25 ms·

Starship is still not understood

309 points by wwilson 5y ago

lquist 5y ago
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?
- oxplot 5y ago
  I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm in awe how they didn't just laugh the question off and didn't take back the shares from those shareholders (only if they could).
  - GDC7 5y ago
    > People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history Tesla was founded in 2002, during the same timespan Facebook became ubiquitous in our lives, Google became the homepage of the world and Amazon became the go-to place to make purchases. Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. The world was much larger and disconnected back then and yet they managed to became so ubiquitous to reach the monopoly status, such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil. I commute to work daily . 25 miles back and forth and I am lucky if I see one Tesla . After 20 years the company most successful and ubiquitous product is its stock
    - cecilpl2 5y ago
      > I commute 25 miles back and forth to work and I am lucky if I see one Tesla . Where on earth do you live? I can barely walk down the street without tripping over one. It's not a stretch to say I'd see several dozen on a short morning run.
      - godshatter 5y ago
        Not the original poster, but I'm guessing they live somewhere other than California or New York. The nearest Tesla supercharging station to myself is a two-hour drive away, for example. While I could use one to drive to and from work or to businesses in the area, I won't be using it to go almost anywhere else any time soon. At least, not without planning my routes around that availability. As a contrast, the small town I live in has six gas stations. I'm looking forward to the day that the infrastructure is ubiquitous enough that I can buy a fully electric vehicle, but that day isn't here yet.
    - oxplot 5y ago
      That’s not apple to apple comparison. Try other vehicle manufacturers and see where your numbers end up. Ramping up a multi thousand part product with hundreds of suppliers is a whole different ball game than scaling an online website.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      Are you comparing software companies to a manufacturing company? They were making new technology that people basically thought was impossible. By 2012 they had only sold 1000 vehicles. That how hard it was. Since Model S however they have grown about as fast as any manufacturing based company in history and they have very clear potential to continue to do so for a few years more at the very least. Tesla basically invest huge into growing a chemical industry to make the batteries. That simply not something that just magically happens within a few years. > Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. Because Microsoft was running on ALL computers designed from lots and lots of companies. Rather the computers were designed for it. > such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil. They didn't 'had to' they wanted to.
      - GDC7 5y ago
        When you advertise yourself as a tech company you are bound to be compared against other tech companies. More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life . Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible. Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan.
        panick21_ 5y ago
        They are a car company that is slowly turning itself into a multi-faceted company. They are doing some tech like things, but they are also turning into a chemical company and an a equipment and manufacturing company. They are also an infrastructure provider. They want to turn into a robotics company. > More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life . Cars are the single largest expense other then a house people make. Of course its gone have less overall impact then a free product that everybody is gone spend very little time on. The Supercharger network alone and showing the way for EV infrastructure will have a huge impact on everybody. > Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible. People usually love their Tesla and that is reflected in the data that is gathered about that. Cars are the second most expensive people buy behind a house. They have huge impact on the people who buy them and clearly less on those that don't. > Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan. Idiotic comparison, no matter how long you talk about it.
  - lquist 5y ago
    Sure, but SpaceX trades on the private markets, not public. The minimum to get into SpaceX is $1m.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      This is flat inaccurate. There people on YT who showed how they got involved for much less then 100k.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    > but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit You can actually figure out how much of a stock is traded and if your assumption is true then there would have to be far more trading. > one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?
    - oxplot 5y ago
      > How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear? Interesting point. My intuition tells me that most people who are looking to get paid are the ones asking the question.
      - panick21_ 5y ago
        I can tell you that the person who got a question in literally every year since like 10 years is a long term investor. See Tesla Daily Podcast. Long term investors are very well organized and upvote certain questions. However that question was not from him.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Isn't SpaceX privately held?
chernevik 5y ago
I'm more worried about NASA's goals than I am their costing strategy. 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. 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.
h2odragon 5y ago
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 could adapt things with "vacuum rated bearings" etc doesn't mean they will. 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.
- twic 5y ago
  I loved this bit: > McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. Yeah, working underwater means it'll work in space no problem!
  - deelowe 5y ago
    It's a bit naive to assume heavy industry doesn't already have solutions to most of environmental challenges in space. I'm constantly surprised by how dismissive high tech is of dinosaur industries.
    - ARandumGuy 5y ago
      Heavy industry does not specialize in the environmental and logistical challenges of space. You can't just slap in some oil drilling equipment into your rocket and expect it to perform to the degree you need. Every bit of equipment needs extensive testing, and likely extensive modification as well. That's not cheap, and it's often better to just design something purpose built for space, instead of trying to modify some piece of Earth-based equipment.
      - 5y ago
twic 5y ago
> 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. 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. There's a bunch of logic in this piece i just can't follow. Like: > How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply? It doesn't need to? > What “lunar exploration objectives” can be “fulfilled” with such an architecture? The only objective which has been pursued since the end of the Cold War, that of pumping billions of dollars into politically important states. Who is this guy? Is he new?
- DennisP 5y ago
  > It doesn't need to? The point there is that if legacy aerospace doesn't do it, new players will, and the legacy companies will be left far behind.
  - twic 5y ago
    Why will they? Where is all this demand coming from?
    - dustintrex 5y ago
      Even frivolous applications like space tourism are worth billions if you can send people into orbit for $100k instead of $100M.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  Is there a name for the rhetorical technique you’re using? When you act as if you’re in an argument with someone who actually agrees with you, simply because they’re making points that you think “everyone knows”? Not everyone is as jaded as you, and some people may actually find it to be interesting reading to hear why our current SLS plans aren’t all that practical. You see it all the time on HN… “Apple changes course by doing something that isn’t very privacy-centric”, responded to with “but this isn’t a change of course because they’ve only ever cared about their bottom line!”… “Facebook does thing that isn’t good for their users” responded to with “no they didn’t, because these people aren’t the users, but the product!”, etc etc. It’s this weird agreement-masked-as-contrarianism that I can only imagine comes from too much time spent debating things online, where you feel you must present everything as an argument of some sort.
theshadowknows 5y ago
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”
- _plg_ 5y ago
  Why not to do both?
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  So much money on it? NASA budget is $23B, total govt spending is $4000B. Show me your math.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem? I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching fire). But I don’t think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of our nation’s resources into the problem. Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwhile investment, even when other pressing problems exist.
  - malfist 5y ago
    Not only that, but R&D can sometimes solve the other problem. Like synthetic nitrogen for fertilizers. A lot of people say (I have no idea how true this is) that the problem isn't growing enough food, it's getting that food too people. What if we can grow rice or wheat on the moon, or ganymeade, or a spacestation or whatnot and drop it where it needs to go a-la Moon Is A Harsh Mistress style. R&D is looking forward. Pointing at it and saying "people are hungry" is willfully ignorant of how science has played a roll in feeding more and more people and is a defeatists attitude.
  - coldtea 5y ago
ncallaway 5y ago
I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. 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.
- fasteddie31003 5y ago
  I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national embarrassment).
  - Loic 5y ago
    People with passion. JPL people were/are (and I hope will continue to be) believer in the purpose of what they are doing.
    - aero-glide2 5y ago
      Interestingly, the author himself works for JPL.
  - basementcat 5y ago
marktangotango 5y ago
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! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon 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.
- yeetaccount 5y ago
  Yeah but watching Bezos turn into a household joke is worth it.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    He’s a household joke the same way Elon is a household joke.
    - oxplot 5y ago
      Bezos is a household joke even in Elon's household. Elon is a nightmare in Bezos'es. That's where the difference is.
      - waltbosz 5y ago
        Can someone explain the joke to me?
- nine_k 5y ago
  Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already populated areas, with viable trade between them. Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship. The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.
nickhalfasleep 5y ago
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.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  SpaceX is already working on that with a professor from some Californian university.
woah 5y ago
> That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API. Lol this sounds like pure BS
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Actually a helpful way to think about the problem.
supperburg 5y ago
I think it was SN11 that stuck the landing. I was there.
- sailingparrot 5y ago
  SN10 landed on it's engines as the legs didn't deploy, and exploded on the pad a few minutes afterwards. SN11 exploded in mid-air in the fog [1]. SN15 landed correctly for the first time and didn't explode afterwards. [1]: https://youtu.be/cN7855POvJ8?t=172 https://youtu.be/cN7855POvJ8?t=172
  - supperburg 5y ago
    Whoops I meant 10
coldtea 5y ago
Damn right, it's not. It's the best shell prompt generator and few use it!
vanattab 5y ago
>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. 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?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  By the time you're sending a thousand Starships in one go, the fuel's probably coming from an orbital refinery processing chunks of captured comets, not Earth launches. Or they've been replaced with some big Aldrin cyclers built using Starships.
  - vanattab 5y ago
    That's exactly my point. This guy is pissed that NASA is not planning properly because Starship will unlock the ability to send millions of tons all over the solar system but in realty starship is only one of hundreds (thousands?) of advancements that will need to be made before we can think of sending 100's of millions of tons around the system.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I think it's reasonable to think NASA should currently being doing exploratory thinking about "how would we build something like a space station, lunar base, or Mars mission if Starship is available within the decade", though. Which is what I think the author is advocating; to get a few years out in front, rather than waiting until Starship reaches the point where it can't be ignored.
      - vanattab 5y ago
        But isn't NASA already doing that? I mean SpaceX and starship was just awarded the solo lunar lander contract no? The first Artimis flights are in 2023 no?
chinathrow 5y ago
Progress at Starbase, SpaceX's base in Boca Chica, TX is done at an astonishing pace and very impressive. Some of the stuff seen in the video series from August by Everyday Astronaut has changed already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
GDC7 5y ago
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. No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it. 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. 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.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  I got news for you buddy. Neuralink is being researched and lasers that communicate in space that are already on Starlink sats.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  You have an SF novel in you, you just need to write it!
- oxplot 5y ago
  Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large margin: 1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters landing side by side after an orbital launch). 2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and memes. 3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).
  - GDC7 5y ago
    > Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence What about the promise that you'd be able to have your present day quality of life on Mars? That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven". Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" , have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though the probabilities of that happening is many orders of magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral agent being accidentally released in the external environment. Curious. Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person with lots of book smarts but zero street smarts When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things happen.
phkahler 5y ago
>> 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. 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.
gene-h 5y ago
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. 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.
- qayxc 5y ago
  Exactly. Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments. There's nothing gained from sending 50t of metal to the outer solar system. Scientific instruments are usually purpose-built and while lifting mass restriction can bring down cost, you'd still have to account for redundancy and precision because no one's going to fly out to Jupiter to properly unfold that darn antenna.
  - neolefty 5y ago
    Nuclear power sources are still mighty expensive too. Solar is hard past Mars, and near impossible past Jupiter, AFAIK.
  - cookingmyserver 5y ago
    > Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments. It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to cheaply launch probes. You spend all of this time researching and developing a scientific instrument only to make two of them. One to launch the other to go on a diagnostic model (maybe a third for a launch backup). You spread out the cost of development over more units and bring down the per unit cost of manufacturing (although probably not that much given we are still talking quantities in the tens or at most hundreds of units). But without a cheap launch system there is a fixed cost per unit of hundreds of millions to get it into space, so there is very little point in producing more than what you need for just that mission. Of course certain missions are going to require special specs, but I do think that generic, somewhat modular spaceprobes are around the corner now that launch costs are going down. If you are going to retire a space craft that you've made a profit off of shuttling cargo to LEO might as well discard of it by sending it on one last mission into deep space with a couple of scientific missions onboard. We will end up spending more money overall, but cost per unit of science (however you want to measure that) will go down.
yk 5y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- Lambdanaut 5y ago
  > star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet Starship has a planned launch to orbit in literally a month pending regulatory approval. * source: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1451581465645494279 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/14515814656454942...
  - yk 5y ago
    They don't plan to circulate the orbit, and instead the plan is to splash down in the Pacific after going 3/4th around the planet. So, I would call that suborbital.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    * A month, yes, in Elon time. It's almost certainly going to be longer based just on past performance (though that performance is nothing short of astounding). They need at minimum to: - get the chopstick carriage moving and out of the way for launch - get the water deluge system in place - tank up enough water, LOX, and Methane - build more of a blast barrier for the GSE - maybe add a flame diverter - test-fire BN4 on the launch stand, testing all engines or enough that they can be certain of the robustness of the ignition sequence - re-assemble the stack and load it with liquid nitrogen to test structural integrity under load etc.
- panick21_ 5y ago
mordymoop 5y ago
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.
politician 5y ago
Ironically Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026781
burlesona 5y ago
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. 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.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  NASA, like most government programs, is actually a mission-driven purchasing program. They are not threatened by SpaceX at all. If SpaceX can deliver what NASA needs, NASA will just buy it from SpaceX. See for example: human space flight.
- macintux 5y ago
  The problem I have with that analysis is that there’s little commercial value to purely scientific missions. What will we lose if NASA isn’t sending (much bigger!) explorers to all corners of the solar system? Maybe mining companies will pick up some of the slack, maybe that’ll be enough.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    There’s a lot of research done today that has no commercial value. Ideally the commercialization of space will make it cheap enough that institutions can fund their own research without needing the government.
cletus 5y ago
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. 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. I completely agree that reducing LEO payload costs (in $/kg) by 2 or even 3 orders of magnitude will be game-changing. 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.
snowwrestler 5y ago
> 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. 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. 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. This is why people are not re-inventing everything around the Starship vision yet; because it hasn’t actually happened yet. 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.
stcredzero 5y ago
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)
micropresident 5y ago
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.
humanwhosits 5y ago
The very second that Starship gets to orbit it'll be politically easy for NASA to make a sudden shift
- cryptonector 5y ago
  It's not just a successful (sub-)orbital test. SpaceX needs to demonstrate re-use. That is essential. The Angry Astronaut had a video about this where he argues that SpaceX should continue testing Starship to demonstrate reusability. But they can't now that they are committed to not using landing legs: first they need to test the chopsticks with a hopper and a load simulator, then they need to test the chopsticks with a booster and a Starship, and only then can they attempt a landing and re-use.
hamilyon2 5y ago
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. 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. That is when slow progress will change thing forever. Not Artemis program, not today.

309 points by wwilson 5y ago

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?

oxplot 5y ago
I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm in awe how they didn't just laugh the question off and didn't take back the shares from those shareholders (only if they could).
- GDC7 5y ago
  > People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history Tesla was founded in 2002, during the same timespan Facebook became ubiquitous in our lives, Google became the homepage of the world and Amazon became the go-to place to make purchases. Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. The world was much larger and disconnected back then and yet they managed to became so ubiquitous to reach the monopoly status, such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil. I commute to work daily . 25 miles back and forth and I am lucky if I see one Tesla . After 20 years the company most successful and ubiquitous product is its stock
  - cecilpl2 5y ago
    > I commute 25 miles back and forth to work and I am lucky if I see one Tesla . Where on earth do you live? I can barely walk down the street without tripping over one. It's not a stretch to say I'd see several dozen on a short morning run.
    - godshatter 5y ago
      Not the original poster, but I'm guessing they live somewhere other than California or New York. The nearest Tesla supercharging station to myself is a two-hour drive away, for example. While I could use one to drive to and from work or to businesses in the area, I won't be using it to go almost anywhere else any time soon. At least, not without planning my routes around that availability. As a contrast, the small town I live in has six gas stations. I'm looking forward to the day that the infrastructure is ubiquitous enough that I can buy a fully electric vehicle, but that day isn't here yet.
  - oxplot 5y ago
    That’s not apple to apple comparison. Try other vehicle manufacturers and see where your numbers end up. Ramping up a multi thousand part product with hundreds of suppliers is a whole different ball game than scaling an online website.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Are you comparing software companies to a manufacturing company? They were making new technology that people basically thought was impossible. By 2012 they had only sold 1000 vehicles. That how hard it was. Since Model S however they have grown about as fast as any manufacturing based company in history and they have very clear potential to continue to do so for a few years more at the very least. Tesla basically invest huge into growing a chemical industry to make the batteries. That simply not something that just magically happens within a few years. > Microsoft did even better between 1975-1995. Because Microsoft was running on ALL computers designed from lots and lots of companies. Rather the computers were designed for it. > such a dominance that the US government had to step in like they did with Standard Oil. They didn't 'had to' they wanted to.
    - GDC7 5y ago
      When you advertise yourself as a tech company you are bound to be compared against other tech companies. More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life . Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible. Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan.
      - panick21_ 5y ago
        They are a car company that is slowly turning itself into a multi-faceted company. They are doing some tech like things, but they are also turning into a chemical company and an a equipment and manufacturing company. They are also an infrastructure provider. They want to turn into a robotics company. > More generally companies from every sector are compared against each other to see which one provides the highest improvement in citizens' quality of life . Cars are the single largest expense other then a house people make. Of course its gone have less overall impact then a free product that everybody is gone spend very little time on. The Supercharger network alone and showing the way for EV infrastructure will have a huge impact on everybody. > Tesla produces lots of noise but the improvement in citizens' quality of life is basically none or negligible. People usually love their Tesla and that is reflected in the data that is gathered about that. Cars are the second most expensive people buy behind a house. They have huge impact on the people who buy them and clearly less on those that don't. > Google, Facebook and Microsoft completely dominate Tesla in this fundamental, during the same timespan. Idiotic comparison, no matter how long you talk about it.
- lquist 5y ago
  Sure, but SpaceX trades on the private markets, not public. The minimum to get into SpaceX is $1m.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    This is flat inaccurate. There people on YT who showed how they got involved for much less then 100k.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  > but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit You can actually figure out how much of a stock is traded and if your assumption is true then there would have to be far more trading. > one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?
  - oxplot 5y ago
    > How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear? Interesting point. My intuition tells me that most people who are looking to get paid are the ones asking the question.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      I can tell you that the person who got a question in literally every year since like 10 years is a long term investor. See Tesla Daily Podcast. Long term investors are very well organized and upvote certain questions. However that question was not from him.
cryptonector 5y ago
Isn't SpaceX privately held?

chernevik 5y ago

I'm more worried about NASA's goals than I am their costing strategy. 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. 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.

h2odragon 5y ago

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 could adapt things with "vacuum rated bearings" etc doesn't mean they will. 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.

twic 5y ago
I loved this bit: > McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. Yeah, working underwater means it'll work in space no problem!
- deelowe 5y ago
  It's a bit naive to assume heavy industry doesn't already have solutions to most of environmental challenges in space. I'm constantly surprised by how dismissive high tech is of dinosaur industries.
  - ARandumGuy 5y ago
    Heavy industry does not specialize in the environmental and logistical challenges of space. You can't just slap in some oil drilling equipment into your rocket and expect it to perform to the degree you need. Every bit of equipment needs extensive testing, and likely extensive modification as well. That's not cheap, and it's often better to just design something purpose built for space, instead of trying to modify some piece of Earth-based equipment.
    - 5y ago

twic 5y ago

> 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. 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. There's a bunch of logic in this piece i just can't follow. Like: > How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply? It doesn't need to? > What “lunar exploration objectives” can be “fulfilled” with such an architecture? The only objective which has been pursued since the end of the Cold War, that of pumping billions of dollars into politically important states. Who is this guy? Is he new?

DennisP 5y ago
> It doesn't need to? The point there is that if legacy aerospace doesn't do it, new players will, and the legacy companies will be left far behind.
- twic 5y ago
  Why will they? Where is all this demand coming from?
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    Even frivolous applications like space tourism are worth billions if you can send people into orbit for $100k instead of $100M.
ninkendo 5y ago
Is there a name for the rhetorical technique you’re using? When you act as if you’re in an argument with someone who actually agrees with you, simply because they’re making points that you think “everyone knows”? Not everyone is as jaded as you, and some people may actually find it to be interesting reading to hear why our current SLS plans aren’t all that practical. You see it all the time on HN… “Apple changes course by doing something that isn’t very privacy-centric”, responded to with “but this isn’t a change of course because they’ve only ever cared about their bottom line!”… “Facebook does thing that isn’t good for their users” responded to with “no they didn’t, because these people aren’t the users, but the product!”, etc etc. It’s this weird agreement-masked-as-contrarianism that I can only imagine comes from too much time spent debating things online, where you feel you must present everything as an argument of some sort.

theshadowknows 5y ago

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”

_plg_ 5y ago
Why not to do both?
aero-glide2 5y ago
So much money on it? NASA budget is $23B, total govt spending is $4000B. Show me your math.
ncallaway 5y ago
If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem? I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching fire). But I don’t think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of our nation’s resources into the problem. Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwhile investment, even when other pressing problems exist.
- malfist 5y ago
  Not only that, but R&D can sometimes solve the other problem. Like synthetic nitrogen for fertilizers. A lot of people say (I have no idea how true this is) that the problem isn't growing enough food, it's getting that food too people. What if we can grow rice or wheat on the moon, or ganymeade, or a spacestation or whatnot and drop it where it needs to go a-la Moon Is A Harsh Mistress style. R&D is looking forward. Pointing at it and saying "people are hungry" is willfully ignorant of how science has played a roll in feeding more and more people and is a defeatists attitude.
- coldtea 5y ago

ncallaway 5y ago

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. 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.

fasteddie31003 5y ago
I'm not sure that NASA designs much. JPL designs and builds most of the probes launched by NASA. JPL is an anomaly in the Federal Government where it gets good results. It would be interesting to look into how JPL does so well relative to other agencies and contractors such as Boeing (which is a national embarrassment).
- Loic 5y ago
  People with passion. JPL people were/are (and I hope will continue to be) believer in the purpose of what they are doing.
  - aero-glide2 5y ago
    Interestingly, the author himself works for JPL.
- basementcat 5y ago

marktangotango 5y ago

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! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon 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.

yeetaccount 5y ago
Yeah but watching Bezos turn into a household joke is worth it.
- gremloni 5y ago
  He’s a household joke the same way Elon is a household joke.
  - oxplot 5y ago
    Bezos is a household joke even in Elon's household. Elon is a nightmare in Bezos'es. That's where the difference is.
    - waltbosz 5y ago
      Can someone explain the joke to me?
nine_k 5y ago
Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already populated areas, with viable trade between them. Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship. The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.

nickhalfasleep 5y ago

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.

panick21_ 5y ago
SpaceX is already working on that with a professor from some Californian university.

woah 5y ago

> That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API. Lol this sounds like pure BS

panick21_ 5y ago
Actually a helpful way to think about the problem.

supperburg 5y ago

I think it was SN11 that stuck the landing. I was there.

sailingparrot 5y ago
SN10 landed on it's engines as the legs didn't deploy, and exploded on the pad a few minutes afterwards. SN11 exploded in mid-air in the fog [1]. SN15 landed correctly for the first time and didn't explode afterwards. [1]: https://youtu.be/cN7855POvJ8?t=172 https://youtu.be/cN7855POvJ8?t=172
- supperburg 5y ago
  Whoops I meant 10

coldtea 5y ago

Damn right, it's not. It's the best shell prompt generator and few use it!

vanattab 5y ago

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. 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?

ceejayoz 5y ago
By the time you're sending a thousand Starships in one go, the fuel's probably coming from an orbital refinery processing chunks of captured comets, not Earth launches. Or they've been replaced with some big Aldrin cyclers built using Starships.
- vanattab 5y ago
  That's exactly my point. This guy is pissed that NASA is not planning properly because Starship will unlock the ability to send millions of tons all over the solar system but in realty starship is only one of hundreds (thousands?) of advancements that will need to be made before we can think of sending 100's of millions of tons around the system.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    I think it's reasonable to think NASA should currently being doing exploratory thinking about "how would we build something like a space station, lunar base, or Mars mission if Starship is available within the decade", though. Which is what I think the author is advocating; to get a few years out in front, rather than waiting until Starship reaches the point where it can't be ignored.
    - vanattab 5y ago
      But isn't NASA already doing that? I mean SpaceX and starship was just awarded the solo lunar lander contract no? The first Artimis flights are in 2023 no?

chinathrow 5y ago

Progress at Starbase, SpaceX's base in Boca Chica, TX is done at an astonishing pace and very impressive. Some of the stuff seen in the video series from August by Everyday Astronaut has changed already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

GDC7 5y ago

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. No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it. 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. 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.

panick21_ 5y ago
I got news for you buddy. Neuralink is being researched and lasers that communicate in space that are already on Starlink sats.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
You have an SF novel in you, you just need to write it!
oxplot 5y ago
Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large margin: 1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters landing side by side after an orbital launch). 2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and memes. 3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).
- GDC7 5y ago
  > Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence What about the promise that you'd be able to have your present day quality of life on Mars? That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven". Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" , have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though the probabilities of that happening is many orders of magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral agent being accidentally released in the external environment. Curious. Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person with lots of book smarts but zero street smarts When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things happen.

phkahler 5y ago

>> 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. 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.

gene-h 5y ago

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. 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.

qayxc 5y ago
Exactly. Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments. There's nothing gained from sending 50t of metal to the outer solar system. Scientific instruments are usually purpose-built and while lifting mass restriction can bring down cost, you'd still have to account for redundancy and precision because no one's going to fly out to Jupiter to properly unfold that darn antenna.
- neolefty 5y ago
  Nuclear power sources are still mighty expensive too. Solar is hard past Mars, and near impossible past Jupiter, AFAIK.
- cookingmyserver 5y ago
  > Way too many people seem to ignore the cost of developing and certifying scientific instruments. It gets ignored because it is a symptom of not being able to cheaply launch probes. You spend all of this time researching and developing a scientific instrument only to make two of them. One to launch the other to go on a diagnostic model (maybe a third for a launch backup). You spread out the cost of development over more units and bring down the per unit cost of manufacturing (although probably not that much given we are still talking quantities in the tens or at most hundreds of units). But without a cheap launch system there is a fixed cost per unit of hundreds of millions to get it into space, so there is very little point in producing more than what you need for just that mission. Of course certain missions are going to require special specs, but I do think that generic, somewhat modular spaceprobes are around the corner now that launch costs are going down. If you are going to retire a space craft that you've made a profit off of shuttling cargo to LEO might as well discard of it by sending it on one last mission into deep space with a couple of scientific missions onboard. We will end up spending more money overall, but cost per unit of science (however you want to measure that) will go down.

yk 5y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

Lambdanaut 5y ago
> star ship does not have a planned launch to orbit yet Starship has a planned launch to orbit in literally a month pending regulatory approval. * source: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1451581465645494279 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/14515814656454942...
- yk 5y ago
  They don't plan to circulate the orbit, and instead the plan is to splash down in the Pacific after going 3/4th around the planet. So, I would call that suborbital.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  * A month, yes, in Elon time. It's almost certainly going to be longer based just on past performance (though that performance is nothing short of astounding). They need at minimum to: - get the chopstick carriage moving and out of the way for launch - get the water deluge system in place - tank up enough water, LOX, and Methane - build more of a blast barrier for the GSE - maybe add a flame diverter - test-fire BN4 on the launch stand, testing all engines or enough that they can be certain of the robustness of the ignition sequence - re-assemble the stack and load it with liquid nitrogen to test structural integrity under load etc.
panick21_ 5y ago

mordymoop 5y ago

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.

politician 5y ago

Ironically Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026781

burlesona 5y ago

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. 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.

snowwrestler 5y ago
NASA, like most government programs, is actually a mission-driven purchasing program. They are not threatened by SpaceX at all. If SpaceX can deliver what NASA needs, NASA will just buy it from SpaceX. See for example: human space flight.
macintux 5y ago
The problem I have with that analysis is that there’s little commercial value to purely scientific missions. What will we lose if NASA isn’t sending (much bigger!) explorers to all corners of the solar system? Maybe mining companies will pick up some of the slack, maybe that’ll be enough.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  There’s a lot of research done today that has no commercial value. Ideally the commercialization of space will make it cheap enough that institutions can fund their own research without needing the government.

cletus 5y ago

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. 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. I completely agree that reducing LEO payload costs (in $/kg) by 2 or even 3 orders of magnitude will be game-changing. 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.

snowwrestler 5y ago

> 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. 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. 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. This is why people are not re-inventing everything around the Starship vision yet; because it hasn’t actually happened yet. 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.

stcredzero 5y ago

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)

micropresident 5y ago

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.

humanwhosits 5y ago

The very second that Starship gets to orbit it'll be politically easy for NASA to make a sudden shift

cryptonector 5y ago
It's not just a successful (sub-)orbital test. SpaceX needs to demonstrate re-use. That is essential. The Angry Astronaut had a video about this where he argues that SpaceX should continue testing Starship to demonstrate reusability. But they can't now that they are committed to not using landing legs: first they need to test the chopsticks with a hopper and a load simulator, then they need to test the chopsticks with a booster and a Starship, and only then can they attempt a landing and re-use.

hamilyon2 5y ago

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. 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. That is when slow progress will change thing forever. Not Artemis program, not today.