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It's the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for interplanetary

It's the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for interplanetary flight: The upper stage is refuelable and is integrated with the passenger compartment and has a large delta-v capability as well as aerobraking/capture/entry. It really breaks basically every human spaceflight architecture. It's a two element architecture (with common propulsion, simplifying development for the booster) that accomplishes every goal of virtually every other interplanetary human spaceflight architecture conceived. This simple architecture (while avoiding the huge penalties of single-stage vehicles) means that it can be developed extremely cheaply. It really is a gamechanger in spaceflight. All of spaceflight. 400 satellites per launch? For maybe an incremental price of about $40 million near-term and $4 million long-term? That's, um, $10,000 per satellite. That breaks every model of space development. And it's not like all of this was unforeseeable. Even Werner Von Braun proposed refueling-dependent human spaceflight architectures in the 1940s (in his fictional book about exploring Mars) that would enable low cost. But for historical reasons, human spaceflight took another path.

chasd00 7y ago
yeah, you're absolutely correct. It's the whole package. I want to know what went so right at SpaceX though. from wikipedia "In late 2001, Mueller began developing a liquid-fueled rocket engine in his garage and later moved his project to a friend's warehouse in 2002.[1] His design was the largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine, weighing 80 lb (36 kg) and producing 13,000 lbf (58 kN) of thrust.[1] His work caught the attention of Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, and in 2002 Mueller joined Musk as a founding employee of SpaceX." that's a hell of a lucky find by Musk and a hell of a roll of the dice by Mueller. Around the same time is when Shotwell joined, she's equally incredible but in a different way. i don't now how Musk found her. Even then, what followed has been black swan territory. Every major development announcement at SpaceX is met with "you're crazy" and laughter from the industry and yet, a few years down the road, there it is working. Again, i really want to know what went so right.
- cellular 7y ago
  What went right, the way Elon, explained, was that they are a private company that isn't set up to profit from long term government counteracts. For them, it's sink or swim. So they swim. He explained that others are set up to take a long time because they never want the contracts to run out, to keep getting money. Also his system strategy is : the best design to use is one that doesn't require the design in the first place. Ie get rid of many systems. Keep it simple. Less can go wrong, and the schedule is reduced. "Tight is right. Long is wrong". He did a great talk last month. You guys might like a video I'm releasing on Halloween, "the actual, physical, reason why time slows at the speed of light". My channel is "TheRainHarvester". Stay tuned...
- cstross 7y ago
  The path taken in the 1950s for spaceflight was dictated by its funding source -- missile development. Missiles were optimized for high performance and were single use devices. Even when dedicated non-military rockets began to appear, e.g. the Ariane range and the Space Shuttle, they had dependencies on legacy infrastructure that was originally designed for strategic weapons (i.e. it was intended to work at peak performance, just once). The payloads evolved to reflect the launch system constraints, so very expensive, one-of-a-kind comsats and earth resources satellites, each of them a bespoke design (or at most one of a dozen or so). SpaceX isn't building missiles; it's optimizing for reliability and cost (which means reusability). More like airliners than missiles. This doesn't mean low performance (the efficiency and power density of a modern civil airliner turbofan would have been a jaw-dropper to 1940s military aviation engineers) but it does mean the performance goals are different. I am still extremely skeptical that Heavy/Starship will facilitate a Mars colony ... but that's because I'm skeptical about the economics and practicalities of building an off-planet colony when the externalities we normally take for granted (like a compatible biosphere) aren't available and nobody's really done the necessary R&D work on self-contained biospheres -- even the ISS is effectively an open-loop system dependent on constant resupply. (Biology and ecology are much harder than they look to a naive outsider.)
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Riffing off of your comment: Neal Stephenson has a pretty good article about path dependence in space exploration: https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-strange-persistence-of-rockets-can-teach-us-about-innovation.html https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s...
hoseja 7y ago
I just hope it doesn't turn out there isn't that much useful to do in space.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  The killer app of spaceflight is telecommunications, and it's a trillion-dollar market. There's nothing else in the next, well, half a century that would provide a market of that order of magnitude (with the possible except of space-based solar power, but that has many of the same drawbacks as nuclear fission). I think we might just do stuff in space because we WANT to do it. Stuff like space tourism, etc.
  - kempbellt 7y ago
    There's also potential for asteroid mining, building space/lunar colonies. Not to mention Musk's dream to build a Mars colony. Plenty of "wow" factor for space exploration, imo.
    - Robotbeat 7y ago
      All those are either unprofitable or have much lower than trillion dollar revenue possibility in the next 50 years. To take asteroid mining as an example: The entire platinum group metal market on Earth is only about $10-20 billion per year. Adding a huge supply is likely to crash the market price well before you drive demand up high enough to compensate for the far lower price. So platinum-group metal mining is not huge. Mining water is also a very small market. You're primarily replacing rocket propellant for launch vehicles or maneuvering, but this is a small market. The entire commercial launch market is about $3 billion per year in revenue. Adding non-commercial launch may more than double it, but you're still talking less than $10 billion per year. And propellant (or propellant services) is going to be a small part of that. It won't help get payloads to LEO, so you're left with just providing services from LEO to GEO or something like that. Maybe for deep space missions... But even that market is very small. NASA makes up the majority of world funding for deep space exploration, about $10 billion per year optimistically. Propellant is a small fraction of that. So for water propellant, we're looking at maybe $100 million to $1 billion per year in revenue. For structural materials, the market is even more speculative and less proven. Space settlements are going to be small revenue, too, for the foreseeable future. NASA human spaceflight, philanthropic, and space tourism are really the only consistent funding sources there. The settlers themselves won't be super rich as they'll need to be sustaining themselves, but let's just say we have 10,000 settlers each able to spend $100,000 for your services per year. That's just $1 billion per year. To get truly sizable, you need like a million people living in space, and it's still only $100 billion per year. So it's primarily telecom that is the big space market. The others are much smaller and less profitable. It turns out that serving billions of Earthling consumers is where the real money is in space. EDIT: There are 3 big (trillion dollar) markets: 1) telecomm 2) energy 3) high speed transport (aviation) Space can in principle address all three. The first one is the only real "slam dunk," the other two are questionable to one degree or another. SpaceX is pursuing 1 and 3.
navigatesol 7y ago
>It's the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for interplanetary flight: The upper stage is refuelable and is integrated with the passenger compartment and has a large delta-v capability as well as aerobraking/capture/entry. I don't know much about SpaceX, but I do follow Tesla closely: how much of this is reality versus "things we'd like to be able to do in the future"?
- avmich 7y ago
  What do you mean by "reality"? With SpaceX critics are often in a state of "you're currently here" on the list of steady achievements. In general, SpaceX delivers most of important Musk promises (just doesn't do it as soon as promised), so - Starship is technically possible to build and run. In the future. Like, in 5 years from now.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >What do you mean by "reality"? For example: is the rocket really "rapidly reusable"? Or is it theoretically "rapidly reusable"? In the same way that all Tesla's sold since 2017 have the hardware capable of self-driving. Are they really capable of it, or theoretically capable? Until you have self-driving software or have rapidly reused the rocket, how do you know? In the same sense, until they landed a rocket, saying "we have a rocket capable of landing" didn't matter; landing it did. I may not be articulating it properly, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding how they test these claims.
    - avmich 7y ago
      Discussing this aspect, I'm still not sure what's the difference between really and theoretically. We assume Falcon-9 first stages are really reusable, right? Not that they are claimed to be reusable, or they are theoretically reusable, but really reusable. Then the question is, what is the criteria to be really reusable? Would only direct demonstration be enough? Then of course Starship isn't real. If there are other ways to claim real reusability, then maybe Elon's plans are real(istic). Also, historically, Elon claimed something for SpaceX before which later became real. There aren't currently proofs that Starship isn't possible to create (with parameters similar to stated).

chasd00 7y ago

yeah, you're absolutely correct. It's the whole package. I want to know what went so right at SpaceX though. from wikipedia "In late 2001, Mueller began developing a liquid-fueled rocket engine in his garage and later moved his project to a friend's warehouse in 2002.[1] His design was the largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine, weighing 80 lb (36 kg) and producing 13,000 lbf (58 kN) of thrust.[1] His work caught the attention of Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, and in 2002 Mueller joined Musk as a founding employee of SpaceX." that's a hell of a lucky find by Musk and a hell of a roll of the dice by Mueller. Around the same time is when Shotwell joined, she's equally incredible but in a different way. i don't now how Musk found her. Even then, what followed has been black swan territory. Every major development announcement at SpaceX is met with "you're crazy" and laughter from the industry and yet, a few years down the road, there it is working. Again, i really want to know what went so right.

cellular 7y ago
What went right, the way Elon, explained, was that they are a private company that isn't set up to profit from long term government counteracts. For them, it's sink or swim. So they swim. He explained that others are set up to take a long time because they never want the contracts to run out, to keep getting money. Also his system strategy is : the best design to use is one that doesn't require the design in the first place. Ie get rid of many systems. Keep it simple. Less can go wrong, and the schedule is reduced. "Tight is right. Long is wrong". He did a great talk last month. You guys might like a video I'm releasing on Halloween, "the actual, physical, reason why time slows at the speed of light". My channel is "TheRainHarvester". Stay tuned...
cstross 7y ago
The path taken in the 1950s for spaceflight was dictated by its funding source -- missile development. Missiles were optimized for high performance and were single use devices. Even when dedicated non-military rockets began to appear, e.g. the Ariane range and the Space Shuttle, they had dependencies on legacy infrastructure that was originally designed for strategic weapons (i.e. it was intended to work at peak performance, just once). The payloads evolved to reflect the launch system constraints, so very expensive, one-of-a-kind comsats and earth resources satellites, each of them a bespoke design (or at most one of a dozen or so). SpaceX isn't building missiles; it's optimizing for reliability and cost (which means reusability). More like airliners than missiles. This doesn't mean low performance (the efficiency and power density of a modern civil airliner turbofan would have been a jaw-dropper to 1940s military aviation engineers) but it does mean the performance goals are different. I am still extremely skeptical that Heavy/Starship will facilitate a Mars colony ... but that's because I'm skeptical about the economics and practicalities of building an off-planet colony when the externalities we normally take for granted (like a compatible biosphere) aren't available and nobody's really done the necessary R&D work on self-contained biospheres -- even the ISS is effectively an open-loop system dependent on constant resupply. (Biology and ecology are much harder than they look to a naive outsider.)
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Riffing off of your comment: Neal Stephenson has a pretty good article about path dependence in space exploration: https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-strange-persistence-of-rockets-can-teach-us-about-innovation.html https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s...

hoseja 7y ago

I just hope it doesn't turn out there isn't that much useful to do in space.

Robotbeat 7y ago
The killer app of spaceflight is telecommunications, and it's a trillion-dollar market. There's nothing else in the next, well, half a century that would provide a market of that order of magnitude (with the possible except of space-based solar power, but that has many of the same drawbacks as nuclear fission). I think we might just do stuff in space because we WANT to do it. Stuff like space tourism, etc.
- kempbellt 7y ago
  There's also potential for asteroid mining, building space/lunar colonies. Not to mention Musk's dream to build a Mars colony. Plenty of "wow" factor for space exploration, imo.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    All those are either unprofitable or have much lower than trillion dollar revenue possibility in the next 50 years. To take asteroid mining as an example: The entire platinum group metal market on Earth is only about $10-20 billion per year. Adding a huge supply is likely to crash the market price well before you drive demand up high enough to compensate for the far lower price. So platinum-group metal mining is not huge. Mining water is also a very small market. You're primarily replacing rocket propellant for launch vehicles or maneuvering, but this is a small market. The entire commercial launch market is about $3 billion per year in revenue. Adding non-commercial launch may more than double it, but you're still talking less than $10 billion per year. And propellant (or propellant services) is going to be a small part of that. It won't help get payloads to LEO, so you're left with just providing services from LEO to GEO or something like that. Maybe for deep space missions... But even that market is very small. NASA makes up the majority of world funding for deep space exploration, about $10 billion per year optimistically. Propellant is a small fraction of that. So for water propellant, we're looking at maybe $100 million to $1 billion per year in revenue. For structural materials, the market is even more speculative and less proven. Space settlements are going to be small revenue, too, for the foreseeable future. NASA human spaceflight, philanthropic, and space tourism are really the only consistent funding sources there. The settlers themselves won't be super rich as they'll need to be sustaining themselves, but let's just say we have 10,000 settlers each able to spend $100,000 for your services per year. That's just $1 billion per year. To get truly sizable, you need like a million people living in space, and it's still only $100 billion per year. So it's primarily telecom that is the big space market. The others are much smaller and less profitable. It turns out that serving billions of Earthling consumers is where the real money is in space. EDIT: There are 3 big (trillion dollar) markets: 1) telecomm 2) energy 3) high speed transport (aviation) Space can in principle address all three. The first one is the only real "slam dunk," the other two are questionable to one degree or another. SpaceX is pursuing 1 and 3.

navigatesol 7y ago

>It's the whole architecture: a two-stage, rapidly reusable rocket with as much cargo capacity as anything to ever fly. And just as important for interplanetary flight: The upper stage is refuelable and is integrated with the passenger compartment and has a large delta-v capability as well as aerobraking/capture/entry. I don't know much about SpaceX, but I do follow Tesla closely: how much of this is reality versus "things we'd like to be able to do in the future"?

avmich 7y ago
What do you mean by "reality"? With SpaceX critics are often in a state of "you're currently here" on the list of steady achievements. In general, SpaceX delivers most of important Musk promises (just doesn't do it as soon as promised), so - Starship is technically possible to build and run. In the future. Like, in 5 years from now.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >What do you mean by "reality"? For example: is the rocket really "rapidly reusable"? Or is it theoretically "rapidly reusable"? In the same way that all Tesla's sold since 2017 have the hardware capable of self-driving. Are they really capable of it, or theoretically capable? Until you have self-driving software or have rapidly reused the rocket, how do you know? In the same sense, until they landed a rocket, saying "we have a rocket capable of landing" didn't matter; landing it did. I may not be articulating it properly, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding how they test these claims.
  - avmich 7y ago
    Discussing this aspect, I'm still not sure what's the difference between really and theoretically. We assume Falcon-9 first stages are really reusable, right? Not that they are claimed to be reusable, or they are theoretically reusable, but really reusable. Then the question is, what is the criteria to be really reusable? Would only direct demonstration be enough? Then of course Starship isn't real. If there are other ways to claim real reusability, then maybe Elon's plans are real(istic). Also, historically, Elon claimed something for SpaceX before which later became real. There aren't currently proofs that Starship isn't possible to create (with parameters similar to stated).