Financially and ecologically this is not worse than manufacturing products in China and shipping them all over the world, or usual stuff like tourism, cloud computing etc.
I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets, as it requires a cleaner fuel than Falcon (methane vs kerosene) and should be fully reusable (i.e. no tossing the rocket in the ocean and hoping it will sink).
If we manage to bootstrap space manufacturing, benefits for ecology, biology and material science are also self-evident.
And yet nothing in any response so far counters my claim that capital expenditure on space projects will likely increase exponentially. The only claim I made, and the one I was downvoted for.
> I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets
Methalox combusts to CO2. As the burgeoning space industry scales up exponentially, so will the emissions.
> If we manage to bootstrap space manufacturing, benefits for ecology, biology and material science are also self-evident.
Not 100% self-evident. Apart from how infeasible this is from the outset, once deployed at scale it would require transporting millions of tons of goods and raw materials back and forth against the gravity of the earth.
Not my domain, but I'm not sure there's a combustible fuel that could have the energy density to do this and not pollute the atmosphere (happy to be corrected on this). It seems we need to find a completely new means of propulsion (or offsetting with carbon capture) before we could have a green space industry.
> It seems we need to find a completely new means of propulsion (or offsetting with carbon capture) before we could have a green space industry.
Space elevators would be a cool solution, but they are in the realm of science fiction for now. So deploying at least some carbon capture solutions before space industry begins to scale actively is a good idea
> Methalox combusts to CO2. As the burgeoning space industry scales up exponentially, so will the emissions.
Methane can be manufactured to be carbon neutral. The cost is prohibitive for everyday on the ground energy use but not so for rocket launches, since fuel is such a tiny portion of the cost of a flight.
It's a much better outcome, but remains to be seen whether it goes beyond a talking point and can scale to meet future demand. Also, depositing GHGs like water vapor and CO2 in the upper atmosphere is a somewhat worse proposition than ground level emissions
They need to figure out ISRU for Starship methane refueling on Mars, but I don't think it will be ready for the cargo launches. Probably can expect it to be deployed before the first Mars crew launches though
I think it sums it up nicely. The fact that a company makes a lot of money isn’t an argument against them and we spend a lot of money on many nonsensical things so spending more on something that drives technological advancement is a good thing.
> The fact that a company makes a lot of money isn’t an argument against them
I wasn't making an argument against companies making a lot of money. I was merely pointing out that the commercialization will be sinking capital investment far greater than just 2 billion, contrary to the poster's claim. I don't speak of the counterfactual, i.e., where that excess money would go otherwise, but I do share the OP's lament that we should be trying to fix problems on Earth. If Space tech can help in some way, I'm all for that.
> spending more on something that drives technological advancement is a good thing
Technologies are amoral. Whether or not the advancement or deployment of any particular technology is a 'good thing' is a matter of subjectivity.
