Once they get this working, the quantity of cargo they can put in space will be ridiculous. We could actually plausibly begin planning for an offworld base.
The financing of an offworld base is still very much unknown.
Even with a high volume and relatively low cost launch vehicle, the actual offworld base will be hugely expensive, and no commercial enterprise can realistically expect to make a return for their investors.
A government needs to step up with the rationale that it will eventually form a tax-producing colony - but a huge investment will need to be put in till it gets there.
We've had an in-orbit base for over 20 years without any claim of future tax revenue or commercial viability. On Earth, we have a long history of establishing research bases in places where there is no potential for a viable colony (e.g. Antarctica).
All we need is the political will and we can fund a Mars base as a purely government funded research program.
2. Another stepping stone to exploring further interesting/important space goals, like gathering resources from the asteroid belt/moons of jupiter/etc, discovering life on Europa, and so on
Money is just a medium for the exchange of goods or services. What would the colony export in order to generate the revenue required to produce said taxes?
The only sensible thing that would produce Earth based revenues would be some kind of intellectual property, but I don't know what is both sustainable enough and valuable enough to fund a colony.
EDIT: this is also made worse by the fact that the first few colonists should be farmers, mechanics and doctors (aka human mechanics), since all the intellectual work can be done on earth.
I expect that when we have a colony on Mars, exports will be found. Either mineral deposits which are rare on earth, or manufacturing processes which are easier with lower gravity.
A human being able to lift 3x as much without machines already opens up possibilities for greater productivity.
Stuff that must happen in the cold is cheaper to do too...
Think of Vegas - no economic output at all, tourist destination alone. Mars could do the same.
It only takes one thing - there is no need for a mixed economy.
I'm skeptical of that. Mars may indeed have some small advantages over Earth in certain niches of mining or manufacturing, but it's hard to imagine how those advantages wouldn't be greatly outweighed by the added difficulty of doing... just about anything on an uninhabitable planet, and expense of shipping the final product back to earth.
My skepticism comes from a different direction. Assume there's something that can be done at lowest cost on Mars — is it cheaper to send humans to do it (with all the necessary life support, radiation protection, and the inevitable black swans because we've never done anything like this before), or to figure out how to fully automate it and send robots?
If it takes 10,000 people to make $thing, then even at Musk's target price of $100k/person, the cost to develop and ship the automation[0] only has to come in less than a billion dollars to win.
[0] I guess the TCO would be more complex to determine, as the human side includes not just paying the humans (and presumably shipping good from Earth), but also figuring out how to do low-gravity and zero-gravity healthcare and surgery (on this scale there will be emergencies requiring surgery during transit), and planning for the colonists' desire to start families and retire.
The amount of money that a sizable and well funded group of people spend to get away from literally every other human on the planet and away from the government would easily fill a few rockets.
2. Martian Water.
Imagine all the disenfranchised homeopathics now have another woo-woo cure to turn to and will pay out the wazoo for. Make up a claim like "the purest water, untouched by human industry or nuclear tests, powered by billions of years of energy from sun, unfiltered by ozone and untouched by magnetism."
3. Tourism.
Vegas is basically a Martian tourist destination with an entire city built to support it. There's no other reason for Vegas to exist. If the accommodations were nicer, people would go to Antarctica as well. Rich people want to take their selfies with Olympus Mons in the background.
4. Low-G sports
Earth sports probably won't work the same, so entire new sports and leagues will form and provide entirely new season pass resell opportunities for streaming video providers. There's no way to simulate the low-gravity on Earth.
Also rich people sports like golf might take on an entire new ultra elite form when your par-4 hole 8 is 4500m long and you need a satellite to spot your ball.
5. Low-G food products
For similar reasons as the Martian water. Insert any combination of differences in nutrition/taste/look and it'll find it's way onto the plates of a three star Michelin restaurant or as supplements sold at a health store or something.
That's off the top of my head and could easily be a multiple billions of dollars per year of sustained economic output from Mars, mostly built on simple vices, novelty, entertainment, and pure human gullibility.
One way interstellar colonies could finance themselves, including no-faster-than-light financial systems is explored in Charles Stross' Saturn's Children books.
I expect it will be profitable in the future as it scales up. But there is probably only about 2x more scaling at the current price point (launching new countries, selling to people who aren't yet aware of it).
Besides just selling more normal Starlink subs, they also have revenue opportunities from selling their LTE cell phone product to carriers, as well as dedicated networks like the in-progress "StarShield" for the US DoD.
We could park religous fanatics and prisoners offworld? Or just drop self replecating machinery to create value. Which is the actual crux. Even for labor.. Remote or ai operated drones are cheaper.
There is a spin on the same idea when working with data (maths/stats/comp/ML) and having to skirt around the curse of dimensionality. Suppose I have a 5-dimensional observation and I'm wondering if it's really only 4 dimensions there. One way I check is - do a PCA, then look at the size of the remaining variance along the axis that is the smallest component (the one at the tail end, when sorting the PCA components by size). If the remaining variance is 0 - that's easy, I can say: well, it was only ever a 4-dimensional observation that I had after all. However, in the real world it's never going to be exactly 0. What if it is 1e-10? 1e-1? 0.1? At what size does the variance along that smallest PCA axis count as an additional dimension in my data? The thresholds are domain dependent - I can for sure say that enough quantity in the extra dimension gives a rise to that new dimension, adds a new quality. Obversely - diminishing the (variance) quantity in the extra dimension removes that dimension eventually (and with total certainty at the limit of 0). I can extend the logic from this simplest case of linear dependency (where PCA suffices) all the way to to the most general case where I have a general program (instead of PCA) and the criterion is predicting the values in the extra dimension (with the associated error having the role of the variance in the PCA case). At some error quantity >0 I have to admit I have a new dimension (quality).
Not safe to say at all, no. It is such an obvious thing to say, and such an easy observation, many people have said something of this nature for a very long time independent of each other. The is basically another phrasing of the question: “how many grains of sand makes a pile?”
I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).
As I understand it, Stalin said, "Quantity is its own kind of quality." But I don't have the original Russian (someone here no doubt does) where he was referring to the USSR's ability to produce arms faster than their opponents even though the quality was lower.
Certainly that dialectic principle is broadly known. But it's specifically (mis)attributed to Stalin with the reference to wartime production/conscription and you won't find that in his works, recorded speeches or memoirs of contemporaries.
This goes in fact for most of his grand quotes. Whatever deep sounding passage are attributed to him and can't be traced back to Marxism tenets, are typically adaptations from the Bible, reflecting his education as a priest.
Imagine a Pepsi-sponsored replacement of the Kardashev scale: how big is the biggest Pepsi logo? Size of a person / building / city /continent / planet / galaxy / universe. Has consumerism truly run its course until a Pepsi logo has been carved into the CMBR?
"First there was the dream, now there is reality. Here in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in public capacties in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens."
An offworld base would need the financial backing of nation states. But from a purely business side of things, does this open up any new possibilities?
I'm guessing Starlink will get less expensive to operate - but will it be to the point it'll displace cell towers?
Earth observations satellites would be cheaper to put up... so maybe we'll get a few more than before. But are there any real game changers?
The previous limiting factors for launching stuff off-world were weight and size. Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore).
With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.
Okay, I get the margins get more cushy. But one could see it being something like space launch getting 10x cheaper and that maybe translates into 3x demand for satellites. The first earth observatory was worth an astronomical amount of money, but the hundredth or thousandth is far down the tail of diminishing returns.
I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space.
There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either
I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives.
The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining
> If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap
Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.
That will never work. You'll spend more time traveling to and from the remote launch facilities than you would flying conventionally from a nearby international airport. Destinations would also be severely limited by technology export laws; maybe it could be arranged for a handful of friendly nations / strategies allies like Japan or Australia, but most of the world would be scratched off the list.
When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.
I don't know, Dallas to Sydney is a 17 hour flight now. If it takes 30 minutes on a rocket from Texas you have 16 hours to do everything else and you'll still get there faster.
If that was just intended to forecast costs, then it’s a good analogy. But I thought SpaceX went further than that. This Adam Something video provides some amusing coverage of the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI
> The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining
The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly.
The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.
I'm no expert but I think Rome was always growing but never achieved ultimate profitability. Yesterday I was considering how the Italian renaissance was fueled by the materials left over from Roman overbuilding. The price Rome originally paid in labor was an enormous savings to the renaissance builders.
I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.
Mostly on the idea that as the Roman Empire expanded its currency was devalued by precious metal content. That sort of pattern signifies to me decline. I understand that the currency may have been just keeping pace with the efficiency of trade. It seems to me that if trade was as efficient as Rome was hoping it would not have collapsed.
Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.
There's always an element of time to money, so your argument and the parent's don't contradict in that the romans might have not been profitable in the near term yet what they created was very profitable in the long term
> Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore).
Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)
If you want to build spaceships to fly around the solar system, being light still matters a lot and inflatable modules are a great idea.
That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.
If they use Starship to bootstrap mining, refining, and manufacturing in space, then this ceases to become a problem. At that point we're talking about how much cargo Starship can move, not how much infrastructure.
There are manufacturing processes that benefit from microgravity (e.g. growing protein crystals for the pharma industry, producing semiconductors, etc).
Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.
Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:
> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude
For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).
I do somewhat doubt that the economics would work out. Silicon wafers are expensive, but I'm not sure if the price is currently higher than that of launching a bunch of sand to low earth orbit.
What fraction of machine time is currently spent pumping wafers down to molecular-beam vacuum? What fraction of machine mass is dedicated to holding that vacuum? Vibration isolation would also be much easier. Not sure if these are enough to matter, let alone enough to justify a rocket, but maybe the math can be made to work.
> An offworld base would need the financial backing of nation states.
It really depends on what we mean by "offworld base". There is extensive literature on how this might be done "on a shoestring budget". Start here: https://www.marssociety.org/concepts/mars-direct/
I don't want to be rude, but I'd say if you fall for that then you're a sucker.
Tell me which of Elon's companies would exist today without heavy government subsidies or largesse?
He is a modern day Ross Perot. No more, no less. Maybe he wants to make the world a better place - but only if he can get extravagantly wealthy on US taxpayer dollars doing it.
He's obsessed with Mars because it represents the fattest international government contract that ever existed.
I believe an idea that circulated early on in the media in regards to SpaceX, whether rumour or real, is that Musk was planning to basically do a reality TV-like show - and be able to fund the colony on Mars through that; who on Earth wouldn't want to watch the first humans land on Mars, live on Mars - and what "influencers" might volunteer to be some of the first to "report on" the experience, as entertainment - for better or worse?
He's also more recently said the revenues from Starlink, aiming to be at least $5+ billion monthly recurring revenue, will fund his Mars colony.
The reality is though he's now tapped into accessing the full abundance of the universe, and he's at least 1-2 decades ahead of everyone else, in part due to the synergy of his various projects: Starlink, Boring Company, Tesla, etc - all are technology that he'll need for Mars - so he can funnel revenues/sales back into those companies]; and Musk understands exponentials of scaled paths, and so him being 1-2 decades ahead, with the synergy of the multiple companies he owns/controls, every year he has the chance to leapfrog ahead another decade of any other competition.
I do wonder with the cost reduction, weight limit increase and turnaround time reduction if we could now skip a lot of "planning".
Can we get to a point where every kg doesn't need to be maliciously thought about and optimised, maybe we could just yeet any potentially useful thing in to orbit and sort it out later.
I'd actually hope that it leads to fewer, larger satellites that it's practical to go up and repair. At least with a bit of regulatory oversight and some international treaties once this model suddenly becomes feasible with Starship.
In the lower orbits, everything will burn up in the atmosphere within five years or so. Orbital decay is very strong under some 400 km.
Also, space is pretty big. Even with a million destroyed satellites out there, the total density of debris would be very low. Imagine spreading debris of a million destroyed cars all over the planet - including the oceans - then walking around and trying to spot a piece. How often would you even see one, much less happen to walk directly over it (=equivalent of a collision)?
The thing is, in orbit you don’t really need to walk around to see the pieces of debris because they come blasting at you from all directions at 7km/s.
Nevertheless, they are still in one place at one time. If anything, my comparison overstates the danger, because Earth's surface is 2D and in space, many of those pieces will fly over or under you.
Starship has a slightly larger internal volume than the ISS, so yeah, a single starship is directly comparable to the current largest space station we've got
Oh the whole tube is way bigger. Just the pressuriseable payload space is bigger than the internal volume of the space station. Here's a view of what Starship docked to the ISS would look like. Or is it the other way around?
In fact Starship may make space stations obsolete, for the same reason we don't have anchored floating research stations out on the sea that we go back and forth to using little boats. We use research ships instead.
Plus if you wanted to, you could send up a slightly customized Starship to serve as the crew portion of the station and then send up a Starship-shaped “equipment pod” with redundant life support systems, fold-out solar panels, etc and dock it to the crew quarters. Just like that, you have a rough equivalent to the ISS in two launches.
That process could be repeated N times to quickly build a station that’d dwarf the ISS.
If we’re talking science fiction, then sure, you could do anything.
You’re talking about metal tube that never reached the orbit. You thing you just need “slight” customization to make it a space station?
That thing doesn’t fly yet, is not human rated, has no life support capabilities, has unknown lifetime in space, has no propulsion system that would keep it in orbit for long period of time and bazillions of other things.
It’s just a metal tube at this point. I know it’s cool to fantasize what it could be, but so far its metal tube that doesn’t even fly and is hugely behind schedule.
And it’s built by guy, who’s known for overhyping.
You mean the company that's been launching one rocket every 3.5 days this year?
I mean when you have a company that's shipped nothing and they are saying big things, that's one thing. But when you have a company that's actively launching and reusing more rockets than everyone else combined, that's another.
All the things you've listed are previously solved problems that have existing solutions. SpaceX isn't even inventing anything new here.
>That thing doesn’t fly yet
Starship has flown and landed in low altitude flights. It's the booster+starship that's in testing now.
Basically what I mean is - if it can do what it's meant to do - go to Mars - then it's also an easy space station replacement.
You can argue if it will get to Mars of you want. But silly to argue that anything that can get to Mars with human occupants won't be able to also orbit the earth with human occupants
At the same time it's much more likely that a company that makes rockets that do one thing would also make rockets that do another thing much more easily and faster than a company that does not make rockets at all.
Starship and Superheavy have missed their aspirational timelines, but that’s largely moot when there’s nothing else with remotely similar capabilities in development. Even if it doesn’t fly until 2030 (which I think is unlikely) it’d still be lightyears ahead of the competition thanks to the larger industry deciding it didn’t particularly care to meaningfully advance past late 70s technology until very recently.
But that doesn't mean it's a viable replacement for space stations.
Those are 2 totally different topics and it boggles my mind how people can write whole science fiction story around and argue that it's basically a fact.
It’s just casual spitballing of possibilities with oversimplification for the sake of brevity. The main point is that any number of things can be set atop Superheavy as long as it has the general shape of Starship and some kind of attached propulsion, and there’s a lot that can be done with that level of lift capacity paired with a volume that large.
I belive anything that can survive a 3 month trip to Mars for more people than even the biggest station we got so far is a hell of a lot more than a metal tube!
Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out? This is like the crabs in a bucket thing. There’s no need to solve every social issue before progressing to high tech things.
We would do well to ignore the cynical and misanthropic who contribute nothing but complaints about how the capable people should serve their personal interests first.
Well there is one argument that, in my opinion, is a reasonable one.
We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity. Otherwise we might suffer a replication crisis, where cultural and societal advancements are not shared by all.
For example, many dystopian media in the past few decades has focused on images of what a hyper capitalistic society could look like in space. Where you may have to pay for every breath, pay for literally existing in a space. A society where every day of your life must be profitable and servicing the corporations you have sworn fealty, a world where the only purpose for the foreseeable future is growth and commerce.
Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered. One where the purpose of society is to nurture and spread life to where complex life does not exist. A society where the primary driver isn't growth for growth's sake.
The argument is that if we ignore our cultural and philosophical short comings, we could replicate them. Why is replicating them bad? Because the stakes are so much higher when you have a space fairing race. Do you know what a small crew of technically literate people could do with the tech a society building a mar colony would require? Capture and redirect an asteroid, and if they were half intelligent they would know that the best way for it to go undetected would be to play the long game and give it a long trajectory out of the solar plane where most of the solar systems mass is. Or they could just as easily purposefully seed a planet's orbit with debris to create an intentional Kessler's syndrome. And you might say that these are outlandish, but any society that lives in space or on an non-terraformed would be a society where the base competency would be vastly higher due to survival pressures.
So, yes we should keep advancing tech but I think it's an obvious deficiency with our silicon valley minded leaders. We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society because these newage business men have been indoctrinated into the ideology that technology is the one and only savior. It's important, but you can't build a society or a building with only one pillar.
> We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society
We spend untold billions and trillions on these things. You will never solve every problem for every person. Utopia does not exist. You see, a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas on what the fundamental problems of our society are. Some people think it's because people have abandoned traditional values and religion. Other people think it's because of that. You can't solve all the problem for all the people. You can't care for everyone because you just end up caring for no one.
> Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered.
Your vision, to my judgement, sounds self centered though. It's saying "take care of me first instead of fulfilling your ambitions". There can't be a single "community". It's just not possible or realistic. It will always be plural because to be quite frank, many groups of people do not like each other, will not change for each other, and don't want to waste their lives trying to be accepted by other groups. And that's OK.
> We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity.
This is saying we should paralyze ourselves until an arbitrary group of people say everything is good now. Again, why would we do that?
Exactly. While I strongly support efforts to improve life for the masses and solve problems on Earth, I also think that there will always be problems. As such, if we wait for Earth’s problems to be solved before venturing into space, we’ll simply never venture into space, and eventually something will happen to cause humanity to forget how to build and launch rockets, potentially for the remainder of the species’ existence.
It’s better to use the capability while we know we have it and have the chance to etch that knowledge into our very existence by way of living all throughout the solar system.
> Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out?
I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.
And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.
I think it is much more likely that Musk is going to cause a kepler syndrome collapse with starlink well before spacex is actually going to consider creating a moon base.
It looks like SpaceX says 5 years for passive deorbit in their FCC filing. If a satellite were pulverized, I would expect the small pieces to have higher A/m and deorbit even faster.
It's been said countless times that starlink will not cause Kepler syndrome. They are in too low an orbit and atmospheric drag would bring down any debris relatively quickly.
Yes, they lost the technology. The last Apollo mission was over 50 years ago, the people who achieved it are retired or dead, and engineering drawings alone are not enough to build a new Saturn V (or the landers, suits, etc). Not to mention all of that is outdated technology by now.
NASA is now building the SLS, a modern(ish) heavy lift rocket meant for moon missions, among other things. But for a couple decades in between there was this obsession with the Space Shuttle as the primary launch platform, and the Space Shuttle wasn't of much use beyond low earth orbit. And with the Soviets focusing on space stations after the Apollo landings there wasn't any competitive aspect to going further either.
There were obviously lots of unmanned missions to the moon and other places in the solar system, but manned activity was limited to low-earth orbit for the last 50 years, so the capability to go further withered.
It's more like we've lost the engineering. The technology is all still there but now greatly improved. From welding techniques to computer components the whole exercise in in manufacturing would be a huge undertaking to rebuild because we aren't manufacturing any of those old technologies anymore so that would be a problem. Or you have the problem of re-engineering the whole rocket with modern components and manufacturing techniques.
We can build medieval castles all day long with concrete and steel, but if you want an actual stone medieval castle, we don't know how to do it.
The Saturn V rockets were very risky, NASA got extremely lucky with them the first time but no longer have the same tolerance for risk. Even if they still had Saturn V rockets ready to fly today in their inventory, it would not be an acceptable option today.
I don't even think we've lost the engineering. We've lost the risk tolerance. Apollo was a risky program, people dying was considered acceptable. The US just doesn't work like that any more.
No, we don’t. Let me introduce you to OSHA and their buddy worker’s comp insurance.
I ran an industrial facility that had been in operation since the 40’s, safety used to not even be a concern. If it operated in 2000 the way it did in 1950’s, or even in the early 80’s, they’d be out of business.
According to that article the astronauts would go to orbit in an SLS then get into the Starship lander in orbit. Is that just for political reasons so there's some point to the SLS?
Yes, on Falcon 9/Dragon. That differs from Starship w.r.t. human-rating in a few ways:
- Dragon can do an emergency abort, by (a) accelerating away from the booster and (b) parachuting down to a soft-landing. Starship's upper stage is so massive that such acceleration and soft-landing seem out of reach (ideally an emergency-fallback-everything-has-gone-wrong mode shouldn't rely on tricky maneuvers like their landing flip!). There may be ways around that, e.g. using an ejectable module, but it would all need designing, building, testing, validating, etc.
- Falcon 9 needed to prove its reliability by performing many successful uncrewed missions. Starship will need to take the same approach, but hasn't managed any yet ;)
- SpaceX had to stop making changes/improvements to Falcon 9, since NASA would reset the successful-mission-count back to zero after major changes. SpaceX was willing to do that, since they had another rocket to focus on (Starship). Also, it helped that Falcon 9 had already exceeded their expectations by the "Block 5" design (which is why Falcon Heavy hasn't seen much use; Falcon 9 is very capable on its own!). Even when Starship is reliably launching, it will likely undergo design changes for a while.
- Getting Starship to the Moon will need in-orbit refuelling. That's untested, and more dangerous than docking and crew transfer (which is now routine), so it makes sense to launch the crew separately and transfer them to an already-refuelled Starship. This doesn't add much complexity, since refuelling requires multiple launches, orbital rendezvous and docking anyway. The choice of crew launcher is then arbitrary: SLS, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Starship, etc.
(Earth) launch and landing will be the hardest parts to get crew-rated, if they ever are. Perhaps the only human-rated approaches will be smaller, safer systems like Soyuz (or some modern replacement on that scale), with immediate transfer to a Starship or space station once orbital. Given its cargo lifting capacity, and station-sized living space, that would still be a great improvement over today (although maybe not enough to pay back SpaceX's costs)
And spacesuits, NASA has been impressively ineffective at getting any kind of new spacesuit designs going, they're still just cycling between the leftovers from the shuttle.
Apparently, they can't do their lunar spacesuits until they do their lander
> What's more, delays to Starship have knock-on effects because the spacesuit contractor needs to know how the suits will interface with the spacecraft, and simulators need to be built for astronauts to learn its systems.
Ironically, Starship has the same problem Shuttle has, basically limiting it on its own to LEO. The payload stage is too big and heavy.
The solution to get Starship and Shuttle beyond LEO is the same: either use up the fuel required for landing and expending the vehicle or orbital refueling.
The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
There is another thing sets apart Starship from other launch systems: relatively wide availability/manufacturability of its fuel outside of Earth. You won't find kerosene or hypergols on Mars or Ganymedes, but methane can be produced fairly straightforwardly there.
Not easier to handle, though. Keeping methane in a tank or moving it across some distance is fairly straightforward, as the problems regarding natural gas storage and transportation were solved a long time ago.
Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to even keep in one place, much less pipe across some distance.
> The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
But that's exactly what people believed about the space shuttle before it launched as well. Let's wait to see Starship actually work before predicting it will be enormously cheap. As it stands, that cheapness is entirely predicated on a completely unrealistic level of reusability (multiple launches per day with the same rocket, when even Falcon 9 requires weeks or months between launches of the same rocket).
You don't have to take Elon's word to know that it'll be cheap. It's being built in the open air under dozens of cameras streaming 24/7 on Youtube. Calculating the time & materials cost for Starship is straightforward.
The problem is not the same...Shuttle's main engines were dead in orbit after jettisoning the main tank. Only OMS thrusters were working and it landed unpowered, gliding to the surface (more like a controlled crash). It would never make it to orbit with the main tank attached. There was no possible way to fuel it, no engines and OMS was not usable beyond LEO.
You have full powered engines in orbit on Starship, "just" need to fuel them :)
> If it used a more advanced technology, it should have been able to at least fly to the Moon
That's erroneous reasoning. More advanced technology does not imply more advanced capabilities in every respect. The shuttle was not designed to go to the Moon, it was designed for other purposes. It doesn't have the delta-v to reach the Moon, nor would it have any way of landing on it, nor any way of returning even if it could land.
Think of it this way; much of the technology on a modern container ship is more advanced than that on a dreadnaught battleship. That doesn't mean a container ship is any good at blasting other ships out of the water; they aren't built for that.
Why even would they want to send the Shuttle to the Moon? That sort of mission is just a political stunt, the scientific research done there isn't worth the expense.
If the country with the most reasons to call "FAKE!" during the Cold War didn't accuse NASA of faking the launch... why are you? The government lies all the time but this is a ridiculous hill to die on.
The descent phase wasn't very long, and the astronauts were kind of busy during that time. That left just automated cameras, which tended to be lower quality (NTSC or worse). So, yeah, we have few photos of the descent, just video of lousy quality, and it's perfectly understandable why.
The fact that they're 50 years old? It's really hard to keep stuff maintained, and manufacturing methods have completely changed. The last people who could build that particular lander are retired or dead.
And they haven't made a new one.
So no, NASA hasn't had a human rated lunar lander for a very long time.
> You don't see 50 years old weapon systems stop working.
You mean simple firearms, that were carefully cleaned, prep'ed, and packed for long-term storage? Or something at least vaguely comparable to a moon rocket in size and complexity, like a B-52?
Talk to an old Air Force guy, who knows the maintenance routines for the older warbirds, and how many issues they have with "manufacturer went out of business" spare parts, etc.
If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
It's not like NASA is missing fuel, or that hull is damaged, or that engine is not working. At least, these things shouldn't happen if they put half effort into maintaining it.
Your "can maintain" for those old submarines amounts to "can maintain something which was originally designed to last for several decades, with a high-trained full-time crew, regular major maintenance, and a supply chain for spare parts...and all the billions of dollars which those non-trivial details cost".
Vs. those old rockets were designed to be one-shot expendable stuff. Plenty of them are on public display at museums - you could ask the museum staff about how many $$$/year they have available in their budgets, to keep the rockets in operational condition. (Hint: $0.)
Or, you might want to check out the YouTube channel for the USS New Jersey (historic WWII battleship, now a museum) -
- where their curator often talks in gritty detail about vast differences between "operational warship" and "keep afloat and open as a museum". Note that the something-million dollars which they are currently trying to fundraise - for some bare-minimum drydock maintenance - is small potatoes compared to the cost of a single new F-35 fighter.
You realize that submarine was only meant to last 20 years and instead they spent 3 years rebuilding it to serve a different role? It is also closer to 40 years than 50 and is decades younger than the rockets in question. I'd also hazard that the lifetime maintenance costs of that submarine far dwarf it's initial construction costs.
Part of the reason why the SLS took so long and cost so much is because they DID try to re-use all the old resources and technology rather than building from scratch.
> If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
Can? Sure you can. Absolutely.
Did they? No. There was no mandate, no requirement, no project, no budget.
Put that Ohio submarine into a dry dock, send everyone home. Tell them to find something new to do because the project has ended. Do you think you will be able to re-launch submarine in a year later if you changed your mind? How about ten years later? How about 51 years later? I wouldn't hold my breath.
The best way to maintain a capability is by regularly exercising it. The Ohio did that every year constantly, the Apollo program did not.
NASA would have to pull out the Saturn V blueprints and rebuild the manufacturing process from scratch. They would have to start hiring from 0 and reacquire all the institutional knowledge they lost over the past 50 years. They would have a real problem with supply chains: those are all gone, the tooling scrapped, the workers retired, and the business sectors offshored. They would have to redo all the testing so the process could reliably produce a working rocket from the designs. And the designs themselves are based on obsolete techniques, materials, and components.
Even if it was possible, there would be no point: the blueprints weren't the hard part, and the world has changed since they were drawn up.
The USA has lost the technology for putting people on the moon.
Records were not kept, knowledge died with the engineers who built it. Materials are no longer available, some of the technology has not been built in 50 years. In the end, redeveloping the stack is much cheaper than using the old rockets. Which is exactly what they are doing - and with every new development comes the risk you are chasing the wrong rabbit and won't, in the end, end up at your target.
Sorry, but it is hard for me to accept that explanation. You don't simply "lose" such technology or don't make a plan B in case it fails to work for some strange reason.
More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.
Ofcourse we could make it in theory, but practically that's not the case. You don't just build a Saturn rocket and moonlander in your own factory (inhouse) one day. There is a massive supply chain. The development cost percentage points of US GDP. There were thousands of people involved. There also wasn't the internet. x factory responsibile for making component y, would call their supplier and buy an off the shelf component. Those suppliers no longer manufacture those components, why? No demand, probably obsolete etc. It's like trying to go buy a vacuum tube now when you could simply use a transistor. Imagine the cost of setting up a factory just to manufacturer vacuum tubes that have no other use. There's plenty suppliers that wouldn't have documented their manufacturing processes either, with the knowledge being handed down to whoever is doing the job.
Orchestrating a plan to keep millions in the dark and ensuring thousands, upon thousands of people keep a secret to their deathbeds is a lot less plausible.
"You don't just build a Saturn rocket and moonlander in your own factory (inhouse) one day. There is a massive supply chain"
You miss the point. They used those rockets multiple times to go to the Moon, it's not like it was "do once and forget" situation.
How could they simply forget things after doing it for so many times? You need extreme reliability and know-how to do those things consistantly over the span of a decade.
There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering. If not, then the whole thing is not really believable. Sorry.
>There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering.
You've never heard of the situation where no one knows how a business critical piece of software works? "Bob wrote it 20 years ago but he died last year".
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. If no one is paying for that knowledge and supply chain to be maintained it will atrophy and dissapear. That's why the US army is still buying tanks even though they have thousands in storage, they need a company to maintain the supply chain and institutional knowledge to build tanks.
Are you imagining generations of engineers being tasked with knowing how to build a rocket with 1960's technology with parts from suppliers that no longer exist despite no one having any intention to ever buy such a rocket again and no one paying for the maintenance of that ability?
Yes, lots of those design top documents still exist. But not every supplier and sub-sub-sub supplier did the same thing. Most of those companies don't exist anymore or were bought and bought again.
NASA never wanted to build a Saturn V again. So they archived all the plans.
You seem to believe that they put some kind of plan in place to keep the Saturn V so they could bust them out again. This is simply not the case. As far as they were concern Saturn V was over and Shuttle was the future. Archiving everything was the only thing they did.
Of course we could do a huge effort and recreate the Saturn V program. And the lots of documentation that exist would help. But anybody who has recreated old things, knows that plans are not perfect. Doing something like that would simply not be worth.
I'm sure that NASA has all the blueprints filed away somewhere, but the reason we don't have a Saturn V factory running today is not because NASA forgot how to make them. Instead, it's because of cost. Between the Apollo 13 disaster, the Vietnam War, and maybe some other factors, public interest and approval of continued Moon exploration wanted, and Congress revoked the planned funding for Apollo 18 through 20, opting instead to focus on programs like the Space Shuttle.
Interestingly enough, the leftover Saturn V hardware was put to good use by launching Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, both of which turned out to be valuable steps in the US space program. So as much as it pains me to say, it may have been a good thing that the last three moon missions were canceled.
The last moon landing was 1972. That's 51 years ago. They were all part of the same Saturn programme, production actually ceased 4 years earlier in 1968. At the time it was the most complex machine ever built.
It's a completely acceptable explanation. Much more so than "it didn't exist at all" which requires enemies with thousands of nukes pointed at each other to conspire for 50+ years.
The issues are pretty straightforward, when the SaturnV and lunar lander were being built, almost all of the design was done by hand, all of the parts were made by hand and the engineers made all sorts of little undocumented adjustments to the designs in the process.
On top of that, the flight computers of the era were extremely primitive, large and heavy, and the design was done with this in mind.
Finally, NASA's safety standards were much more lax at the time. Saturn V would be considered way too dangerous to fly crew on nowadays.
Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship.
"Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship."
I'm all for it, and root for SpaceX and Musk to make it happen.
What I'm saying all this time on this thread is following:
"Man never went to the Moon before. Artemis will hopefully be the first. If man has been to the Moon multiple times using the same aging technology over 50 years ago, then it shouldn't be an issue to go there now. In fact, it should be much easier and cheaper, as the computers are 1000x more powerful nowadays, and we still have fuel/energy sources that were used then."
Astronomers today measure the distance between Earth and the Moon by shining a laser beam towards it and measuring the time it takes to come back.
Now, guess why the beam actually comes back instead of getting absorbed by the lunar surface? Because Apollo 11 left a mirror there half a century ago, it still works
There are people alive, today, that can prove to you that we went to the moon just by shooting a laser beam in the sky, so yes, we did go to the moon.
I used to think that if it were only slightly off, the return beam might end up intersecting the Earth at somewhere inconvenient, or even missing it entirely. Even more impressively, it took only five minutes to deploy, which is faster than most bathroom mirrors are installed :)
The reason why this isn't a problem is that the device wasn't 'just' a mirror, but rather a retroreflector. This reflects any light back at its source, regardless of which direction the light came from.
If you were really lost in deep space, perhaps you could flash a very bright light (not a laser) momentarily, then look for the return flash from the retroreflector moments later - or at least, hopefully that soon, otherwise you are very far away indeed! A few strategically-placed retroreflectors around the solar system could make an effective triangulation-based location tracker. I wonder if this already exists in some form.
Resorting to a conspiracy to explain facts you miss the opportunity to construct more precise mental model of engineering. And of economy of these big achievements.
It works this way with any conspiracy. It is you mental model, it is your decision, but it is little sad to watch people choosing ignorance over knowledge.
Again, you've glossed over the fact that if the US had never gone to the Moon, the Soviets would've been making it very clear. They obviously had good reason to closely monitor the landings so they could catch the US in any lies and embarrass them. The landings being faked requires a conspiracy to have lasted all this time, without ever being written down, between countries that were one serious misunderstanding away from ending human civilization.
As for cost and 'easier', the Artemis lander programs are cheaper than what Apollo cost, and they have far higher requirements than just being the bare minimum to keep 3 carefully selected specimens of humanity alive for a few days. Hell, Starship is supposed to have an entire infirmary. That is to say that it would indeed be a lot easier if we were just aiming to land a few people in a can for a few days and were completely willing to risk their potential inability to return. We've made the requirements much harder, so the project is appropriately harder.
You lose people, expertise and organizational structure. Those are more important than the "plans of the rocket". Not to mention, would nowadays engineers be able to work from the methods of back then? A lot of stuff would be faster to redesign from scratch (all the software and electronics for sure).
NASA a radically changed it's focus an functions since the space race. Suppliers have changed too.
They could do it again with enough funds and time, but it will take many years.
Kinda like America's WWII battleships didn't really exist - it was all faked - because the U.S. no longer has the industrial capacity to actually build battleships?
Neither destroyers, frigates or aircraft carriers do what a battleship did - delivering projectiles the size of a human some 15 kilometres away in a ballistic arch with some precision.
We do have rocketry that is a lot more advanced than the Saturn V ever was - but it simply cannot, and does not do what the Saturn V did.
I could argue details - but notice that, after battleships were no longer so important, it remained a critical priority for the U.S. Navy to be the "Reigning Superpower" on the world's oceans:
Vs. how interested was the U.S. Gov't in retaining "can go to the moon" capabilities after Apollo 17 (in Dec'72)? Can you name any post-Apollo, pre-2000 manned-moon-mission NASA programs which received serious funding?
Do you think we could built an exact replica of the Model T and its manufacturing line? We could build something kind of like it, but it would require a lot of engineering.
The type of plastic and cloth used is likely not manufactured anymore. The processes used and tools used don't exist anymore in the exact same way they did then. And the people trained to build those tools and operate them don't exist anymore.
The idea that all technology once built can just be recreated without any issue is just complete nonsense.
Do you not know anything about how technology works?
technology and knowledge quickly deteriorate if they aren't actively kept alive. Remember, that this knowledge must be in human minds, and be in the forefront of those minds continually, for the technology to be up to speed enough for it to be collaborated on and to progress or to be employed.
no group of people today, outside of a few enthusiast amateurs (very few), know much about how the Apollo program worked in enough detail to resurrect that technology and infrastructure.
We can't return to the moon today. That's why we're building up a new moon program. We can't just pick up where we left off.
NASA still can make those rockets, but I believe those were pretty inefficient. While it was “justified” during the Space Race, nowadays they would be deemed too costly IMO.
Why not? The Chinese Moon exploration programme is called "Chang'e" after their Moon goddess (who flew to the Moon). And Mao said that "Women hold up half the sky". And Xi Jinping has been pushing for female independence and leadership in science.
And the Chinese would get to beat the Americans at the American's own stated goal. America's programme is called the Artemis Program - Artemis being Apollo's sister - and the programme's first goal is to put a female and a person of colour on the Moon ASAP.
It would be a clear-cut victory for China over the USA, all the while being perfectly in keeping with China's socialist beliefs and past activities.
And China has several competent female astronauts (Wang Yaping and Liu Yang are experienced).
The moonshot was a technical achievement with a political goal. Putting a person on the moon in the next decade will also be a (different) technical achievement with a political goal.
70% of the US is either female, POC, or both. Enticing that mind bogglingly huge demographic into STEM has massive utility for this country. Evidence shows that people aspire more easily to be like people they resemble, and the moonshot that inspired "Whitey On The Moon" didn't do that job well.
What would you pay to add 10 million more engineers and scientists to the trajectory of this nation over the next couple decades?
The US is I guess 51% women, maybe 20–30% Hispanic, maybe 15% African-American, and so on. Then you just need to put one of every identity on the Moon in the next decade.
Because surely you didn’t think that the average person of a sociological minority identify themselves as “not a white [straight] male”.
Lots of vote thrash but no replies. I invite you to examine whether you are reacting to keywords or to concepts, and if the latter, to chime in with what you’ve found, I’m legitimately interested.
What you're missing is scientific reason for that. From scientific point of view we already sent the woman to space (just to test if there are any unexpected effects).
Sending a woman (or a person of color for that matter) to the moon has no scientific benefits unless the mission is framed as building a long-term colony there (where both men and women could participate) for example.
You enumerated several political reasons but no scientific ones as I understand. Hence my question.
Maybe political is not the correct word. The US did it to prevent existential threat from Russians (this is my understanding) and I don't see one here.
Putting humans into space is a roundabout way of letting people know you can put anything you want into space. That is, it's a demonstration of superior technology, which usually means superior military capabilities. In the context of the Cold War, it is reasonable to assume that both the USA and USSR feared that the other might become overconfident, underestimate their potential enemy's defence and make a first strike.
Therefore, the logic goes, each side needed to frequently show off their advanced technology whilst avoiding showing any secrets: ostensibly civilian space exploration serves that purpose rather well.
Possibly it did: the Russians might have thought that they were sufficiently ahead of the USA to start a war and survive it. Perhaps, in a flare-up of nationalistic sentiment combined with a bit of political instability at home, the risk of mutually assured destruction wouldn't have seemed too high. In this hypothetical scenario, seeing pictures of American spacecraft landing on the moon, astronauts doing spacewalks before making safe re-entry at supersonic speeds might have made the notion of surviving a war seem untenable, and would have put the Russians off the idea of a first-strike.
I've read a similar argument for spying - that countries begrudgingly want a certain amount of espionage to take place in peacetime. This is because it's better for everyone to know the extent of each other's military capabilities than to accidentally start an arms race out of a misplaced belief that their rivals are suddenly increasing development of weapons.
I was born in the post-USSR world, and am also British rather than American, so perhaps take my perception of the Cold War with a pinch of salt. :)
The idea that seeing the effects of a nuclear weapon wouldn't be enough to deter a war but seeing a man walking on the moon would is absurd. Is there any evidence for it?
I don't have any evidence, unfortunately. The Wikipedia page for the Space Race mentions that it was considered critical for the national security of the USA, but again there's no citation as far as I can tell for this claim.
The general US population considered Sputnik to be an existential threat. The original space race had all the impetus of a (cold) war effort.
China putting a woman on the moon would be a little embarrassing to the US, but people would forget about it in a week or two. It wouldn't prove China's technological superiority, just some vague sense of moral superiority. And there are a lot cheaper ways to send that message.
What significant difference does it make if we put a woman (or woman of color) on the moon first vs putting another white man on the moon. [with modern technology].
I could think of a few positive reasons to do this, but it shouldn't be the main driving force of competition.
No scientific difference. It's political. A president can trumpet it as a great achievement for humanity. Helps with getting funding & public support, yada yada.
It feels like the value in political virtue signaling is quite past its peak, in fact I think there's something of a negative value to it in a lot of important circles.
The only scientific reason for sending humans to space is to develop better technology for life support on longer missions. At this point automated probes can accomplish most other scientific purposes better. So yes, you send people with different physiological characteristics to further that mission. If you’re sending people for non-scientific reasons than you do it to be first.
Tereshkova was one of the first people in space in the time when nothing was clear about long-term effects on human body. The decision to send a female cosmonaut came from Vladimir Yazdovsky, the pioneer of biomedicine in spaceflight, not from the party cogs or someone else.
While this would be great to start space exploration, there is no military incentive for this, and they're always the only ones with a blank check. Not sure that tourism is the option, maybe mining.
Mass orbital surveilance, live detection of all rocket launches or other orbitally visible weapons.
Military comms over Starlink, or a US Space Force equivelant.
Countering the ability for competitors to launch the capability's both you and I mentioned.
A moon base would let any party who controls it have the high ground in any global conflict. Quite literally, they'll have the ability to control the globe.
The moon's too far away. It would take a missile a few days to get to Earth, and you need to waste energy getting off the moon in the first place. Plus putting it there. There's just no point.
On the inverse though, it takes a few days for missiles to get to you and far more energy to do so. Which would make their launch far more noticeable.
Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth. With modern radar absorbing/scattering designs their transit could also be unnoticed. By the time they arrived at Earth they would be moving far faster then any ICBM could ever hope to achieve. Which puts them well outside the envelope of any existing/soon to exist missile defense system. You would also not have nearly enough time to launch a meaningful counterattack, and any that you did launch would be much easier for our moon based overlords to spot and counter.
Basically putting nukes on the moon breaks MAD pretty thoroughly for the foreseeable future.
My hope would of course be that opening space up would provide humans with sufficient rocks that we would stop trying to blow ourselves up over this rock. I don't expect that will be the case, would be nice though.
Small edit: Double checked the published reentry speeds of some modern ICBMs, ~8 km/s, it's a lot closer to the moon to earth reentry speed of ~10 km/s then I thought. Should point out though that the first is a ceiling and the latter is the floor. So my point still stands, it just means that the moon nazis will have to push a little harder to kill us all.
>Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth.
If your opponent puts missiles on the moon, put observation satellites in lunar orbit.
Surely stealth nuke satellites in earth orbit would be better than fixed positions on the moon? But even nuke satellites are way worse than land based missiles.
A co-ordinated satelite strike from ow orbit means all you satellites need to go over your target at the same time. In an emergency unless you happen to have a bunch of sates by chance over your target, on average it actually takes longer to wait until a given satelite is over a target before you can launch, compared to using ground based missiles. You can compensate by having about 20x as many missile sats as you actually need, so there's always enough over your targets. In theory that gives a small advantage over land based missiles, but that's hugely wasteful.
Putting any of that on the moon just means your enemy has 3 days to figure out what you're doing, or means if you need an emergency response it will arrive in 3 days time.
I don't know that we can detect ICBMs on re-entry at all. Don't existing systems only see them in the boost phase? Your scheme still hides that, I think it might work.
The only saving grace here is that if the US government contracted Elon Musk to secretly haul nukes to the moon, there'd be a smarmy tweet about it that same day.
As against launching the thousands of nukes you already have right here on Earth, and hitting your targets within minutes. I suppose if you want to wipe out your opponents 100x over veeeery slowly rather than just 10x over in lunch time.
Did you forget that you need four refueling launches and a depot launch and then the actual launch of the lunar vehicle (HLS I think) just to get to the moon? The SLS went to the moon in a single launch.
That is a lot of launches for a rocket that doesn't work.
First 3 Falcon launches failed. Now Falcon launches at an annualized rate of roughly 100 times per year and is the most reliable launch vehicle ever made in terms of numbers of consecutive successful launches. Let’s see how Starship’s 4th launch goes.
A SLS launch costs about 2 billion dollars. A Starship launch is estimated to cost around 40 million. It'll probably end up costing more than that, but it would need to cost a whole lot more to make the SLS a better option
You're not technically wrong, but that's like complaining about the bad gas mileage a semi truck gets when driving it to Starbucks for a coffee. Yes, the gas mileage would be better with your Prius. But no, that's not the real use-case for this thing.
This is quite the pessimistic take. If you could wave the old magic wand, what would you do? I feel like you'd start by shutting down the Starship program completely and putting the money/effort elsewhere.
I really wish people would stop making these claims with only a passing knowledge of the issue. SpaceX’s Starlink in particular has done a good job of addressing these problems because they chose to deploy their constellation at very low altitudes (400-600km) where failures (or debris from collisions, to some extent) quickly deorbit due to atmospheric drag. Their original competitor OneWeb chose a higher orbit, 1000-1200km, to get by with fewer satellites. At those altitudes, the satellites stay in orbit for centuries unless actively deorbited.
Kessler Syndrome is a real risk at higher orbits like 1000km and above. But not at the lower altitudes. Kessler Syndrome is an exponential effect, so if the losses (due to atmospheric drag) are higher than the gain (debris generation due to collisions), then you do not get the exponentially growing debris problem. It’s not even possible.
Although it should be pointed that even at higher orbits and even if you’re technically in the exponentially growing regime, this growth would occur very slowly, not minutes or hours. Think months or years. And it’d take something like an active war with mass deployment of anti-satellite weaponry to trigger that kind of thing.
In fact, most debris problems nowadays ARE caused by debris from anti satellite tests (as well as collisions with old Russian derelict satellites or explosions of upper stages not properly deorbited).
But we also have demonstration missions for deorbiting derelict satellites to prevent the production of additional debris even at these higher orbits.
But sorry to say, none of these problems are due to Elon Musk.
