Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective. Yes, you can save say $50M for your launch. But your satellite costs hundreds of millions and it has a very long lead time. SpaceX has slips and occasionally loses a bioster. So you might simply buy the Ariane offering because they will effectively purpose-built the rocket for you. Especially when there are political connections to be maintained.
But with a high-volume market things shift considerably. Now it looks freakishly expensive to launch even for $10M when your satellites roll out of the factory in the dozens. And the concept of building a rocket on demand when you might need to replace a few broken sats next quarter is just outlandish.
I think old rocket companies are basically just seeing the entire business model change from a ultra-specialist logistics company to something more akin to FedEx.
http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellatio...
I'm pretty sure that the idea behind huge fleets of commercial LEO internet communication satellite constellations had existed long before Elon tried his hand at it (first proposed in 1994).
Even starlink was only brought in-house after a cancelled project with OneWeb (formerly WorldVu) https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-int...
You can get 10 launches per year and pretty high reliability and high cost. Satellite cost is maybe 10x the launch cost. Government and commercial operations are possible. Europe has to maintain this for strategic reasons, no matter the cost.
And then there's the "newspace" strategy. Low cost launch achieved by reuse brings more demand, satellite cost goes down. When price goes low enough, completely new markets become possible. You enter a virtuous spiral. This is at least the theory. Requires a large amount of political capital to do this, as it will be lossy for a long time and there will be high profile failures (because you do so many launches and iterate). So this is probably only doable by mega billionaires who "get it" (the newspace way of thinking), not by public companies or governments.
Even Elon Musk didn't "get it" originally, they were trying to fish the rockets from the sea and refurbish them. At some point he turned around completely. Grasshopper and vertical landing was done.
There, I fixed it. The reusable orbital launch vehicle revolution may well reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude when it's all said and done. That's not even relatively boring. It's not boring at all. It's nothing short of amazing. But it was boring when no one knew how to make it happen.
> But with a high-volume market things shift considerably. [...]
That's on the money. Government-owned/operated launchers are in trouble.
Can you name a few?
Google for "Hidden Champion".
$50m is still a lot, and not every sat costs that much. How does a corporate bean counter justify spending $50m more than they have to?
> SpaceX has slips
Are there launchers that don't??
> and occasionally loses a bioster.
Losing a booster is a risk for SpaceX, not for the customer.
> So you might simply buy the Ariane offering because they will effectively purpose-built the rocket for you.
Nonsense. Unless there's something to do with fairing sizes, $50m is $50m.
> Especially when there are political connections to be maintained.
Ahhh, got it.
That's seems pretty easy? The satellite easily has a 2 year lead time, and it's 100s of millions so you can't afford to build a spare 'just in case'. At that point, spending an extra $50M to reduce the (perceived?) chance of a 2-year project delay starts to look pretty cheap.
Of course, this is dependent on there being a material reduction in the probability of RUD. And as SpaceX has accumulated more data on reliability, it starts to get very hard to argue that there is indeed a material reduction.
Naturally, everyone has delays. But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.
Selecting launch providers is not just about the sticker price of the rocket. But with more and more launches it obviously becomes ever more important.
Let's not forget too that EVERY booster for EVERY rocket other than Falcon 9 suffers a rude, if scheduled, disassembly EVERY time. When Falcon 9 suffers an unscheduled one, it's SpaceX's loss, not the customers. How can you possibly think that the occasional loss of a booster post-boost phase is a problem for the customer?!
Starship and the undeveloped Superheavy, not so much.
The fact is, Arianespace just had massive month long delays because of production issues.
While SpaceX has 5 flight proven booster ready in the pipeline if one fails, its next one up and very little delay.
Its not even comparable.
Anyways, soon enough we'll know what their real reliability story is.
What?!
- Worked at one, know others still there. Truck example is real.
Another area that humanity hasn't even gotten to the stage of considering yet would be dedicated interplanetary space transport craft. For now SpaceX is planning to just use Starships for getting out of gravity wells and getting between them. But the kind of cadence, $/kg, and sheer capacity Starship will enable also opens up the real option of permanent orbital assembly and maintenance facilities, and in turn the construction of spacecraft optimized purely for use outside of gravity wells (so much more emphasis on ISP vs thrust, no need to worry about aerodynamics, far less restriction on size, optimization for long time travel like potential synthetic gravity via spin, more radiation shielding, etc). No reason SpaceX couldn't lead the charge on that too in principle, though certain attractive forms of propulsion like anything using nuclear would probably necessitate more government involvement until/unless SpaceX can form their own mature government far down the road.
Anyway, $100-200/kg (or less!) and huge volume/high cadence is so radically disruptive that it's kind of hard to predict how space will look a few decades down the line. It's going to be a wild thing to watch, with lots of opportunity.
It goes between two places with at least some sort of atmosphere by default (or one with and on without for the Lunar variant) so while indeed dragging aerosurfaces with your in the vacuum of space might seem wasteful on the first look, you can save huge amounts of delta-v once you arrive at your destination due to atmospheric braking.
A purely built for space vacuum only craft could be built to be much lighter but would also need to loose all that excess interplanetary speed with engine power alone, potentially negating the advantages quite a bit.
There are, of course, various hybrid approaches: - the space only craft still could have some limited aerodynamics to do earocapture to orbit at the destination or at least do aerobraking from a "cheap" eccentric capture orbit - you could have a space only "hotel" ship on a cycler orbit and get passengers and cargo using Starship like "taxi" ships from a planet - a big complex space-only ship could have fancy high tech low thrust & high ISP engines that would not realistically fit on craft that needs to be fairly aerodynamic
Also as for in space construction - indeed, it will enable really massive and efficient space structures, but we are not there yet space infrastructure wise. And Starships so far have shown how easily they can be made in their current form using very basic tech during their assembly, even compared to tech used for existing decades old expandable rockets! :)
So no doubt eventually big efficient high tech in space cruisers will carry the most interplanetary traffic, it seems like Starship is a surprisingly good fit for the time being & for putting in place the building stones of that future. :)
Heck, you don't need orbital assembly for that. SpaceX could put in orbit a single- or two-engine starship with no landing legs and no heat shielding for transfers. Eventually they could decommission one such truck to make an orbital station.
> Anyway, $100-200/kg (or less!) and huge volume/high cadence is so radically disruptive that it's kind of hard to predict how space will look a few decades down the line. It's going to be a wild thing to watch, with lots of opportunity.
There might be so many satellites in orbit as to permanently disrupt astronomy on Earth, necessitating a fleet of replacements for the James Webb telescope.
That's SpaceX's lunar lander plan - a Starship that'd never need to come back to Earth except for refueling.
Most importantly, there is no commercial space station to move people and current starship test articles are not fitted for passenger transport nor low earth orbit rendezvous.
It's a long road from even a properly working Starship towards this goal.
Sorry not familiar with these plans - does this mean that we assemble a bigger rocket (by using earth based rockets) at ISS level orbits and then relaunch to another planet?
In theory this would work for anything that is permanently in vacuum, such as the NASA Lunar Gateway (though it's currently planned for lunar-orbit operations only), or some future low-Earth orbit station such as Gateway Station[1] or some sort of Venus, Mars, or Ceres orbital habitat.
After that, orbital infrastructure: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1373132222555848713
And possibly nuclear propulsion? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1153378777893888005
Not to mention colonies on other planets: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1373735946244431873
Most of that is pretty long-term though. I suspect Starship will remain a commercially viable platform for quite some time after its inception.
- Reusable launch system
- Intercontinental transport
- Space tourism
- Earth–lunar transport
- Mars colonization
- Multiplanetary transport
Because of that, I would say starship still has to prove it is commercially viable.
Space tourism, in particular, highly depends on how safe one can make the trip. A 1:1000 risk of death likely would make many would-be passengers think twice before booking a trip.
It also would depend on making the trip nice. The first few tourists might go for bragging rights, but after that, one would need attractions in space. Building those there will increase the cost of a trip.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-lunar-payload-servic...
Granted, it's a monopsony for now but...
Also, the next market might be "companies who want to mine asteroids for rare metals or rocket fuel", in which case SpaceX may be in the "sells pickaxes to gold miners" business.
Those who pursue asteroid mining would do well to review the history of recently dormant or acquired companies such as Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, and Shackleton Energy Company.
That said, I agree that some of Elon's longer-term goals in space are somewhat more questionable from an economic perspective. Safety is still a big question mark when it comes to tourism and intercontinental transport, and a lot of the other proposed uses (such as Elon's goal of settling Mars) have questionable economic value. Will be interesting to see if any new markets get created by Starhip's record low launch costs.
Starship is already pretty marginal of an upper stage and it's fired early. More marginal than old Space Shuttle, but cheaper to refurbish.
To heavily paraphrase the story: The US military has a number of unusual requirements that are not cheap to meet (security, extra review, etc etc). SpaceX originally balked at a number of those requirements, but after a fair bit of back and forth, they eventually threw up their hands and said "Sure! Whatever you want, but you have to pay all the extra costs". And so the US military launches are significantly more expensive than the commercial launches, but the large part of that is because the costs are genuinely higher.
I think the amazing thing about SpaceX is that they are constantly improving their stack. They don't finish designing a rocket, unless they're working on the next big rocket. The model of "build a rocket, and then sit back and profit for the next few decades" model is never going to take off again. A lot of the old launch providers need to reckon with this reality, and it's going to be really hard to turn these giant aircraft carriers of companies into embracing this new way.