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4h49m
So I'm excited to see this tech develop but I wonder how much of a market there really is for super-heavy lifters. I can't wait to see a future version where they land the various stages rather than just dumping them into the sea. The first Falcon Heavy launch was super impressive.
SpaceX already has the Falcon Heavy and there have only been a handful of launches, primarily military.
I guess the argument is it'll open up new opportunities but will this really replace the Falcon 9 workhorse, which at this point is I believe the most successful launch system in history?
Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?
There’s lots of things that are just too big and heavy and need launch vehicles like that.
It might be overkill for satellites, but space stations and habitats need the payload capacity of something like this to become anything resembling economical.
how many of those things are there?
Apollo program flew once in 6 months.
If we're to build a Moon base, we're going to have at least this frequency of flights - really, I'd prefer to have a great margin on top of that, because Moon is much harder than LEO, and we might need more resiliency to safely explore.
Each flight to the Moon will likely need to involve 10-20 Starship flights (rough number) to LEO. So even if we're flying twice a year - and 6 month stay on the Moon right now looks like a pretty serious expedition - we need to have a Starship flight every ~10-15 days.
So even for a robust Moon exploration program we need as many Starships per year as the whole world was launching rockets per year just some ~20 years ago.
Mars launch window is every two years. It is very inefficient to launch at other times.
As for moon, I'm surprised with the estimate you have provided. Apollo needed just one launch for each mission. Even if SpaceX will do orbital re-fueling, it's just two-three launches, why would you need more?
BTW, the idea of getting heavy Starship to the moon and back is interesting, but at the end flying the vehicle optimized for re-entry far away and back is suboptimal. My prediction that they quickly will go to specialized LEO-LMO vehicles with LEO re-fueling.
A bit like asking how many 30 story buildings are there when we first started building modern steel and concrete buildings. How many cathedrals could we possibly need?
If you build it, they will come
There'll be a lot more once it is actually possible and economical to put it in space.
Well, most prominently, thousands of Starlink satellites.
This is such an odd argument; it's like asking how many airports there were in 1904.
FH had the problem that it had a comparatively small fairing compared with an upper stage that's "only" okay-ish for deep space insertions, so you can neither put really huge LEO payloads on it, nor can you give a deep space probe a really big kick stage to make up for the deficits of the upper stage.
Starship solves all these issues: The upper stage is more fuel efficient, and it has more room for really big payloads and/or kickstages.
Half of the people tried went bankrupt already due to F9: It is already too big for most payloads, so it does a lot of rideshare missions that pool multiple smaller launches together. It's very hard to compete with that.
So even if, for some reason, commercial customers don't really want to exploit the capabilites of Starship (ignoring the fact that multiple did already), SpaceX can again offer ride shares at a larger scale for F9-class payloads.
Starship might honestly have a similar payload issue with the weird door design, the way it hinges up means you need a more complex release plan than most which just pop straight off the front of the booster.
During the third test flight they also tested their weird side eject design for Starlink (or other flat pack style satellites) and the video looks like the door completely ripped itself apart.
The door design isn't final yet, there's no point in whining about it. They need tankers and landers for NASA contracts short term (neither of which require payload deployment), anything else is a nice to have that can be tinkered with on the side until it works.
Your first clause is correct, the second is unnecessarily hostile.
I'm just getting really irritated by the amount of concern trolling surrounding SpaceX. Everything they do "must" have a gotcha, because clearly they cannot be as far ahead of the competition as they daily prove to be.
Yeah, I agree with you. Healthy skepticism is generally a good thing but now SpaceX has clearly demonstrated an unprecedented ability to solve a large number of insanely difficult problems. At some point, it becomes unreasonable to "yeah, but..." less difficult things like cargo doors.
> Healthy skepticism is generally a good thing but now SpaceX has clearly demonstrated an unprecedented ability to solve a large number of insanely difficult problems.
I'd add "again" into your sentence. They already did it before. Now they proved that they hadn't lost that ability yet.
The door is a major issue to using super heavy to deliver other payloads which is a goal long term and the need for a heat shield on the bottom makes it hard to make it fully open towards the front. Kind of need to have this fairly well sorted from the beginning because new designs mean new testing and certification which are expensive.
No. That's the whole point of SpaceX's development model, testing done right is absurdly cheap.
The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!
Like? What industry really needs things floating in space that are only constrained by cost to launch? I can see lots of science mission perhaps, but even that seems somewhat limited.
Internet
There have been tests of producing fiber optic cables (iirc) made in zeroG. There are other things as well that are way too cost prohibitive now, but might become viable opportunities with this type of capability.
Asteroid mining.
Tourism is likely the next big market; cost is a major barrier.
It's not only about cost per kg but also maximum payload mass. If you can build bigger satellites then you don't need to optimize for weight as hard and can use cheaper components/standardize. Which means both launch cost and sat costs will come down.
Or entirely new capabilities get developed. Look how long it took for the F9 Heavy to get any business because fitting payloads really only got planned and developed after it demonstrated its abilities.
With the Starship, there will be single payloads of 100t or more - Elon is even talking about 200t in future versions. That is a total game changer. A station like the ISS could be set up much quicker. You could start designing real spaceships with e.g. ion drives. And a 100t payload might even cost less than currently a single F9 flight.
Has to be large to be reusable due to scaling factors.
We can finally start sending useful amounts of things into space, millions of solar panels for one
How is putting solar in space more useful than putting it on Earth? You still have the problem of a capricious atmosphere between the source of the beams and the place where you need the electricity. Sure, you can slightly modulate and do a few things, but the extra energy is extraordinarily unlikely to make up the extra costs even if the transport costs were 0.
It means you can have abundant power in space to run all kinds of hardware.
Then what is this hardware that you'd want to run in space, that needs more power than it can generate on its own?
Anything that will fit in a 30ft diameter faring weighing less than 150 metric tonnes. I’d love to see commercial space stations that can house large numbers of people in comfortable cabins so it’s more like a cruise ship than a submarine. Gotta power all those amenities somehow without diesel generators. But you could also put things like datacenters in orbit if the cost savings on power production made it worth while. Longer term you need a lot of power for resource extraction and processing and manufacturing. Would also make light sail propulsion of probes or deep space missions possible using lasers or beamed microwave power for ion thrusters so you don’t have to sacrifice mass for nuclear and aren’t constrained by how much wattage you can produce on board.
Works 24/7 with 0 atmospheric reduction.
You can send the power via microwaves so less interference, problem is the largish ground based capture device.
Apparently $200/kg makes it economic, Starship is aiming for more like $2/kg
Bezos predicts data centers in sun synchronous orbit so they always have solar power. The audio is poor but I consider the below video an excellent listen because Bezos outlines his vision of the future which is very different from Musk's.
https://youtu.be/Bn0jTLgyjAg?t=1124
Payloads are designed according to available spacecraft capabilities. When this thing flies, market will form around it in no time.
I'm skeptical because satellites, like pretty much any technology, tend to get smaller over time. I remember reading about how it was profitable for someone to buy up 4 geostationary slots and replace 4 satellites with 1 that was probably smaller than any of the 4 (because geostationary slots can be incredibly valuable).
There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are inherently so expensive anyway the launch vehicle costs almost don't matter.
I'm not yet convinced there's a huge demand for super heavy payloads.
If launch costs are going to be $250M, you need a budget of that order of magnitude to make a mission viable. At that point, you might was well spend anywhere from $50M to $1B on the payload because that's where your budget is. Or, to put it another way, only payloads with a $50M to $1B budget can afford to exist if the launch costs are of the order of $250M.
However, if launch costs are of the order of $5M, then missions with much smaller budgets suddenly become economically viable. And there are a lot more potential missions out there with $10M budgets than there are missions with $500M budgets.
Satellites get smaller not only because the tech gets smaller, but because launch costs/kg are so expensive, or so limited. Currently it's worth spending $10M to reduce your mass by 10%, if doing so means you can reduce your launch costs by $25M. Or, if doing so means you can double your onboard station-keeping fuel, and double the lifespan of the satellite.
If launch costs are less and available upmass is higher, your budget for engineering to reduce your payload mass is less, and so is the reason to do so.
There are a couple of great examples of this playing out in "reverse" with some missions that, at pre-F9 launch costs could only afford to be on a rideshare or small launcher and thus were expecting to have to deal with all sorts of limits, only to end up being able to afford a dedicated F9.
There was IXPE, which has been the smallest dedicated payload launched by F9, which otherwise would've had to launch on a much smaller, air-launched pegasus rocket to get to the right inclination. I recall that they were able to simplify some aspects of the satellite deployment due to the roomier vehicle.
There was another mission, maybe Psyche? where the original plan would've required the risk of testing a new kind of engine to get to its deep space destination, but being able to get a dedicated ride instead, that risk was eliminated, such that it was going to be able to get there even if the engine tests failed.
They’re expensive (and often delayed and over budget) in part due to the ridiculous demands of fitting everything in a small faring and reducing weight e.g. needing it to fold up and using expensive high strength low weight materials. Lessen those constraints and things get cheaper and easier to build with standard methods and materials.
Why is there's always an Akin's law?
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
Sure, if a decade is "no time".
5 years from concept to prototype, another 5 years to operational and then another 5 years to full capacity.
Starlink was super quick, but it's design started in 2014.
Iterations on existing concepts like telecom or imaging will be quicker, but truly new fields like mining or tourism are at least a decade out before they're using substantial lift capacity.
Eventually it will get cheap enough to where people can be buried on the (shot at the) moon.
Talked about this with my partner this week. Somebody is going to yeet their ashes into the regolith some day.
It has already been attempted. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/08/peregrine-moon-lander-launc...
And indeed has been done too!
"The human remains aboard the lander won't be the first on the moon, as ashes of Gene Shoemaker, the founder of astrogeology, were buried on the moon in the late 1990s by the Lunar Prospector."
I believe that is illegal in every country, putting human remains on foreign bodies.
It's not, and there've already been (failed) attempts. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/08/peregrine-moon-lander-launc...
Yes, there won't be as many customers purchasing 150-200 tons of lift, but that's the point of "rideshares". All that really matters with space launches is the cost per kg and if it's capable of lifting multiple payloads into multiple orbits, it'll have 10-15 customers per lift, not one. The current model has a kind of pez-dispenser but for chucking out multiple payloads.
There are purchasers for the full lift capacity too, like ISS modules and major telescopes.
If you think about this, it doesn't make a lot of sense because different satellites are going to sit in very different orbits.
Geosynchronous satellites are an obvious case where satellites will collect into a limited number of orbits but they vary on what point of the Earth they sit over. Also getting to geostationary orbit takes a lot more fuel so the rocket has less room for payload than, say, low EArth orbit. I'm not sure one rocket can launch a geostationary satellite above the Americas and above Europe in the same mission.
But you can't really launch a satellite in a polar orbit and an equatorial orbit in the same mission, for example. Likewise, how economic is it to deploy one at 150km and another at 250km?
Starlink is a special case because it's a related constellation of satellites where a number of satellites are in the same orbit.
It can. Geostationary satellites are a certain distance above the equator. If they adjust their orbit a tiny bit lower than that they start to drift east, if they adjust their orbit a tiny bit higher they start to drift west. This process is called "repositioning".
Generally there is a tradeoff between how much fuel you spend on it and how fast the repositioning is done. So you can do it quick and then your sat will have less fuel for position keeping. Or you do it "slow" and then you preserved more fuel potentially extending the lifetime of your satellite.
But these are all done with tiny bits of fuel (compared to the fuel needed to put the satellite up there in the first place) because the delta-v involved is very small.
The (unproven) target cost per kg of a re-usable starship, from even the most conservative source I could find, was under $300/kg[2]. The next cheapest, the Falcon Heavy, is around $2.3k/kg[1]. The cost difference is astronomical, and so low that it becomes viable send less payload and more orbital adjustment fuel, not to mention its (again, unproven) designed to be refueled in orbit. At that price, you could fly multiple refueling flights and still be under the cost of any other life provider.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
Easily. Moving within an orbit is a matter of fine adjustment. For example, any stationkeeping that expands the orbit slightly will cause the satellite to "fall back" over time. Geostationary satellites are the best orbit for this, since every satellite in such an orbit essentially shares it with all others, differing only in position along the orbit.
For one, Starship+Superheavy will enable launching of large objects like space telescopes without forcing object in question to be engineered with expensive, delicate, failure-prone folding mechanisms (like the James Webb Space Telescope was). Just build the thing as big as it needs to be and launch it in its final form (aside from minor folding bits like solar panels).
It could have similar impact on other scientific missions like rovers and probes. The ceiling for what’s possible is much higher when you’re not having to question the worth of every gram and square millimeter.
So JWST has (IIRC) a 6.5 meter mirror once deployed and yes, it was a challenge to develop that tech. Plus it added risk of failure. The Starship Super-heavy seems to have a max payload dimension of 9 meters. I imagine some buffer is required (ie it won't just allow a static 9 meter mirror) but I could be wrong.
So that's larger but not that much larger. Remember the JWST was a huge step up from Hubble's 2.4 meter mirror.
I expect NASA/ESA will take the opportunity to deploy even larger mirror by using the folding tech they've developed.
But here's the main point: these kinds of flagship missions don't support and sustain a commercial launch system. There are only so many JWST 2.0s that you can and will build, launch and deploy. Your bread and butter is going to be commercial communications satellites and other than deploying large constellations like Starlink, I'm not sure what the market is here.
It will make space tourism viable for people who aren't super wealthy, an influencer or both.
Rocket Lab is doing that.
Ever seen the incredible classic Moonraker? Larger satellites, larger rockets, it's about more at a lower cost. Bigger trucks, bigger ships, bigger lifters.