For example, NASA could start allocating a small-ish budget (e.g. 50M$) to design a parallel mission to their Artemis-IV mission that is currently scheduled for 2026 (but will slip) and that should deliver the Gateway i-HAB module to Moon's orbit.
While 50M$ (excluding launch costs) for a mission like this would be lunacy today given the constraints on weight imposed by current rockets, with Starship that would be a sizeable budget to design a much bigger and more useful module.
If by some cut-off date (say 2024) Starship still hasn't proven itself, then scrap that mission, proceed with the original one and the wasted 50M$ will be a rounding error in Artemis-IV budget.
If Starship proves itself before then, scrap the original mission and go with the redesigned Artemis-IV based on Starship. Billions of dollars will be saved (SLS launch cost + at least 2 years worth of development), and we will have a Lunar Gateway 10 years ahead of what we would have had otherwise in terms of capabilities.
NASA has taken a cautiously optimistic stance on Starship. The assignment of the HLS to Starship and no other provider was an aggressively optimistic stance from NASA that surprised many of the space industry observers at the time of its announcement. The expectation (and normal NASA behavior) would've been two assign the HLS to multiple vendors, at a reduced funding level and stretch the timelines out.
So, I'd argue that NASA is already being quite bullish on Starship given the projects and funding that they have available.
But then, I know nothing about how NASA operates internally.
Trying to a void a lawsuit is how you get nonsense like the LCS where the Navy first opened the bids for a single class of ship, and then when it was time to announce the winner, split the contract between Marinette Marine and Austal.
You have it backward. Airbus won the contract initially. Boeing sued and managed to get the bidding process restarted from scratch. Boeing won that second bid and Airbus decided to not protest, probably because they knew they had 0 chance against Boeing lobbying power in the US.
The author's claim that the potential benefits of Starship are not understood by NASA is cringeworthy naive. Everyone at NASA is rooting for SpaceX but they have been burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS, hell even the shuttle despite its "success" only fulfilled a small fraction of the desired results.
Makes me wonder how old the author is.
> Makes me wonder how old the author is.
The author works for JPL.
> Starship is still extremely unproven. If you look at the history of rockets, mayyyybe 1 in 5 that make it to an orbital launch debut (which is like 1 in 50 paper rockets) in turn make it to commercial rollout.
How many of these had 10+ prototypes fly and had a dedicate launch site near to complete?
How many had a working next generation engine for there first and second stage?
How many were designed by companies that had already developed the largest rocket in the world?
> burned many times by the promises of the next shiny rocket: DC-X, VentureStar, NASP, Ares, SLS,
Non of those were even remotely close. DC-X was a sub-orbital technology demonstrator. Even had it been successful it would have been nothing more. NASP is another technology demonstrator.
VentureStar was far, far away. Comparing it to Starship is just not accurate. It was basically almost delusional to think it would ever happen. And many people even back then were very skeptical of a SSTO Spaceplane. And beyond that politically it getting the needed funding was also not gone happen.
Ares, SLS are basically just warmed up shuttle concepts. These are designed to keep contractors employed, not to solve the problem. They no potential to solve anything.
In any case to those reasonable out there, don't worry. If SpaceX can prove reliable launch to orbit and deliver on their promises, change will come. It's kind of silly to write articles about how everyone should change the way they operate NOW because change is coming. Of course it's coming, everyone accepts it's likely, and things will move quickly once it does and is proven. What more do the fanboys want!?
What you are insinuating is that people are unable to difference between a suborbital technology demonstrator and powerpoint vehicles and multi-billion $ projects that are deep in development.
And non of the projects you mentioned would have a comparable impact to Starship. Maybe VentureStar but that was at best decades away.
You can just throw out some random projects and use them to justify non-action.
If VentureStar had actually seriously gone forward the same kind of almost the rethinking would have been necessary. And even if it in the end didn't happen, it would have been valuable to do.
> perspective of someone who is quite literally writing proposals about launch vehicle selection for NASA missions. But hey, you can read Wikipedia, so...
So making bad arguments can be justified from authority. Good to know.
> It's kind of silly to write articles about how everyone should change the way they operate NOW because change is coming.
There are many years of lead time, choices are only gone go into actual products and missions year from now.
Now is exactly the right time to start planning and rethinking approaches.
When Commercial Cargo was made, much of the need private industry didn't exist. And yet they did it, because they were locking forward and adjusted their operations.
Back then there was massive critic of NASA even from win NASA itself that this was a bad idea and it was never gone work. And that is what kick started the New Space movement.
That kind of thinking is what is needed. Plan projects now and get them rolling that could take advantage of the capabilities in a few years.
> What more do the fanboys want!?
Putting yourself as the reasonable authority and then ranting about 'fanboys' makes you look silly.
The auther of the article works for JPL, but I guess he is a 'fanboy'.
My other points stand, though. Everyone in the industry that's paying attention knows that Starship, IF it delivers on its promises, will change the game. It's a strawman to say those in industry are ignorant of this. Yet we've heard Starship-esque promises many times before, spoken with just as much fervor and certainty as displayed by your friend the JPL blogger.
I don't perceive this as a forum for ruthless debate but rather sharing ideas in an atmosphere of cooperation. Debate closes off context and undermines trust, which in turn limits communication bandwidth severely and often destroys it entirely.
The act of debate can most certainly be productive, but in an open and unbounded forum where the ruleset of "debate" - and thus its goals - are undefined, competitive framing has a consistent tendency to devolve into semantics and entrenchment of positions rather than productive insight.
Of course, you're free to pick my statements apart further, if you find that productive. But I will spend my time elsewhere.
As a software person. JPL employs over 5000 people. The vast majority of them don't have knowledge of the sort of systems and business dynamics relevant to the matter of NASA using Starship.
If experience from private sector is any indication, that's usually question of caring. It's not hard to gain such insight from the inside - but you need to walk around a bit, talk to people outside of your team, and most importantly, pay attention.
Not really. They were started before SpaceX proved the idea of reusable boosters. They are a safe Plan-B, using engines and concepts that were already available. It’s a shame they decided to improve upon the existing hardware and took much longer than initially expected, but that’s what life with rockets used to be before SpaceX showed rapid iteration is a better path.
Also, Congress would be very upset with a bunch of failed launches, but that’s also how iterative development works.
I was the Plan-A back then during Constellation. And SLS was also Plan-A.
> Not really.
I would argue the forced existing hardware into those project to continue to employ the same contractors.
Using a single stick solid rocket booster for your human launcher might be one of the worst ideas in the last 2 decades of rocket history.
Not surprisingly the congress person from that state was heavily involved funding Constellation.
> It’s a shame they decided to improve upon the existing hardware and took much longer than initially expected, but that’s what life with rockets used to be before SpaceX showed rapid iteration is a better path.
There were other viable paths even back then. Not to the level of SpaceX but there were others.
NASA did a whole bunch of studies and these studies pretty much universally showed that the current SLS designs was flawed and a booster that looked like a modern Saturn V was the far better solution.
There were even considerations of having it be privately developed.
Turns out NASA can make as many studies as they want, congress basically over-ruled them and forced them to use all the existing contractors and facilities and thus they were forced into current SLS.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...
It makes sense for it to use the well known approach as Plan-A when the options don’t exist.
> NASA did a whole bunch of studies and these studies pretty much universally showed that the current SLS designs was flawed and a booster that looked like a modern Saturn V was the far better solution.
New developments based on new components, however Saturn V-like, are a risk. I have read a couple studies back then and, while I am not overly enthusiastic about the approach adopted, it offered minimal development risk.
The only novel idea of Ares was putting people on top of an SRB, which was cheap, but abandoned when they realised the vibrations would kill the crew.
Back then, SpaceX was science fiction.
Not when Plan A has well known well document problems.
> New developments based on new components, however Saturn V-like, are a risk.
Restarting production for RS-25 has risk. Using solids boosters for human space flight has risk.
The idea that magically the picked design has no are significantly less risk is questionable.
In terms of risk to human on the rockets the other designs out-performed the current design and they were cheaper.
> The only novel idea of Ares was putting people on top of an SRB, which was cheap,
I recommend you go back and check out how much Ares 1 cost. It was literally the opposite of cheap. It was a gigantic money pit for a non-commercially competitive rocket that was incredibly risky for human.
> but abandoned when they realised the vibrations would kill the crew.
Maybe the single worst rocket design ever. Despite the issues there were others metnioned.
However the whole Constellation program got canceled because it was horrifyingly badly executed and a bad plan in the first place.
> Back then, SpaceX was science fiction.
By the time SLS was designed they were not. And just because SpaceX doesn't exist, doesn't mean you couldn't do much better then Ares or SLS.
Uhm, I think you're simultaneously doing a discredit to past rocket development and giving an easy pass to the mess that is SLS with this statement.
It's just shoddy project management and prioritizing collaboration with as many big donar aerospace companies as possible as opposed to what works. There is playing it safe and then there is just being complacent. The SLS is complacency personified.
Not at all what I intended. Congress is to blame for some of the mess, NASA for the rest. They had shuttle parts and tools and the SLS is certainly not the best that could be done with those.
But, remember, NASA can’t really do much unless Congress gives them the money.
And I don’t think the author wrote what you said. His main point was that not one of NASA’s powerpoints even as much acknowledges that something like Starship might come round. The new constraints by Starship are a game changer.
That's just not true, though. NASA awarded the HLS program solely to SpaceX as a Starship lander. The Source Selection Statement of that program (https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...) discusses the benefits and drawbacks of Starship in good detail.
It seems wild to claim that NASA doesn't acknowledge that Starship might come around, when they're paying SpaceX specifically for the Starship program, for moon landings with Starship in 2024 (I think we all know that date will slip, but that's the official plan).
The argument is potent particularly because space mission architectures are designed primarily around constraints of the space launch systems, so choosing Starship as the launch vehicle seems to merit a large expansion in scope, if not total redesign of the program.
They had all the data and they officially declared it was very doable and that SpaceX had a path to get there.
So its ok to plan for it but pretend it only exists for that one thing they contracted if for, and ignore if for everything else.
No one here is saying "NASA should ignore Starship for everything else".
I'm saying that NASA isn't "failing to understand" Starship when they don't push all their chips to the middle of the table on Starship. You can't use the fact that NASA was willing to make a $2.9B bet on Starship as evidence that they should have been willing to go all-in on Starship.
It'd be like saying if you wager me $1,000 on an outcome, then you should also be willing to bet your house on it. That's not how risk works!
Would I personally like to see NASA continue to evaluate and select Starship for future programs? Yes!
Would I personally like to see NASA start kick off early concept-phase work for payloads that would be enabled by Starship? Yes!
Do I think that NASA decided not to completely re-orient everything that they do around Starship right now means they don't understand Starship? No! Of course not! It means there's too much risk right now around doing that.
Not just have the same circle of programs, selecting a launcher and on.
You need to fundamentally rethink how you approach space.
And there is little evidence of that happening, specially from a leadership standpoint.
Which, if Starship delivers on its promises (and I'm quite optimistic and hopeful that it will!), then NASA will have to fundamentally transform everything about how the organization operates.
But that's a huge transition to make on the back of a program that hasn't proven its key value proposition yet. I'm happy for NASA to wait the extra 2-3 years for Starship to prove that it can deliver on its promises, before NASA commits to a reorganization and restructuring at such a fundamental level.
If NASA commits to such a restructuring now, and in 2 years we learn that Starship's economic dream fails to materialize and the program ends up as an improvement (but an ordinary one) over Falcon 9. NASA how has to unwind all of that organization restructuring and program development. It seems...wise to me for NASA to wait a handful of years to see Starship prove itself before committing to such a transition.
The article agrees! Author's point, as I read it, is that if NASA does not plan for the transition now, then by the time Starship "has proven its key value proposition", both NASA and its usual contractors will be out of the game, as a new breed of private companies takes over most of space activity. The author doesn't expect NASA to bet on Starship, but rather to at least make some internal noises and initial movements towards that transition - but he failed to find any indication of that for the past 2 years.
Its more about starting to thinking on how to do that. And initiate some trail projects that take a different approach.
At the moment, in most parts of NASA its simply ignored. That Starship launch system got funded is more of an accidental byproduct of the HLS.
But what's new in Starship?
What's new in Starship? Rapid turnaround. Catching the returning rocket with the launch tower. A durable heat shield that needs zero refurbishment for back-to-back flights. The sheer number of engines on the first stage and the volume of engine production needed for that. Orbital refueling. The landing flip maneuver.
There is a lot of new stuff in Starship, and not all of it is proven yet. Personally I think the biggest remaining risk is the heat shield. I'm no expert, but my speculation is that there will be several reentry failures, and refurbishment will limit turnaround speed for a long time. I've also heard a lot of people saying that orbital refueling will be very difficult. I'm also worried that landing failures will wreck the ground support equipment. And I think it's very unlikely that the reliability of the whole system can ever be good enough for the airliner-like earth-to-earth passenger service that SpaceX has proposed.
All that said, I'm very much in agreement with the article that NASA needs to radically change their future plans, because while Starship is not completely proven, it is clearly derisked to the point where it's going to be revolutionary, even if some of the above risks prevent the total potential from being realized. HLS was the first time NASA showed that they realize this, but they are still doing tons of stuff outside HLS that makes little sense in a Starship world.
(Superheavy is a different story.)
All this turns on the design of the heat-shield tiles. Those we have seen are basically the same as on the shuttle. Each individual tile needs a great deal of personal attention before and after each use, including squirting in some goo that will boil off on the next flight. Many will need to be replaced, each flight.
So, turn-around time is weeks, minimum. More probably a month or two, or three.
It is conceivable that a future version of Starship will have a heat shield that needs less attention. Maybe a fabric shroud in place of tiles, over most of the hull, will turn out to be practical. If that happens, it might get possible to turn around a re-entered Starship faster. But that will require entirely new development not obviously begun.
I will be happy to be proved wrong.
Despite all of the above, even without quick turnaround or even re-usability, Starship is obviously overwhelmingly superior in every conceivable way to Artemis/Ares. NASA has the unenviable chore of trying to unload that turkey on some commercial contractor to get out from under the obligation to pour ever more treasure down its gaping maw, endlessly. If NASA succeeds in selling it at a penny on the dollar to Marietta, and leaving Marietta to try to find someone, anyone willing to pay for even a single hull, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Orbital refueling is required for HLS and depends on rapid turnaround so SpaceX and NASA must have some confidence that it can be achieved without a radical redesign.
Rapid turnaround seems at this stage more an aspiration than a designed feature. It was the same with the shuttle. In that case it was never achieved at all, even with decades of experience.
Turnaround and reuse are desirable, particularly to minimize cost, but not strictly necessary for a successful mission.
(You can make an argument for Soyuz's just-before-landing rockets, but it wouldn't be a fair one.)
It is, but those are largely separate features. Each half of that combo has been done, and combining them doesn't cause any massive engineering conflicts.
The planned recovery mechanism (the aerodynamic fall, with a very late righting maneuver and landing) is still quite new. They've successfully tested it once (which is great!), but the Starship concept really hinges on that being an extremely high reliability maneuver.
I would argue that, until SpaceX can demonstrate that landing maneuver is high reliability, that the Starship concept isn't proven.
I say this as a massive fan of Starship, and someone who is extremely excited by the promises of Starship of they come to fruition.
Perhaps it's changed, but not sure how relevant many of them would be in a Starship world.
That's not sensible risk management, that's head in the sand denialism.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-wants-to-buy-sl...
For what its worth, if Starship does succeed in being a cheap and re-usable super-heavy launcher, NASA can always just stop making SLS (presumably after giving the senators for Alabama sufficiently large bribes) and switch to Starship for super-heavy launches.
The idea of Starship being $10M is that it's fully reusable, so your marginal cost is only fuel/maintenance/launch.
So if a Falcon 9 costs $50M to launch, then 70% of that cost is SpaceX profit/recouping its design cost. Starship is supposed to be even more re-usable so lets assume that they only need 30% of the launch cost for recouping design costs/profit. This would be $87M/launch
So my really aggressive estimate is still almost an order of magnitude higher, which is why I am doubtful. Lets also remember that SpaceX got $396M from NASA for the development of Falcon 9 and Dragon [1]
[0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and_fundin...
I'd argue your estimate is not aggressive. SpaceX continues to claim an eventual marginal cost in the high 7 to low 8 figures per launch. I'm inclined to believe that deep analysis over a back-of-the-comment Fermi estimate.
And for what it is worth, SLS should be canceled no matter if Starship exists or not. Its a program that embodies everything bad about the modern space industry and space policy.
If they can't prove rapid reusability for both stages, it's extremely unlikely the cost will be anywhere close to as cheap as current estimates. And if they can't refuel in orbit (which as of now, has only been performed a handful of times with small satellites), Starship will be unable to leave Earth's gravity well.
If the first stage is reusable, having a cargo launcher second stage that is none, reusable can be done for 30M.
First stage reuse is wall proven already.
> Starship will be unable to leave Earth's gravity well.
If its not reusable you can use it like any upper stage and it could launch anything anywhere you want.
> And if they can't refuel in orbit (which as of now, has only been performed a handful of times with small satellites)
The physics is well understood. We do it constantly with non cryogenics.
I really think this is overrated in how much of a technology risk this is. Specially if you have enough weight that you can invest in the solution.
Refueling is a schedule risk, maybe the first design will fail to account for something and it will take a couple iterations to get it right. There is zero risk that the problem is unsolvable.
In general I think refueling is a far smaller problem then the heat shield.
One, it's Congress' baby.. ain't noone taking it out behind the barn.
Second, you need redundancy. If something is proven bad with falcon or starship design... You don't want another situation like we had with the shuttles where your paying for Soyuz seats for years on end while the problem is debugged and mitigated.
Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly duckling.
No you don't. Just as there was no redundancy for Saturn V. As there is not for Falcon Heavy. There was no redundancy for Delta 4 Heavy. There is always a largest rocket.
And if you do need redundancy, SLS is not how you would get there.
If Starship doesn't work, then there will simply be no moon landing. Period.
> Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly duckling.
That is just contract mombo jumbo that changes nothing about the actual project.
No, what happens is that you create a seriously powerful group of private institutions that will go full force into lobbying congress to not kill the project. Even more so then now.
But it would be increasingly awkward for Congress to be seen to force NASA to choose the $2B launcher from vendor A over the $10M or $50M (or whatever) launcher from vendor B.
The problem is that not only are they not putting any eggs into the Starship basket, they aren't even aware (or admitting) that the basket even exists.
HLS is a $2.89bn egg they have put in the Starship basket.
Remember, SpaceX is engineering a production line to make Starship, not just prototyping Starshipp.
[citation needed]
The engine cost is reportedly already under 1M and they are building a huge factory t produce more.
Even under the worst assumption, where I take conservative assumptions and then double them you still end up with cost comparable to Falcon Heavy.
As for NASA remaining with SLS, for now at least, is due to a mix of congressional support, and the remaining unproven nature of starship. SLS allows members of congress say that they're supporting jobs. While SpaceX is pushing the limits of space engineering, Boeing and many other contractors have pushing the limits of political engineering. Hence the result that the same company that took us to the moon can't get into orbit, but is still maintaining contracts in spite of screwing up everything.
Once Starship is tried and tested, I strongly suspect they will flat out deprecate Falcon. Fly the missions that have been paid and scheduled, and then bin them.
It doesn't do anything that you can't do in other ways. We already have distrusted rocket launch.
SLS is holding the moon architecture hostage. There is simply no need for it.
Now the obvious solution is to rate Dragon for deep space and launch humans in that on a falcon and have it meet up with a starship in LEO. But getting that will probably take more years and billions paid to to the Orion and SLS POR before it will actually come to pass.
Never underestimate the power of a self-licking ice cream cone.
If Starship succeeds, expect SLS to get quietly relegated after a few token launches.
more like corruption
Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and electricity was thought of as just steam, but less messy and cheaper.
It took several decades into electrification before people fully wrapped their heads around: a) many small motors didn't cost more than one big motor and you should redesign your machines so that the motors were where they made sense and b) now that machines could be placed anywhere, you should design your factories so that the machines were in the path of the parts.
Sometimes, quantitative changes become qualitative changes and you need to start from a clean sheet because all of the existing received wisdom stemmed from obsolete assumptions. It takes a while for this process to happen because we don't fully know how all of our assumptions stack on top of each other and we resist the change because our power/identities rest on elements of the status quo.
Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.
I think Starship, if it pans out, will be exactly as disruptive as the author of the post thinks it will be. I'm very very much hoping that is the case.
And if it delivers on its promises, it will be a revolutionary change in how we think about space exploration, space tourism, space manufacturing, and other things.
But, I strongly suspect that many very smart people at NASA also understand this. And that the reason NASA isn't retooling everything that they do around Starship has more to do with the risk of that future not panning out, and less to do with the people at NASA not understanding that there's a massive economic change at hand if Starship delivers.
> Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.
Yes! Exactly! The old space industries (and NASA) derive significant benefit from the status quo, and fully transitioning to the new system risks many those current benefits in the event that the new system fails to materialize.
For someone like NASA, they have many resources, so betting everything on a 95% chance of success may be a bad bet. While a start-up that has very little status quo resources, it's a really really really good bet.
However, I have a problem in characterizing that as "not understanding" the opportunity. NASA, and plenty of old space companies can recognize and understand the opportunity, while it's still a bad bet for them to make at the current development point we're at.
It's more a matter of strategic risk, and current positionining. An organization like NASA isn't in a good position to bet the farm on Starship yet, even if they fully understand the benefits of the bet if they knew the bet would pay off.
What happens when launch costs are $10,000/kg, $1000/kg, $100/kg? What things that we're doing still make sense, what doesn't? Who could be a player that isn't a player now. It's going to happen some day, even if it doesn't happen tomorrow, but it's looking like it's increasingly about to happen tomorrow from a NASA timeline perspective.
NASA is in the business of futuristic speculation, they develop plans for hypothetical future propulsion systems or life support systems or missions and draw out the vision for the future. But like any organization, making plans for what's politically palatable is always easier than politically unpalatable and Casey is merely pointing out that lower launch costs appear based on public actions to be very politically unpalatable and thus, an institutional blind spot.
1. None of the current public Starship designs include payload doors. So none of these are in any way useful as launch vehicles for orbital payloads. Payload doors a huge structural weakness and requires a lot of engineering effort. None of the current public Starship designs have an obvious "payload doors go here". A Starship-based delivery vehicle will likely be a separate design from the manned vehicle.
2. In-orbit refueling is not just an unsolved problem it's a largely unexplored problem. Moving fuel between two vehicles in free-fall is going to be a monumental challenge. You'll basically be running the same pump mechanisms you'd use for the rocket motors but feeding into a flexible umbilical between vehicles. Starships are huge so you're talking about docking two huge vehicles (one of which is nearly empty of fuel for maneuvers), connecting an umbilical between them, pumping fuel through the umbilical (in free-fall), then undocking and the two go their merry ways. None of that has been done and involves hundreds of individual challenges.
3. Musk (not necessarily SpaceX engineers) is making grand promises about the turn around time for Starships. I think they're wildly unrealistic. A large vehicle undergoing a lot of extreme dynamic forces in a flight is going to need a lot of examination before it can be safely relaunched. SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised cadence of launches. The manpower to refit vehicles is going to be expensive. There's a big difference between reusing a booster core and a vehicle that had to survive orbital reentry.
4. Even if launch costs were hundreds of dollars per kilogram it doesn't make any other aspects of spaceflight less challenging. If you send people somewhere they need their vehicle and life support launched with them. A broken toilet can still kill the crew. Just because it was cheaper to launch doesn't mean you get to scrimp on other expenses. The Space Shuttle was expensive not because of the marginal cost of the launch itself but the operations/personnel costs of the Shuttle program.
That's always been the plan. Even in the original 2016 presentation featuring the considerably larger Interplanetary Transport System that got scaled down to become what's now known as Starship and Superheavy, the plan was to churn them out en masse to make it possible to make the most of each Earth-Mars transit window.
Starships and all the parts that comprise them are designed to be mass produced and treated as cattle rather than pets.
Their own deliveries of fuel and client payloads will be delayed from the airspace and downrange surface exclusion zones.
Once you've got vehicles in space you'll need 24/7 monitoring and management. Even if mission control teams are relatively small the only way you'll be able to safely manage a large number of missions will be with a large number of teams.
The personnel and infrastructure costs will put a cap on the number of Starship launches SpaceX will ever be able to manage. The costs of those will push up the costs beyond Musk's low-ball fantasy promises.
But that doesn't matter. Even without any Starship re-usability (aside from Superheavy), you still come out far, far ahead of any conceivable evolution of SLS.
I've read that the fundamental problem for NASA is that they are a political football. They have at most 8 years of one administration before the next comes in, and Congress can change hands several times even in that span. As such, the only way to create a program that won't be announced to great fanfare one year and cancelled the next, is to make it out of solid, Congressional grade pork. Which would be SLS. Since nobody benefits by cancelling it, it won't be cancelled. Even if it becomes an obsolete and ridiculous white elephant.
There are always other people who think 'maybe those Alabama $ could go to Texas instead'.
And while it might use all 50 states, in reality the waste majority of money is spend in a very few locations as paying labor is huge part of the cost.
I'm going to presume what author thought and quote him:
------
What does NASA do with teams that cost a few billion dollars a year to feed and whose main expertise is building rockets and space probes whose entire architectural philosophy is threatened by current launch costs, let alone the order of magnitude improvement that’s in the pipeline?
The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks?
In short, in a world where SLS’s ongoing failure is justified and/or ignored while Starship races towards transformational capabilities, NASA needs to think very deeply about its place in a human spaceflight program that appears poised to proceed without NASA at its center.
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So the point is it seems to be a question - what is NASA planning to do AT ALL in the world where Starship is flying?
Starship cannot deliver 100 tonnes to mars, only to LEO. The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other machinery.
Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do something other than track every milligram
> The rover was not just a ton, it came with a heatshield and other machinery.
Great and that was thrown away and didn't add anything to the mission. The actual payload is 1 ton.
> Nasa has plenty of other projects, like the SAFE nuclear reactor, and I am sure these teams will be delighted to do something other than track every milligram
If they allow them to not work that way. That the whole point.
I know for a fact the the people who work on Kilopower are really exited for their reactors to potentially power future Mars base and they really want to be allowed to build larger versions.
I think the risk of not doing so is to high.
And NASA is already relaying on it. They have had all the data and they selected it for Human Landing System. They knew what it required and they were comfortable with it.
> If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises
It doesn't have to deliver on everything to be worth designing for it.
> But that leaves them with no backup plan
Going back what they always did before is the backup plan.
How come wasting 20 billion on SLS is totally reasonable, but risking a few billion on starting with designing for a rocket that doesn't exist isn't.
> I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes.
But that will leave a years to decade long gap of actually profiting from it.
> but a different calibration of “risk”
Yes an incredibly conservative one that would have meant the US could never go to the moon.
For non-Space Wonks, the "$10,000/lb" to orbit number was the rough cost of launching some payload on the Space Shuttle to orbit. Costs for the Space Shuttle were basically NASA's entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of Shuttle launches performed in a year. It's not just a naive number it's wholly misleading.
No/few commercial space launch approach $10k/lb. It's a meaningless number for any discussion of launch costs since the Space Shuttle is retired and was not a commercial launch vehicle anyways. Even the most expensive ULA rockets aren't even close to that price.
If you're going to talk about space launch capabilities and bring up stupid numbers it impacts your credibility.
Starlink launches were claimed to cost $35 million for 16 tons, this means SpaceX is still around $2000/kg even internally. This is the lowest cost of "real" missions with payload adapters and deployment mechanisms.
Atlas 551 is ~150M for max 18.8tons to orbit so best theoretical price is > $8000/kg.
Dividing the space shuttle program cost of $196B by 133 successful launches and a max payload of 23tons you get around $64000/kg.
I can only assume they are internally very excited at the prospect of what Starship can be to them in the future but that can't be fully expressed if something out of their control has not been fully proven. They will jump on this as soon as the risk is outweighed by the benefit which, as the author argues, is in the process of happening.
If Congress passes a budget with $7B in funding specifically for SLS, you can't really blame NASA for spending that money on SLS.
There is a real non-zero risk of something bad gappebing to him and then future of SpaceX is in question, its not a robust institution like NASA
And in some absurd crazy scenario NASA could basically 'take' it because its relevant for future mission. NASA has done so before if a company they needed went bankrupt.
SLS depends on a incredibly long list of suppliers. Far longer then Starship.
Like how SLS has proven itself?
There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the road. It would most likely have to be transported by ship from the manufacturing facility to the launch site. Additionally, new test facilities like thermal vacuum chambers, acoustic cells and anechoic chambers would likely have to be created to handle the large spacecraft that a Starship could enable. And NASA is not going to make that investment until there is a higher probability of the Starship succeeding.
Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/space-business-rocket-idUSN0...
This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on Falcon 9.
There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty late.
The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-usability. However the end result was more then double as powerful then the version announced in 2013.
This is not to say that what SpaceX is doing isn't incredible. But I get frustrated when articles like this take the promises of things like "<$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year" as an absolute truth.
Edit: Had the original contracted launch date for the STP-2 mission wrong
This seems to be a theme of many of Elon Musk's ideas: assume they will work and talk about what a difference it will make. Just look at the media coverage surrounding the Tesla Robot.
So, this stuff is cool and I'm glad it's happening, but there's a ton of capability to prove before any sort of external organizational budget should be allocated to the Starship project. It's still a rough prototype.
No. It’s rocket science. :)
The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high.
If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentally alter their approach to space. But that leaves them with no backup plan in the event that Starship fails to materialize or deliver on its promises.
Whereas this other approach, of treating Starship like a much better vehicle but integrating it into its old processes, gives them an out if Starship fails in some way. Because they’re still using the “old” assumptions, they can fall back to other “old space” style providers.
I think once Starship has proven itself capable of deliver on its promises, you’ll see NASA changing its approach radically in the manner the author describes.
So, fundamentally, I think it’s not a lack of “understanding”, but a different calibration of “risk”. This also applies to many existing space companies, and I also think this gives opportunities for new companies that have a higher risk tolerance to take advantage.