it. What matters is how fast the energy is released and a rocket explosion releases energy relatively slowly.
Building airports is already difficult, because they require a lot of space and cause a lot of noise. People also oppose them for environmental reasons or simply because they don't like them. Spaceports are going to be worse in every aspect.
I don't see spaceports appearing in the densely populated areas of Europe or US East Coast or in LA, and definitely not in the Bay Area. You have to build them in remote areas or in international waters, and then you have to pair them with a conventional airport or with high-speed rail.
There is a reason Musk and co have stopped pitching the point to point transfer on Earth. Aside from technical challenges, this is a massive regulatory and logistics problem
I was about to say it would be terrible because so much fuel would be burning with these cheap launches that we'd probably destroy the atmosphere in a few years...
But for just $10, we can't really be using fuel in the first place.
Interestingly there are proposed launch systems that, while not being $10, would potentially be under $1000 and transform passenger and freight movement on Earth too. I am of course talking about orbital rings [1].
If you're ever in the Houston area, I highly recommend going to see NASA Johnson Space Center. They have a full-size replica (?) Saturn V rocket on its side, you can see.
You simply can't grasp how big these rockets are until you see it up close. It's like a tall building blasting off into space. They're humongous.
I hope to one day see Starship up close in person as it takes off to space.
Saw the first falcon that landed that was put up at SpaceX HQ. It's not as big as Saturn V, but it's still humongous up close.
I also went down to Vanderberg AFB on a whim with a friend of mine to see a Falcon launch. That supersonic boom as the landing booster punched through the atmosphere, followed by smell of rocket exhaust in the cold dusk air is something I'll never forget.
Decades ago, I had an SBIR contract with NASA, the contract monitor being in Huntsville. After I briefed him, I went to see the Saturn V. At that time, it was resting horizontal on a long concrete pad. The briefing went really well, and I was in good spirits.
So there was no barrier between the vehicle and visitors. You could walk up and touch it, which I did. Then I walked to the engine end of the first stage and climbed up between two of the F1 engines. I was able to climb into the center F1 and stand up at the end of the expansion bell.
I didn't even come up to the center of the bell. It drove home the titanic size of the machine in a way that nothing else had.
I had to climb down when a moderately pissed-off guard saw me after a few minutes. It was a wonderful experience.
It's the US Space and Rocket Center for anyone looking it up. The vertical rocket is a replica. The sideways one is real, or mostly real. It's suspended pretty high up so you can walk below it. They host a weekly Oktoberfest event under it for a few months a year. In addition to the museum, they also give bus tours of NASA MSFC.
There's a planetarium nearby with a cool history made from the dome of an oxygen tank. UAH has a special collections room dedicated to the Apollo program. There are some other rockets on the side of the interstate near the outskirts to let you know you're entering rocket city.
If you plan carefully, you can see everything in a day.
Make sure to talk to the docents - many (all?) of them are engineers who worked on the hardware! Last time I was there I spoke with someone who had worked on an IMU mounted in the interstage.
That matches my experience. I spent a wonderful time talking to a docent who diagnosed some of the failures on the Skylab booster. (Which came very close to not making it.)
I got to go up in, and on top of it once - an unreal experience. It is also the tallest exurban building in the country IIRC. From across the river, you can see it from over 10 miles away quite distinctly.
As you're driving along the 105 near Hawthorne, CA, you can see what looks like a smoke stack rising above some large industrial buildings in the distance. That's the Falcon 9 First Stage standing upright outside the SpaceX factory.
This is a fact a lot of people don’t realize. The Saturn V was 363 feet long. I tell my kids to look at the highest building in town we have it is 12 stories and about 150 feet tall. The rocket was well over double that. That is insane! I would do anything to go back in time to watch that thing launch. Absolutely incredible in size.
A good number of people who watched it go to the moon would have been around to hear about the Wright brothers' first powered flight (which only covered 1/3 the distance of the rocket's length). Technological progress from 1900 to 1970 would have just been mindblowing.
The design is now thoroughly outdated. It wouldn't be cost-effective to reproduce a Saturn V as-is.
The equivalent rocket is the Starship, which clearly can be built.
Technologies like 3D printing, new alloys, better fuels, modern computers, etc... have made dramatic differences to the design and construction of these rockets.
It's huuuuuuge! The computer power of that entire thing could fit into a single chip these days. Trying to reproduce something like that 1:1 in the modern age would be just absurd.
Note that the Saturn V design isn't just cost-inefficient because technology has moved on. It wasn't cost effective back then either! The per-launch costs were over $1B in inflation adjusted dollars, putting it squarely into the same ballpark has the SLS, which is a monstrously expensive pork-barrel project designed primarily to burn money, not rocket fuel.
Not really, fundamentals doesn't change that much. Starship is not equivalent, it is entirely new, different category.
>better fuels, modern computers, etc... have made dramatic differences to the design and construction of these rockets.
Saturn V used RP1 and LH2 fuels, both are still widely used. Gas generator cycles are also used in modern engines. You can have smaller computers now but I don't think this would change costs significantly.
Really only thing that changed significantly are manufacturing processes, but that doesn't invalidate the entire design, that you cannot make 1:1 copy doesn't mean you cannot port it to modern manufacturing methods, like this proposal for F-1B: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/new-f-1b-rocket-engi...
RP1 deposits too much coke in the engines to allow reuse, or even extensive static test firing.
LH2 is stupid dangerous to use, requires physically large rockets due to the low density, and as I mentioned, requires extensive leak detection to be integrated into the design.
Super-chilled methane as used by Starship is "just better".
You really should read through the Saturn V manuals and documentation. NASA put a lot of it up online. Technology has moved on from then.
At the time, cost was no object, so they used approaches that wouldn't be acceptable now. For example, the cooling of the engines used hand-brazed tubing, which is crazy expensive to manufacture and test to the required safety level.
Modern engines simply use CNC machining to cut channels into a solid wall, then a plate is brazed on top. Much simpler to manufacture, much cheaper, much safer.
But CNC machining didn't exist back in the Saturn V days! This is the point. We wouldn't "do it that way" any more, because we have tools that they didn't have. Conversely, they had workers readily available that had skills that are not in demand any more, which would cause a hiring bottleneck if the construction of the rocket was attempted today.
Designs don't exist in a vacuum, in some abstract space of "raw materials go directly into the finished product". Designs are made for the wider landscape of the industrial base and the available engineering skillset.
There is no practical way to take the Saturn V design as-is and manufacture it today. It's possible, just not practical, let alone cost-effective.
You're implying that it's in some different category that can't replace the Saturn V but what is that? What can't the Starship do that the Saturn V could?
> They say we couldn't build another Saturn V if we tried. Apparently that old saw is true enough, at least for the original contractors.
We can't build an authentic Great Pyramid, 1950s supercar, or 1970's minicomputer, either. At least, not for anything resembling cost-effectiveness compared to the current way to do things.
That doesn’t mean we can build a 100% copy, though. Apparently, some of the welding requires techniques that have been replaced by better methods, and welders who can replicate the original do not exist. I guess that’s solvable by using robots, but if, e.g., 3D printing or even glueing works better, and the goal would be to get a rocket that size again, why bother?
lol of course we could build another Saturn V. It would be practically from scratch and require a congress which is a bit less polarized, but that's just a silly statement.
This is actually a myth FYI. No records were ever lost, and you can go see all the original blueprints and relevant memos and technical reports in the archives at Marshall or DC if you want. It's all there.
Where the myth comes from, and the kernel of truth underlying it is that the Saturn V was a hand-crafted machine made by experts. NASA and their contractors did their damndest to record every aspect of its production, but undoubtably there is some things that slipped through the cracks and were never written down. Those were lost not because records were lost, but because the individual workers went on to other jobs, and have since retired.
EDIT: Also the tooling has been dismantled and recycled. The blueprints for the tooling exist and it all could be recreated, how sure are we that the specified tolerances matched the actual article? Uncertainty over this would probably invalidate all the testing that had been done.
In a bizarre twist, the new production facility and reverse-engineered production process yielded a version of Fogbank that was of a higher purity than it had been in the past, according to the article. The problem, however, was that for Fogbank to work as intended in existing warhead designs, that previous level of impurity was actually essential. NNSA had to revise the process to ensure the final product was just as impure.
"undoubtably there is some things that slipped through the cracks and were never written down."
I dont think they slip through the cracks as much as people today have different skils. It's like trying to get. Bunch of Node-JS developers to get a mainframe-based system from the 80s working.
In order to make a vehicle like that, you need the tools to make it. That doesn't just include wrenches and hammers - it includes the tooling used to form the curve of the skin and the area you assemble the pieces into. Almost all of that is gone, disassembled or misplaced.
The popular wisdom is that we literally lost some of the technical specs and drawings. A lot of the R&D would have to be redone from scratch... not that it wouldn't make sense to do that anyway, 50+ years later.
The CuriousMarc YouTube channel [1] features a current series where they work on some Saturn transmission equipment (Apollo Comms). They also also restored an AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer). Those were incredible designs for the time, but you wouldn't build (and probably couldn't even if you tried) these modules this way today.
I'd say the loss is more one of history than actual utility. The only way would have been to keep the Saturn V going during the whole time, and upgrade its technology as time went.
Not exactly related, but this reminds me of this triple nuclear plant project that ran into trouble by the time they're on their third, because it took so long, people with the requisite knowledge was gone and the remaining people had no idea how to fill the gap.
The phrase, “we couldn’t build one if we wanted to,” is misleading. We could build the exact vehicle but we could build one that looks similar and does the same thing.
With money and political will they absolutely could build one in 5 years. I'm not sure why people are stuck on this "we just can't accomplish what they did in the good ol' days"
>" There's an upright Saturn class ship in Queens at the NY Hall of Science"
They have nothing near the size of a Saturn V. NY HoS has:
Gemini-Titan II
Mercury-Atlas D Rocket
Mercury-Atlas D “Friendship 7” Replica Capsule
Mercury Capsule
Saturn V F-1 Engine
For perspective, the Saturn V is about 20 times the size of Titan II (by mass), and could almost deliver the whole Titan II into low Earth orbit (LEO).
"dirt cheap Starship" kinda reminds me of a backwoods project where all that was needed to achieve spaceflight and warp drive was a drunk James Cromwell and a few wise-cracking Starfleet officers who traveled back in time...
Dr. Zefram Cochrane: Please! Don't tell me it's all thanks to me! I've heard enough about the great Zefram Cochrane! I don't know who writes your history books or where you get your information from, but you people got some pretty funny ideas about me! You all look at me as if I'm some kind of... saint, or visionary or something!
Cmdr. William Riker: I don't think you're a saint, Doc. But you did have a vision. And now we're sitting in it.
Cochrane: You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs, money! I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I wanna go to the stars? I don't even like to fly! I take trains! I built this ship so that I could retire to some tropical island... filled with naked women. THAT'S Zefram Cochrane. THAT'S his vision. This other guy you keep talking about, this historical figure? I never met him. I can't imagine I ever will.
I recently read "Liftoff" about the early days of SpaceX [1]. Definitely recommended if you want to get a good overview of the company and industry. To me, it provided a lot of missing context and background that is really nice to have when reading articles like this one above. Though the book ends in 2008 - after SpaceX finally put a rocket into orbit on their fourth, and what would have been final, attempt - many of the plans talked about in the book are still ongoing, like the Mars mission.
> Mr Musk’s development philosophy is that “if things are not failing, you aren’t innovating enough.”
My boss used to keep saying "move fast and break things!" Then a new guy seriously messed up and almost lost us a valuable client. The boss demanded an explanation. I said the new guy moved fast and broke things.
He actually wrote that in the explanation to the client. I haven't heard that phrase from him since.
Falcon 9's safety record would indicate that it is possible to have development cycles that push boundaries and maintain a high reliability production system. With regard to Musk's statements about the relationship between innovation and failure, below is a quote from the linked video about optimization in the development process, a quote that provides a more nuanced view than the pithy quote.
Then, try very hard to delete a part or process. This is actually very important. If you’re not occasionally adding things back in, you’re not deleting enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards “Let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” But you can basically make “in case” arguments for so many things. And for a rocket that’s trying to achieve, trying to be the first fully reusable rocket…you have to run at tight margins because if you don’t run tight margins you get nothing to orbit.
The key corollary for "move fast and break things" is "but don't do it in production". SpaceX doesn't rapidly innovate things in production. Starship is not yet in production.
Compared to oldspace they definitely do; Falcon 1 only flew a handful of times, and Falcon 9 has been continually upgraded. Musk has mentioned even the old F9 Block 5s (which are the newest block) are painful to refurbish versus the newer ones.
"move fast and break things", but make sure you know the consequence of breaking it and have that pre-approved by your bosses, labeled with a large font "disclaimer" sign written in red ...
For size comparison, interesting that they put a SLS block 1 in there, which has never flown or been to orbit, but didn't include the Soviet N1 which at least has flown a few times (in catastrophic, exploding fashion) but also has never been to orbit.
They did include an Energia, which is a defunct program and has zero chances of ever getting manufactured again, same as the N1.
I mean, the SLS is slated for a launch in the next few months and the N1 was a failed program that ended fifty years ago. I can see very well the reasons for including one and not the other.
No, just no. The Russian announced about 20 major space projects every year and about 0.1 of them are ever more then that.
Anybody that has watched the Russian space program knows this is nonsense. They have barley enough money to continue to fly their 50 year old rockets. Their supposed next generation rocket has barley ever flown.
Since that article they have already announced like 3 other rockets as well.
Russian space program is 50 year old soviet tech and a lot of political propaganda.
The thing that's impressive to me, in addition to the sheer size of these machines, is the engines. The Raptor 2 is groundbreaking. And there's 30+ of them between both stages. It's just incredible, and there's nothing like it that's been done.
Why? I mean, if the Starship is reusable, and they're producing enough engines to build 2-4 a month, that seems like overkill. How many Starships are even needed?
Enough to get a million metric tons of cargo to Mars (the estimated minimum for viable long term settlement, as explained elsewhere in comments) on a reasonable timetable.
The most comparable scale they’re targeting for manufacturing Starships is jet airplanes. They’re supposed to be space busses, essentially. The way Musk sees them is, as “cattle, not pets”.
Elon wants >1,000 Starships due to the Mars launch window, every 2 years. He wants to get a million+ tons of stuff there quickly. At 100T per Starship, and 1,000 starships, it would take at least 20 years to get 1M tons there.
So, Starship will be really cheap because they are reusable. Also, Starship will commit a larger fleet than all the planes that Boeing and Airbus combined make in a year to a more two decade long mission.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it does mean SpaceX will really have to scale up. Where is that capital going to come from? I'm not even sure even with all of Musk's personal assets and selling out on launches they'll get there for decades.
As I recall, the Soviet moon rocket failed because it had a cluster of engines that they could never get to work together. The Saturn V had a cluster of only 5, and barely were able to get that to work.
Falcon 9 has 9 engines, it’s not like Spacex is unfamiliar with putting multiple engines on a rocket. That being said we have yet to see more than 3 raptors in flight at a time, so the upcoming orbital test flight will be interesting to watch.
> As I recall, the Soviet moon rocket failed because it had a cluster of engines that they could never get to work together. The Saturn V had a cluster of only 5, and barely were able to get that to work.
N-1 rocket had many troubles with the engines, but it wasn't specifically due to the number of engines: the NK-15 engine couldn't be test fired, vs the Raptor definitely can. You can read more about the four failures here[1].
Similarly, the biggest issues with the F1 engine (powered the first stage of the rocket) was with the injector plates: there was a lot of combustion instability due to uneven mixing in the giant combustion chamber. The Raptor, by virtue of injecting both fuel and oxidizer in gaseous form, will mix better (and it has much smaller combustion chamber anyway)
Having two launch pads (they're starting work on a second tower at the Cape) is also a big help, as they would have backup launch site in case there's an explosion.
The discussion was about Raptor and Starship, but you're right that the falcon heavy has some similarities in having to synchronize 27 engines. Regardless, the rest of my comment was the more interesting part.
The N-1 failed partly because the engine were untested and had high failure rates. The could not be tested on the ground and had a lot of manufacturing issues.
The N-1 failed because the on board computers couldn't handle engine shut downs very well. They basically just shut down the opposite engine.
In some flights that problem lead to complex piping being broken as well, but its by far not the reason the rocket failed.
And SpaceX has already done the Falcon Heavy with 27 engine and its perfectly fine.
What matters is that your engine work well and that if something happens to one engine the computer can figure that out and perfectly adjust all other engines to that new reality.
Raptor 2 has melting issues that prevent many of reuses. It not just gone melt during operation. They have tested Raptor 2 full flight cycles many times.
What they are doing is trying to figure out how much cooling they need to make many reuses possible but still have the highest possible performance.
> The thing that's impressive to me, in addition to the sheer size of these machines, is the engines. The Raptor 2 is groundbreaking. And there's 30+ of them between both stages. It's just incredible, and there's nothing like it that's been done.
I may be wrong, but isn't the reason there are so many engines on their rockets is because SpaceX isn't good at building big rocket engines?
>I may be wrong, but isn't the reason there are so many engines on their rockets is because SpaceX isn't good at building big rocket engines?
No, that's completely wrong. There are challenges in running a bunch of engines, but it's critical to pull off for reusability. All rocket engines have a strict floor on how low it's possible to throttle them. Even 40-50% is quite hard, and I believe the Raptor is 40% though with the goal of getting somewhat lower. And for old space expendable rockets that was plenty.
But to land a rocket, you necessarily need to be dealing with bringing it down when it's nearly empty. Rockets are mostly fuel by mass, and when that's expended are very light. The thrust necessary to lift a fully fueled rocket up is massively ginormously more then would be needed for its empty weight. So if you light up at full power even for a moment it's going to fly right back up again. You want a low enough minimum thrust/weight ratio (TWR), ideally below 1 (so you can gradually descend/hover), though a rocket can get by with a bit above with a "hover slam approach" approach like the F9 uses. But it can't be that far above. But you can't just throttle a rocket engine down to 1% either. What to do?
The answer is multiple engines. Throttle is limited, but you can always turn an engine off. So if you have 10 engines which each can throttle to 50%, your effective ability to throttle from max thrust is .5/10 or 5%. With 30 engines at 40% would be .4/30 = 1.3%. Very helpful. Also means more potential redundancy for landing.
There are challenges with plumbing, harmonics, control etc which are real, so as always with rockets complex tradeoffs, and big engines have their own issues. Small engines are also easier gimble, another valuable thing for landing, and to mass manufacturer which is a whole extra aspect for SpaceX, Starship is about economics remember. But there are many solid technical reasons for the choice.
Many smaller engines is cheaper than one big one as you can streamline manufacturing. Also large engines develop combustion instability much easier. They're also harder to cool because of the square-cube law (more heat, less surface area).
It also gives you engine out capability and also the ability to effectively throttle the rocket in a much more fine grained way by shutting off engines.
I don't think they have even attempted to build a large engine. But SpaceX is setup like an assembly line rather than some bespoke engine maker. A larger engine would require larger tooling, 3d printers, etc. Also with 30+ engines its less of an investment if one goes bad, just swap it out.
They always have the option of designing another larger engine later.
With more smaller engines, you have a lot more options how to control your flight. You can throttle them down individually, gimbal them etc.
The only downside is that if any of the engines explodes catastrophically, it will take the entire rocket down. This used to be a big problem in the Soviet N-1 lunar rocket, but contemporary technology can mitigate it quite a bit: with enough telemetry and computer power, you can determine that the engine is acting funny before it explodes, and you can switch it off. Losing one engine out of 30 isn't fatal.
Also, with computer modeling, a lot of the engine design and testing process takes place on screen, so many failure modes are debugged early.
I don't know much about it, but I'm interested to know why the space shuttle solid rocket boosters were so much more powerful than the F1 engine. 2 of them produced about 87% of the thrust of the 5 F1 engines on the Saturn V.
I thought combustion chamber instability was the biggest issue with the big engines. Are solid rockets much more stable?
Solid rockets don't really have that problem in the same way. The instability happens in the thrust charmer of a liquid engine resulting from non-uniform burning. The chamber is not very big if you compare it to the size of the tank. Once you press that non-uniform hot gas threw the neck out into the nozzle the expansion happening in the nozzle also expands those imbalances. So you can end up with different pressure pressure in different part of the nozzle leading to vibration and potentially the nozzle ripping itself into pieces.
Solids rocket are like a candle with a hole threw it. They burn inside out, not from the button to the top. So there is not really a thrust chamber in the same way. A channel goes from buttom to the top inside the booster. So the 'thrust chamber' is essentially the hole length of the booster. And all that material gets pushed down in the direction of the nozzle.
I have never heard any rocket engineer explicitly explain this, but my assumption is that on the way down when everything is pushed threw the neck the gas has time to mix enough so that the instabilities are not that large anymore. I also think the pressure is lower in a solid.
Solids have higher thrust but lower efficiency. The thrust comes from the fact that in the solid fuel mix there is lots of other stuff that need to form the solid. Heavier elements that don't participate in burning (thus less efficient) but add thrust.
Solids also have the draw back of being incredibly loud and having massive vibrations.
Solids also can have 'stability' problems as in that if they are not correctly manufactured, they might not burn uniformly and that can lead to a whole lot of problems and additional vibrations too.
Almost no new rocket company uses solids. Its far to expensive and operationally dangerous. At best you can reuse some outer shell, but not the expensive part.
No. There are other good reasons to use lots of small engines. Redundancy. Ability to throttle down (very important for Starship). You can use the same engines on both stages. Easier to gimbal.
There is an upper limit to scaling. Bigger engines do not mean more power / weight. Bigger is also harder to build and maintain. SpaceX is finding the sweet spot.
What's the best thing I can do to help out with this as a software engineer? Is SpaceX in need of any critical software components? I think this is honestly the coolest thing to happen in my entire lifetime so far, and I would love to be a part of it, but I'm not sure I'd be useful since I'm not a mechanical engineer.
They will need a lot of CGI graphics of the starship flying through the space, cuz this project will never take off anywhere near what Musk is promising.
It sounds like I am overly negative but if you push the hype aside and let only facts speak for themselves:
Orbital refueling - no technical details, just cgi images
crew capacity - no details
ship layout - no details
stage 0 launch platform - no details
life support - ummm scaled up dargon??
raptor 2 - 'its stripped raptor 1 and much better' (still in tests, not proven tech)
refuealing and relaunching withing few hours - Falcon 9 takes 30days!
Optimistically Starship is not going to be ready for human crew anywhere near 5-10 years.
Also someone made a super cut of his 2022 update talk and its beat for beat the same thing he said in update from 2 years ago. Its not a good sign if you havent done anything in 2 years for a project that promises so much in few years time.
> They will need a lot of CGI graphics of the starship flying through the space,
SpaceX in its whole history has shown very, very little CGI. Specially compared to many other traditional rocket companies.
> Orbital refueling - no technical details, just cgi images
We know for a fact that NASA was very, very impressed with SpaceX work on orbital refueling. In their bid for the moon mission they got a special shout out from NASA because their approach to it was so much further developed then anybody else.
They also have a contract with NASA about demonstrating cryo fuel transfer in space.
Have you ever consider that just because they are sharing everything with you personally doesn't mean they haven't thought about it?
> crew capacity - no details
> ship layout - no details
Why would they provide details? The crew capacity is not a fixed thing. Depending on the mission the internals will be different. We know what NASA is planning for the moon. In that version there will be very tiny crew.
Likely a somewhat larger crew for the Polaris program. And probably somewhat more for the DearMoon project.
Compared to making a fully reusable super heavy this is peanuts.
> life support - ummm scaled up dargon??
Do you have anything to say other then '??'? Yes, those are machines exist and if you have a larger inside you need to add more of them. This is totally possible and not a '??'. If you are not constraint by weight then doing that is totally reasonable.
And NASA own evaluation of the HLS bid also thought it was reasonable.
Its not reasonable for a Mars flight, but that by far not one of the first missions, they have lots of time to continue to work on that technology.
> raptor 2 - 'its stripped raptor 1 and much better' (still in tests, not proven tech)
They have produced many more of them that many other rocket engine program produced in their hole history. They have test-fired them many, many, many times and they have done full duration test fires as well.
> refuealing and relaunching withing few hours - Falcon 9 takes 30days!
You can't just look at Falcon 9 and say 'this proves it'. That's nonsense. They have many Falcon 9s, why would they try to rush a landed booster into service when they have 10 others waiting.
Falcon 9 often lands in the ocean and it takes a week+ until they even get it back.
> Also someone made a super cut of his 2022 update talk and its beat for beat the same thing he said in update from 2 years ago. Its not a good sign if you havent done anything in 2 years for a project that promises so much in few years time.
Of course and he talked about the same thing in 2016 as well. Because the talks are not primarily about technical details.
Also, your comment is just plane nonsense. We have cameras on their production and launch site literally every day. If anybody thinks that they have not made progress in 2 years then they have not been paying attention and are just deliberately making disingenuous argument.
This thing reads like a victim of a Stockholm syndrome.
No I have a better example, this reads exactly like defenders of Nikola Semi-
truck, before they were busted for having nothing but a shell of a truck rolling down the hill.
I could but I am not going to waste time. Sweet dreams.
edit:
reading back your comments... Is that you Elon? Shouldn't you be working on rockets or something?
The article doesn't mention using Starship for point-to-point transport on Earth. It would seem to make sense for fast long distance commercial travel, and for high value -- like military -- cargo delivery. I'd guess that such terrestrial applications could swamp the more cosmic ones in scale, just because this is where the money and demand is.
The main problem with that idea is that rockets are incredibly loud and noisy. You couldn't launch anywhere close to population centers, where the transportation needs are, and if you need to take a boat to get to a launch platform far at sea you lose a lot of potential.
Second problem is that it looks awfully like an ICBM. Lots of countries wouldn't like one of these flying in their direction, which would limit the amount of possible routes.
Imagine having to drive for three hours after a one hour flight halfway around the world and complaining that you had to drive three hours to save 16 hours of flying in a jet.
That said, I don't see passenger rockets being a thing for quite some time.
I sometimes wonder what my great-aunt was thinking when she flew across the Atlantic in a jetliner. She remembered when the first automobile came to her village.
I first flew across the Atlantic as a baby in a propeller airplane. The last time I crossed, it was in a 757, the airplane I worked on 40 years previously.
The big advances in my lifetime were pretty much all in computers. Ironically, that was the one thing not predicted by any of the endless scifi books I read.
I think that even if Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell stopped everything at SpaceX right now, their contributions with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are enough to etch their names in history. The three Falcon heavy boosters landing is nothing short of sci-fi coming true.
What have these two people actually done, except lying all the time? And abusing their workers?
Also, these "magical" landings have been made 60 YEARS AGO! Go Musk! Hyperloop! FSD! Robotaxis! Semi! VTOL with pressurized air! Tesla robot! Pedo guy!
Not sure if you’re interested in feedback, but your angry and extreme feelings about Musk and everything connected with him make your opinions too easy to disregard: you’ve made yourself the HN equivalent of the angry crazy guy shouting on a street corner.
I know it’s the trend in the world, the established media, social media, etc. but it’s possible have have a more nuanced view on things than ALL VERY BAD or AMAZING AWESOME.
For example, one can reasonably criticise Musk for his stupid outbursts on Twitter and elsewhere (and of course, also criticise the media for breathlessly reporting every bit of nonsense he spouts for clicks.) He is notoriously bad at predicting the timing of when things will happen. Robotaxis are probably 5+ years away, if ever. Tesla delivers their new models much later than promised, and has poor customer service. Hyperloop was a concept that would probably have been ignored were it not for the outsize attention that Musk gets. Etc.
But… these views can reasonably coexist with also acknowledging that two of his companies have revolutionised their parts of our world within a very short space of time. SpaceX has revolutionised the commercial rocket space, and Tesla has driven the whole automotive industry towards building EVs by leading from the front. And it’s almost guaranteed that neither of those would have happened without them being led by Musk (and Shotwell).
Your comments about rocket landings just speak of your own ignorance. Even the guy who made video you linked wouldn't agree with your terrible opinion.
> Hyperloop
What lie? Have you actually done any research.
Musk said he worked on something, he is not gone develop it as he has no time, but if somebody else wants to, they can. And to help that he opened up this BluePaper:
That's literally it. No produce was ever promised. The only thing that was promised was to deliver a BluePaper and they did.
> Semi
A produce they are delivering in slow numbers and there is no question that they will deliver more. Its a question of battery availability and business strategy.
> VTOL with pressurized air!
Again not true. You keep mixing up things talked about and things promised.
For the new Roadster they said they would work on a SpaceX package that would be able to for a small time hover a vehicle. They have neither sold that package only talked about that they are working on it.
> Pedo guy!
So guy was an asshole to him, and then he was an asshole back. They are both not the nicest people. So what.
> FSD! Robotaxis!
Like many others he was wrong in their prediction. Like many others were on the same topic. Ok, fair. But the rest of your comment is nonsense.
> And abusing their workers?
More nonsense. Tesla workers with stock options have done far better then any autoworkers. Many SpaceX engineers retired as millionaires. Overall working at SpaceX its highly likely that you would have made more then comparable engineers specially of comparable seniority.
You have a fundamental scientific misunderstanding of the difference in difficulty of landing a rocket that goes straight up and down and landing a rocket that has just put something into an orbital trajectory.
Go look at any analysis of launch prices over the last 20 years, they have gone down.
SpaceX came in with a very aggressive price and they have lowered it a bit since. However since they have no competition they have increased their own margin rather then lower the price further.
That has made them a highly valuable company capable of investing in next generation.
> And reusability has its own problems, like lowering the amount of payload by 25% (you need to save fuel for re-entry).
That argument is equally dumb for all other types of transportation as it is for rockets.
> You can maybe get 10-20% savings if you ever get it working (see previous failed attempts...).
Complete nonsense. Hardware on a large rockets is above 80% of the cost and large fixed cost can be improved also by higher flight rates that re-usability make possible.
Anybody that has studied that space seriously understand that massively lower cost are possible with full rapid re-usability.
The point mlindner is making is that the cost of launch vehicles is in the vehicle, not the propellant. So full rapid reuse, so you can refly the entire vehicle a lot, drives the cost per launch way down.
Because there's a lot of uncertainty at the moment that depends on the result of the FAA environmental review. If there's a "yes", then launch is likely this year. If there's a "no", then launch is likely not this year.
Aren't environmental review services a thing in the USA? It's pretty commonly expected to seek such services and edhere to their recommendations prior to filling a launch request in many jurisdictions around the world since prior to launch you have to coordinate with several state authorities, and do some paperwork.
I'm pretty sure any organization that's able to figure out such launch vehicle will be able to do their own due diligence.
Remember folks Elon has a way of, er, overstating. He promised that SpaceX launches cost what, 1% of current launches? So far, they're more expensive than the Space Shuttle it replaced in NASA contracts. Their own numbers say that in the fullness of time they may be 10% cheaper. So far, not so.
Space exploration is great, we should do it, and this rocket sounds cool. We should do it even if it is expensive.
But "dirt cheap" is probably an Elon-ism, closer to "full self driving by 2018."
The space shuttle is a human-rated launch vehicle capable of taking 7 people into orbit at a total cost of $445M per launch, or about $65M per seat. When subcontracted to Russia, the charge was about $85M per person. Crew Dragon costs about $55M per person - which is one place my 10% number comes from.
Cargo flights are different, and you should also look at total program costs from the deal with NASA. The NASA contract [1] was for ~12 launchs, minimum 20T of cargo for $1.6B. That puts the total program cost at $80,000 per kg. The space shuttle program costs were about $60,000 per kg.
But don't take my word for it, here's a quote from a NASA scientist saying their payload cost per pound went up. [2]
"My cost per pound went up with these rockets," Margasahayam told Tech Insider. "On the shuttle, it would be much less."
The article there cites per-kg costs at $10,000 on the space shuttle vs $27,000 on SpaceX. With the Dragon it came down to about $9,000 per kg, which is again about 10% below the price NASA was paying for the shuttle.
The $445M number doesn't count the total cost of the program, which put each Shuttle launch at ~ $1.5 billion.
Average cost of a SpaceX resupply is $152 million. That's the total amount the US government pays per mission.
You couldn't send the shuttle up with 10% of the cargo capacity and only pay 10% of the cost. The Shuttle was $1.5 billion whether it was 16,000 kg to the ISS or 2,000 kg.
Nor could you just use it to send two people to the ISS and only pay $170 million for two seats (Really $400 million - the actual cost for two seats.)
> The article there cites per-kg costs at $10,000 on the space shuttle vs $27,000 on SpaceX. With the Dragon it came down to about $9,000 per kg, which is again about 10% below the price NASA was paying for the shuttle.
> Their own numbers say that in the fullness of time they may be 10% cheaper. So far, not so.
How do you reconcile these two statements? Are the costs now 10% cheaper per kg or not?
Also from the link 2
> Margasahayam points out that, while the space shuttles were more expensive — a whopping $500 million per launch (or possibly $1.5 billion, according to one analysis we've seen) — each mission carried about 50,000 lbs. (plus seven astronauts!). That means each pound of cargo used to cost about $10,000 to ship on a shuttle.
Some estimates are even higher than that, close to $2 billion, inflation adjusted
It's deceptive to compare the two since the shuttle really is good almost exclusively for ISS missions, Hubble repair, etc (unique Canadarm capability) while F9 is the cheapest there is for Satellite launches at $2,720/kg. It isn't so great to require a crew for a satellite launch. The shuttle can only stay docked to the ISS for about 14 days while crew dragon can stay for over 180 days.
Mr. Margasahayam does not work on any mission I've been able to find. It sounds more like Business Insider being it's normal self trying to drum up false things about Musk businesses.
Notably Falcon 9 launch prices have dropped to ~60M. That means that at this point, SpaceX is about twice as cost efficient per kg to LEO as the shuttle was.
> So far, the average costs of launching cargo remain on par with the space shuttle at about $US30,000 per lb. (The space shuttle cost about $US1.5 billion per mission, including development, and could carry up to 50,000 lbs of cargo.)
Also not to mention that the Wikipedia table is probably irrelevant, because for the Space Shuttle launch cost is just the total cost of the entire program (including R&D and everything else) divided by how much it actually carried, while SpaceX figures are literally just Elon's marketing material. Look at the citations.
> The development of commercial launch systems has substantially reduced the cost of space launch. NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg.
The fact that SpaceX advertises that figure doesn't make it true.
The fact that business insider (a much discredited tabloid) puts it in an article doesn't make it true either. Falcon 9 is MUCH cheaper than launching on Space Shuttle ever was. Your article is from 5 years ago btw.
Does the federal government pay the same rates we commercial third-parties from abroad get to go to launch?
To my understanding several times the federal government has special requests that can and will drive the launch cost upwards for many (if not all) launch providers.
> Does the federal government pay the same rates we commercial third-parties from abroad get to go to launch?
Every launch contract is bespoke and the customers can request additional (sometimes significant) amounts of documentation of part providence and the rest. The US government often requests significantly extra documentation so it increases costs quite a bit.
Shuttle launches were about $450M per launch, with 7 people and 50,000lbs of cargo. Came to about $10,000 per kg, vs SpaceX Falcon 9 at $27,000 [edit] and the Dragon around $9,000.
In case you’re not very familiar, when dealing with launches to orbit: cost only makes sense in terms of “$ per kg per launch to <orbital destination>”, not “$ per launch to <orbital destination>”.
For the Roscosmos costs, mass to LEO seems to be $4270/kg [0].
Falcon 9 is at $1270/kg [1]. This link also has the comparison with the Space Shuttle.
I think there's a difference in methodology here. When those numbers of the shuttle are listed, they're including all the upfront R&D spread across the life-cycle of the program. I believe the Falcon costs disregard all those as a sunk cost and only list the actual "launch" costs
I think this might miss the point. Is the $70MM/launch tag including the R&D? Does it include the R&D that is essentially given to SpaceX through their SpaceAct agreement?
Imagine if Tesla gave me all their R&D and manufacturing know-how and offered to help me out whenever I hit a snag, wouldn't I look great by showing everyone how much cheaper I can build an EV? That's why I think it's a bit of a faulty comparison. Still great, but some of these comparison border on the edge of hype
I'm not going to argue that the shuttle wasn't a boondoggle. The same reasons it was are the same reasons it's not a great comparison. Very different mission scope/requirements, having to conform to multiple masters (DoD and NASA) regarding the design, etc. The shuttle was required to do things F9 is not.
Again, I don't think that's an apt comparison. The NAFCOM numbers used in that calculation don't include things like program support costs, contingency costs, contractor fees, etc. Those are usually baked into the NASA figures sighted though. Add on top of that, NASA will sometimes independently fund R&D related directly to issues experiences. SpaceX can be the direct beneficiaries of that research without having any of the costs on their books.
I'm confident SpaceX would still be substantially lower than NASA if they had, but we need to be consistent in the methodology or it just becomes the equivalent of cherry picking data to underscore an already valid point.
I personally really don't like Elon's completely ridiculous claims of cutting the price of something by an order of magnitude or two.
Even if he could (he can't), what business sense would it make? Why would you cut the prices of launches to 1% of the current ones, if you could also cut them by just 10% and supposedly have an absolutely insane margin, because you'd still get all the business.
It will take the space industry a few years to adapt to the new possibilities, yes.
But already in the beginning, Starship should be able to deliver several hundred Starlink satellites to their orbits, so it could accelerate deployment of the network quite a lot.
> It will take the space industry a few years to adapt to the new possibilities, yes.
There are tons of possibilities; James Web 2 with 10x the diameter, a probe to catch up with Oumaumau, real asteroid prospecting. Oh and orbital hotels. Does anyone know of any concrete projects?
Depending on the final cost, and the cost of amenities, SpaceX could probably profitably just launch people on orbital holidays. By some numbers I think you're looking at sort of "trip to Disneyland" pricing in terms of expense.
There is currently probably an almost infinite market of sending middle class people into space to experience true microgravity and LEO, and if that's viable then you're already setting up a secondary market of people who would want more (3 days to orbit moon? At say...$30,000 I'd do it).
Space tourism gets oversold a lot, but in a scenario where prices are accessible to the middle class and you make a little money...it would be a long time before you'd run out of customers.
$30,000/person for a vacation is definitely out of budget for the middle class. $30,000 for a family of four is also out of budget. Hell, I'm not even sure Disney is a less than a once-in-a-lifetime (if that) for middle class families.
Well, the entire middle class isn't flying to the Moon anytime soon. Not even a meaningful fraction thereof. The logistical constraints are enormous.
But I guess 10 thousand people out of the 8 billion that currently inhabit the Earth would be willing to spend 30 thousand bucks to visit the Moon. Getting all of them there and back would actually mean quite a lot of effort.
Sure, 10,000 people may sign up for that. But that's not relevant.
First, in revenue, that's $300MM. A lot of money, but doesn't seem to be a lot of money for the costs of running that number of Starships, let alone the building of them or R&D.
Second, if we assume 1% of people want to go into space, the 10,000 people would be out of the richest million people on earth. That is not the middle class. In fact, those million people will have more wealth than the entire world's middle class.
There are 4 NASA projects proposed to launch successors to JWST sometime after 2035, doing more foundational (heh) research: Lynx, HabEx, LUVOIR (with variants A and B) and Origins. All still need to get past the initial research phase, and all but Lynx would greatly benefit from a launch vehicle that can cheaply and easily send 10s of tons into L2.
Oh, and don't forget the contract from NASA for landing humans on the moon.
The possibilities are endless, but the supply chains will have to grow in order to utilize them fully, and that will take some time.
IDK how many engineers qualified in designing space-resistant hardware are out there, but I am almost certain that many more will be needed. Space conditions are pretty brutal on components.
SpaceX has a contract to land people on the moon as part of the Artemis program. Last I checked, their plan includes multiple Starships and orbital refueling. Then there's the dearMoon project, where some artists are planned to be sent around the Moon, because.
The thing is that it can deliver that 100 tons to LEO at a lower cost than a single Falcon 9 launch. You would see fundamental changes in how the industry behaves. Now you have incredible engineering efforts that are put into weight reduction of payloads since the launches are so expensive. That will come to an end, engineers will focus on delivering more value, rather than maniacally lowering weight. And you will see incredible things that come with this. Private space stations, actual production in space, and many things that you couldn't even think of will come to life. All because of the accessible super-heavy rocket. and I hope that SpaceX wouldn't be the only company that has such a rocket. We need New Glenn and as many other rapidly reusable rockets as possible because nobody wants a monopoly in the form of SpaceX controlling the whole market.
Their goal is to create a ship that‘s up to the task of setting up colonies on Mars. Their estimate is that at least 1 million metric tons of cargo to the surface of Mars are required for that.
Favorable launch windows to Mars are occurring every two years. With a cargo mass capacity of 100t per ship, over a span of 20 years (=10 launch windows) that would still require 1000 launches per launch window in average. Let that sink in…
Since a trip to Mars takes too long, a ship can only go once per launch window. So they would need as many ships as there are launches to Mars in a launch window.
I'm not all that familiar with orbital transfers and costs. Given the 20 year time frame and launch quantities needed, is a favorable transfer window always needed (I'm probably asking if it is always cheapest)? Seems like there's going to be stuff being sent up that would be totally fine slowly cruising to Mars in three years instead of one. Receiving a thousand shipments from space sounds approximately as hard as sending them and spacing them out over a longer period might be desired (and given that quantity, let's face it, we're going to crater a few of them into Mars and replacements will need to be sent).
Outside the launch window, you need to spend more fuel, which means less payload. I would imagine sending ships outside the window, even if you can do so at a greater rate, won't help you much in terms of payload, if at all.
No, it's because the transfer orbit with the largest payload for the thrust is only available in a specific configuration of Mars and Earth, which only happen every 26 months or so.
Yes. When you leave is extremely important as its mostly about the relative alignment of the planets. You can trade a massive amount of fuel to get their faster, but waiting a month can sometimes shave 3 months off the travel time.
If you left on August 25 2022, you will arrive in July 2023. If you waited 1 month to leave, and left on September 26 2022 you would arrive in May 2023, months before the people who left earlier.
Its not mass to orbit (though it helps) - it's $ per kg to orbit.
If Starship hits its mark, it will have a lower $ per kg to orbit then any other rocket in history.
And that's big: most technological innovation happens when we cross economies of scale in the price of some underlying service - or in availability. The existence of computers revolutionized a lot of things - but putting one on every office desk, and then in every home, and then in every pocket - that's what's led to a lot of other capabilities now being viable.
Orbital access is the same trajectory: we probably can't even conceive of the types of business models that will happen once certain cost/availability thresholds are breached. You see this every day in your home - really sit down and think about the logistical chain that means you can use aluminium foil the way you do. The type of resources and logistics which make that possible - all of which didn't have the goal of making home aluminium foil readily available, but who the existence of solves problems without us even thinking out.
I'm guessing it is just referring to reliability of rockets in general. Reliability should be improved and being able to fly more rockets by being "fully and rapidly reusable" is the right approach. Planes would not have been able to become as safe as they are if we had to build a new one for each flight.
Soyuz is the only rocket that has flown much more than 100 flights, and it has a reliability of 97%.
Several other rockets, including Falcon 9, have flown enough successful flights that statistically their reliability is unlikely to be less than 99%, but we cannot know that it's any higher than that.
NASA figures that the failure rate of a Dragon flight is about 1 in 500, but that's based on analysis rather than statistics and is likely quite wrong. Note that the highest chance of failure in their analysis is a micrometeorite collision rather than a rocket failure.
>Soyuz is the only rocket that has flown much more than 100 flights
Falcon 9 has had 140 flights of which 138 were successful, but that includes 1.0 and 1.1 which were significantly different early designs. It's had 120 flights for F9 FT, all successful (though over 111 flights ago one was destroyed in preflight testing). It's arguably the safest rocket system ever made [0].
That said, Starship should easily surpass it. It has more margin to work with and will run at a much higher cadence with much more opportunity for refinement and testing.
