The Eads bridge[1] is also an example of a very early (opened in 1874) use of steel. I don't know about how over engineered it is, but it is still used for automobile and light rail today.
Starship is a devastatingly powerful space access and logistical transport mechanism that will instantly crush the relevance of every other rocket ever built.
If I am a launch provider other than SpaceX, I'm out of business in probably 3-5 years.
Countries will keep their own launch systems alive for both national security and national pride reasons. Commercial customers however will flock to SpaceX.
SpaceX still has about 10 launches officially scheduled in 2019, but I'd be surprised if they launch half of it. And in total, for SpaceX, this represents less launches than in 2018, not to mention some of these are test launches and others serve their own Satellite venture.
Does this mean that the market is contracting? Is there less money in space launches?
I personnally find this fact more disturbing; SpaceX is a very successful venture, but the US is second in terms of launches anyway (of which SpaceX represents only about 50%) behind China, and I feel like 2019 will be a small year. Their last launch was 84 days ago (!! https://spacexnow.com/stats.php#Turn_Arounds ), and the back order sheet is not gigantic either.
> Does this mean that the market is contracting? Is there less money in space launches?
The reason SpaceX launched so many last year was that they built a very large backlog of launches, and last year their "steamroller" finally came online and because of reuse they could launch at much higher rate. Early this year, the backlog ran out.
This reminds me of the rock climbing story from yesterday that made the point that just knowing someone else had successfully climbed a route makes it far easier to achieve again. Elon Musk could become the Alex Honnold of space entrepreneurs, blazing the path.
And this is true for many other launch providers; most foreign launch providers in particular. But it does make competing for commercial satellites really hard for those firms. ULA basically gave up on commercial launch.
We'll have national firms emulating Starship within 5-10 years.
You really think that ULA etc is going to be able to catch up to SpaceX in a decade? For the US, I see SpaceX dominating launch just as Boeing dominated passenger jets. Eventually Congress will realize the fiscal futility of hamstringing NASA. The only thing that Boeing etc will be building will be ICBMs/SLBMs.
ULA will have engines from Blue Origin, and both ULA and BO will have second mover advantage in designing their own fully reusable launch systems.
Once SpaceX has got Starship working even only for LEO missions, China will have a clone up and running within two years. ULA might be a bit slower due to overly zealous bureaucracy.
Eventually these launch providers will mean SLS gets cancelled with NASA funding switching more to pure science (eg: building missions to look for life on icy moons, not the rockets to get them there).
Congress will continue to hamstring NASA even as their best and brightest depart for commercial operations with bigger R&D budgets.
China can't even manufacture military grade jet engines. You think that they'll be able to clone Raptor? I haven't looked at BO's engine tech since there's so much vaporware with them, but is it close to Raptor?
They don’t have to clone Raptor, just use an open cycle hydrolox and suffer a weight penalty of extra insulation. That will still give them a reusable LEO launch vehicle with tens of tons payload capacity. Raptor is what it is because SpaceX wants it as part of their Mars project, meaning hydrogen is off the table due to long term storage requirements.
As for the jet engines, is that what you know or what you have been told? What is the provenance of that data? Is there any chance that you are victim to a Chinese disinformation campaign?
The Chinese have been trying to manufacture fighter grade jet engines for over 20 years, with a pretty dismal result. They tried to clone the various Russian engines that have come with the Su-27's they've purchased, but they've had trouble with the metallurgy. Even their latest stealth fighter (J-20) is using an upgraded version of this engine (Saturn AL-31).
And considering BO had previously said they'd have manned missions by 2018, I'm skeptical of anything in their forecast.
The government thinks it's a national security risk to have only one launch vehicle available. They seem comfortable with having one launch provider as long as there's two vehicles with different enough heritage.
John Cusack in his podcast with Joe Rogan made an interesting point: that BlueOrigin's slow and steady approach might be counterintuitive to space flight. He said that you want to be fast and test out as many crazy ideas - moonshots - as you can, and that having essentially limitless money can actually slow your progress down.
I would think that pre-existing contracts would keep competitors limping along. Add to that pre-existing relationships + a bit of nepotism, and they might last quite a while.
> it wouldn't make sense if you are just launching a cubesat
You’re both thinking through the consequences of complete system reusability and rapid reflight. What costs less, throwing away a complete cube stat launch vehicle, or refuelling Starship?
Imagine you are SpaceX. You are going to be launching a Starship. Given how booked your launch manifest is, would you rather launch a cubesat or a full-sized payload? Which would earn you more money?
He can't do that legally to other countries. And will be stupid to do it with his competitors in the USA. Since there competition is fierce and he is not on good terms with them.
I think you are confusing Elon's pledge to "opensource" tesla patents, in 2014 - which to the best of my knowledge, not a single company has taken an interest in because of strings attached to it.
In the middle of 1966, Robert Taylor took over the directorship of Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)[1]. It was Taylor who launched the project that produced ARPANET. This is a great history series on ARPANET, starting with "ARPANET, Part 1: The Inception."[2]
"One of the really interesting interesting things to contemplate is the total mass to orbit capability of a large reusable system where you have a significant fleet in operation. If you've got something like Starship where you've got maybe 150 tons capable to orbit and the ship can fly, is capable of say theoretically flying four times a day but you know they call it like 75 percent uptime so theoretical three times a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. So that's like about a thousand flights a year for the ship. The booster can do a lot more than that. This is obviously max theoretical. You've got, you know, 150 tons that service, 150,000 tons to orbit per year per ship. If you've got say ten ships you'd have [...] one and a half million tons to orbit per year. Twenty ships you've got three million tons to orbit per year. I think the total rest of world capacity, if you take all rockets on earth including Falcon, the total capacity to orbit I think is around two to three hundred tons currently. Total Earth capacity to orbit is about two to three hundred tons if all rockets launched at max rate. So we're talking about something that is with a fleet of starships a thousand times more than all earth capacity combined. All other rockets combined would be 0.1% including ours."
How is this not massively disruptive to the entire space launch industry?
It is. Three orders of magnitude leaves everybody else in the dust.
I wonder if this applies to pricing as well. If we get to single-digit dolar prices pe kg to orbit, a tourist ticket would be easily a couple thousand dollars - equivalent to a business class plane ticket.
One more order of magnitude and you can start shipping ready-to-be assembled habitats and fuel factories to Mars. And Boston Dynamics robots to assemble them.
At these prices you can start sending empty nuclear reactors for power, and lift heavily shielded nuclear fuels as well. Not puny RTG generators for a couple hundred watts but 1000MW generators that will sustain cities.
It is, and is supposed to be. Elon loves to talk about Mars, but the real story behind this architecture is complete ownership of spacelift until someone else catches up. Then the story becomes enabling actual space industry.
Isn't space launch already demand constrained? SpaceX has flown 9 times this year, with a few dozen undated upcoming missions listed as well [0]. He's talking about being able to do tens of thousands of launches per year, but who's going to pay for it? If almost no-one is paying to put a few tons into orbit now, where is the demand for millions of tons a year going to come from?
I think you would be firmly in “creating completely new markets” territory at that point. It would be like trying to imagine what one would need 1000x as many transistors for, at the dawn of semiconductors. The world certainly wasn’t buying that many vacuum tubes, was it?
From my perspective, these are the big ones in the near term:
1) LEO satellite internet. Fixes the lag issues with GEO orbits, making space internet directly competitive for some applications.
2) Tourism: I would certainly pay a very pretty penny indeed to see the earth from space.
Longer term:
3) Global sun shade or other system for preventing global climate catastrophe. In 30 years I think we’ll be talking a lot about this.
4) Resource extraction, which otherwise doesn’t make sense with expensive rockets.
5) Self sustaining mars base. Still can’t figure out what the economic incentive is for this. It will cost a lot of money for what return exactly?
Spacex hasn’t shown a payload capability yet; ie a starship model with clam doors, but they’re going to at some point I wager. Or an expendable second stage.
Also see the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation (APOLLO)[0]: "APOLLO measures the round-trip travel time of laser pulses bounced off the lunar retroreflectors[1] to a precision of a few picoseconds, corresponding to about one millimeter of precision in range to the moon."
Check out the book The Wright Brothers by David McCullough[1]. You will see that they are anything but tinkerers, but more the founders of aeronautical engineering.
But don't forget that they also threatened to hold the entire aircraft industry hostage with a overly broad patent and then spent years trying to rewrite history so they got most if not all of the credit. Even their gift of their flyer to the Smithsonian came with strings attached about how the Smithsonian could frame other developments at the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eads_Bridge