I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Spacex is building the transcontinental railroads of the solar system. There is mind boggling upside for them. I'm kinda disappointed Blue Origin seems to have fallen in a rut. I'm sure Musk will be happy to provide transportation for Bezos space colony construction projects!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon</a><p>Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact that anyone with grand aspirations in orbit/solar system will have to go through Musk and Spacex until a competitor does appear. RE space colonies, I believe the natural sequence of events for space tourism is: sub orbital, oribital, long term orbital (a small space "hotel") culminating in orbital habitat ala O'Neil Cylinders. Cheap kg to orbit enables all of that.
>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows.<p>So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 launches to transport that 100million tons?
And this guy is mad that nasa is not assuming that this is achievable?
I think he's handwaving a bt on how easy "space tractors" are going to be. Caterpillar etc are as fully invested int heir corporate structures and current practices as Kodak and all the other dead companies he mentions were; just because they <i>could</i> adapt things with "vacuum rated bearings" etc doesn't mean they will.<p>I fear we'll need some legal reforms before we can have "the remainder of human industry" keep up with SpaceX here. They've got Musk's "laws don't apply" card shielding them, or something, to explain how they've managed to innovate this far and this fast. The company that produces a cheap vacuum capable drone tractor won't have that, and will be rendered a wet stain by big competitors before they can get one of their products on a rocket. I expect.
NASA is hamstrung by Congress here. Congress mandated the SLS program. It's not meant to be competitive with SpaceX. SLS is a jobs program for key districts, no more, no less. It's welfare for Boeing.<p>I don't know if NASA personnel cannot plan for or even discuss SpaceX. It's probably not that overt. The powers there probably just realize it'd be career suicide to do so.<p>I completely agree that reducing LEO payload costs (in $/kg) by 2 or even 3 orders of magnitude will be game-changing.<p>Personally I'd like to see a viable competitor to SpaceX here because competition is good and it drives innovation. But it isn't Boeing, ULA or even Blue Origin. I actually think Blue Origin is so culturally broken that you'd almost be better off starting from scratch.
>> A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit. I can see NASA partnering with industry to produce and test these parts, but that is no way to service the institutional overhead embodied by a team of hundreds of people toiling on a single mission for a decade.<p>If one function of NASA is to redistribute pork spending around the country, that seems like an even better way to do it. Rather than have contractors that strictly focus on NASA activities, use existing companies and fund projects to make space-capable versions of existing equipment. That also means the money can be shuffled around more as needed.
> We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity.<p>This is not really what economists do. Elasticity is not something an economist can “derive” or predict in advance of market developments with any reliability. It can only be reliably observed.<p>That is the whole point of a free market. What is possible—changes in elasticity between factors—emerges from complex behavior. As it emerges, new efforts can compete to take advantage of it, thereby themselves creating new possibilities.<p>This is why people are not re-inventing everything around the Starship vision yet; because it hasn’t actually happened yet.<p>There are many projects and companies sitting on the garbage heap of history because of, basically, a branch prediction error. They guessed wrong on direction or timing. Even if Elon is right about Starship costs, but it takes significantly longer than expected to get there, that’s a huge risk to projects that set it today as a dependency.
A big part of the cost of space missions is not making things as light as possible, but developing the scientific instruments. More upmass doesn't always make designing sensitive scientific instruments easier.<p>If said scientific instruments need to go on a rover, mass still matters. More mass can limit rover mobility and at some point the rover requires more power than can be provided with RTGs or solar cells.
Progress at Starbase, SpaceX's base in Boca Chica, TX is done at an astonishing pace and very impressive.<p>Some of the stuff seen in the video series from August by Everyday Astronaut has changed already.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw</a>
When I worked at a national laboratory, it was always evident that research priorities lagged funding priorities. No scientific program director would allocate significant resources into an area that wasn't either already funded or practically guaranteed to be funded. I don't how NASA and JPL operate organizationally, how their budgetary decisions are made, but I would guess that no movement toward re-orienting around Starship (or any new commercial technology) will happen until funding agencies dictate that it happen.
The article is really interesting, but the stress the author expresses about the potential downfall of NASA seems misplaced. This is just creative destruction at work. If NASA can adapt to capitalize on the new paradigm, then it will, and there will be NASA logos everywhere in future space stuff. If not, then NASA will fade away, and some of us will wax nostalgic about how cool NASA seemed when we were kids but nobody will really care because humanity will have moved far past the limited space exploration that was possible to-date.<p>Like most old US government programs, NASA is fully of wasteful political constraints - for instance, facilities scattered around the country and to satisfy pork-barrel politics and get random senators to support the overall program. I think NASA is still a net good, and I'd love to see it adapt, but if it fails to adapt, that probably just means the institutional dysfunction between Congress and NASA administration was too great, and even though it will be a little sad, it will still be a net win for humanity to replace that dysfunction with a new wave of highly functional new players.
One way to summarize this article and relate it to software engineering: Before Starship, orbital launches and their payloads were like "snowflake" servers. Meticulously crafted one-offs. After Starship, launches and their payloads should become like containerized servers. (Starlink is already going this direction. No wonder, since Falcon is just a stop-gap and that system was designed for Starship)
I'm more worried about NASA's goals than I am their costing strategy.<p>SLS and Orion are taking up much of NASA's budget, and I don't see the payoff. What science are we going to add with another manned moon mission? Going to the moon and returning with stuff like the Genesis Rock was important, but that's been done. Likewise I'm really not sure what science we've gotten from the Space Shuttle and the ISS, outside of biology on long-term human space flight.<p>Whereas stuff like Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, Juno, Hubble have had _clear_ science gains, and cost much less than manned missions. Now we the Webb Telescope and Lucy, we should be doing much more stuff like that.
We tend to overestimate science and technology progress in short term, while underestimating it in long term. Of course, starship will fail on it's promises and artemis program will lag it's schedule and cost of kg to orbit will be 2000$ and not 100$ For next two decades that is.<p>But in 2045 it would be unimaginable to design new rocket not taking in account starship. Starship itself will be on it's 10-th iteration. Everyone: EU, China, Japan will have starship-inspired space launch vehicles. In-orbit refuelling will be finally figured out.<p>That is when slow progress will change thing forever. Not Artemis program, not today.
What am I missing here? Why is spacex valuation 100bn if this is true? I would think it would be 1tn easily in this kind of capital abundant environment. Is the risk that high? Is the market size being overestimated?
I’d love to know if any Universities or Research organizations are planning big observatories based around launching on Starship. What was once a rare NASA budget item could now be in the reach of many more researchers.
I would like to know what the Ozone impact these rockets will have is. It's my understanding that they burn quite a bit of the ozone up as they pass through; but my information could be wrong.
Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the techno-utopian Pope.<p>No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it.<p>The amount of mass that we have to bring up there to live and thrive and be happy is so enormous that Nobel astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Christopher Nolan had to essentially cheat their way into the epilogue of Interstellar. The hero of the movie finds the answer to the problem of how to lift humanity off the Earth into the Gargantua Black Hole, which by definition is the place where all the rules are off, and there is no knowledge of what really happens in there, so that Kip Thorne could, in good conscience, allow it in the script.<p>People who love space should work on mind uploading and laser transmission of the aforementioned upload. That's the only way we can manage to lift ourselves.
The entire space reporting has the problem that simultaneously there is an established genre of fanboy fawning about space x, which is kinda unconnected to space x actually starting to disrupt space.<p>Right now, it looks like one could save a few billions if Artemis is not green lit a decade ago. However, private launches were still rare at that time, so in absence of a, likely expensive, time machine that's just not an option.<p>So looking at the planned timelines, Artemis I will circle the moon next year, and a crewed landing is planned for 2024, while star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet.<p>Also on a personal note, I am utterly astonished that there will be people on the moon before the subway station down the street is operational.
> The Artemis program to the Moon requires a Gateway and separate Human Landing System (HLS) because even the SLS doesn’t have enough lift capacity to be execute the mission on its own.<p>The Artemis programme requires a Gateway because senators decided it would be cool to have a gateway. AFAIK, anyone with actual technical expertise thinks it's stupid.<p>There's a bunch of logic in this piece i just can't follow. Like:<p>> How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?<p>It doesn't need to?<p>> What “lunar exploration objectives” can be “fulfilled” with such an architecture?<p>The only objective which has been pursued since the end of the Cold War, that of pumping billions of dollars into politically important states.<p>Who is this guy? Is he new?
I know that going into space is sexy and nerdy and cool and that it’s a difficult problem. What I don’t get is why so many people think about going to space and spend so much money on it when there are people in the US who drink water that catches on fire..and people elsewhere who don’t have access to water at all. Seems like we should work on the truly hard problems rather than the ones that are basically “just go up, really fast”