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The previous limiting factors for launching stuff off-world were weight and size. Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space station

The previous limiting factors for launching stuff off-world were weight and size. Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore). With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.

contrarian1234 3y ago
Okay, I get the margins get more cushy. But one could see it being something like space launch getting 10x cheaper and that maybe translates into 3x demand for satellites. The first earth observatory was worth an astronomical amount of money, but the hundredth or thousandth is far down the tail of diminishing returns. I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space. There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives. The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining Everything else is on taxpayer dollar
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  > If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    That will never work. You'll spend more time traveling to and from the remote launch facilities than you would flying conventionally from a nearby international airport. Destinations would also be severely limited by technology export laws; maybe it could be arranged for a handful of friendly nations / strategies allies like Japan or Australia, but most of the world would be scratched off the list. When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Someone downvoted you because you have hit a nerve. Don't mind those people.
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      I don't know, Dallas to Sydney is a 17 hour flight now. If it takes 30 minutes on a rocket from Texas you have 16 hours to do everything else and you'll still get there faster.
    - dzader 3y ago
      [dead]
  - antonvs 3y ago
    If that was just intended to forecast costs, then it’s a good analogy. But I thought SpaceX went further than that. This Adam Something video provides some amusing coverage of the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI
  - imtringued 3y ago
    I don't know what to tell you but that is basically the equivalent of a kickstarter scam.
    - andrepd 3y ago
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly. The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I'm no expert but I think Rome was always growing but never achieved ultimate profitability. Yesterday I was considering how the Italian renaissance was fueled by the materials left over from Roman overbuilding. The price Rome originally paid in labor was an enormous savings to the renaissance builders. I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    How do you define profitability for a entity like Rome or its current equivalents, let's say the USA, China and maybe Russia? As Italian, we're still profiting from what the Romans built and from their general hegemony.
    - airstrike 3y ago
      There's always an element of time to money, so your argument and the parent's don't contradict in that the romans might have not been profitable in the near term yet what they created was very profitable in the long term
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Mostly on the idea that as the Roman Empire expanded its currency was devalued by precious metal content. That sort of pattern signifies to me decline. I understand that the currency may have been just keeping pace with the efficiency of trade. It seems to me that if trade was as efficient as Rome was hoping it would not have collapsed. Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    > how space can be profitable Figuring out how to get large nearly pure metallic asteroids in earth orbit would go a long way in figuring out that profitability.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      The problem is that there seem to be plenty of easier to solve problems that would have an immediate effect on the dignity of human existance. I love the challenge of space technically. My concern is confusing technical challenges with profitable/worthy pursuits. I say this as a collector of inertial guidance systems.
lupusreal 3y ago
[dead]
api 3y ago
If you want to build spaceships to fly around the solar system, being light still matters a lot and inflatable modules are a great idea. That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.
godshatter 3y ago
If they use Starship to bootstrap mining, refining, and manufacturing in space, then this ceases to become a problem. At that point we're talking about how much cargo Starship can move, not how much infrastructure.
chriswarbo 3y ago
> Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore). Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)

contrarian1234 3y ago

Okay, I get the margins get more cushy. But one could see it being something like space launch getting 10x cheaper and that maybe translates into 3x demand for satellites. The first earth observatory was worth an astronomical amount of money, but the hundredth or thousandth is far down the tail of diminishing returns. I just really wonder how much money can they make off of all of this even in the best case scenario. There isn't an infinite demand for putting things up into space. There are demand inflection points. If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap. If Starlinks starts making all telecom providers obsolete then that'd also present something radically different and a huge amount of revenue. But I don't think they're able to do that either I feel the primary reason people stopped caring about space after Apollo is because there are simply insufficient economic incentives. The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining Everything else is on taxpayer dollar

bryanlarsen 3y ago
> If it's so cheap you can go up for your birthday, or can do transatlantic flights, then it's a bit different - but nobody is talking about it ever getting THAT cheap Actually, Shotwell has. She has speculated that they could eventually do a trans-Pacific hop for the price of a first class plane ticket.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  That will never work. You'll spend more time traveling to and from the remote launch facilities than you would flying conventionally from a nearby international airport. Destinations would also be severely limited by technology export laws; maybe it could be arranged for a handful of friendly nations / strategies allies like Japan or Australia, but most of the world would be scratched off the list. When Shotwell and Musk talk about stuff like that or Mars colonies, they're hyping the company to attract more talent. If you loom at what they're actually building, it's all satellite launchers.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Someone downvoted you because you have hit a nerve. Don't mind those people.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    I don't know, Dallas to Sydney is a 17 hour flight now. If it takes 30 minutes on a rocket from Texas you have 16 hours to do everything else and you'll still get there faster.
  - dzader 3y ago
    [dead]
- antonvs 3y ago
  If that was just intended to forecast costs, then it’s a good analogy. But I thought SpaceX went further than that. This Adam Something video provides some amusing coverage of the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQUiIdre-MI
- imtringued 3y ago
  I don't know what to tell you but that is basically the equivalent of a kickstarter scam.
  - andrepd 3y ago
shkkmo 3y ago
> The list of things you can do is short.. Telecom, Telescopes looking down, tourism, space mining The first three have provided quite a bit of launch demand. Nation funded human space flight has been in decline since Apollo but commercial launch demand has been grown significantly. The last two have yet to be tapped but their combined potential have the ability to create unprecedentedly high levels of demand.
detourdog 3y ago
I'm no expert but I think Rome was always growing but never achieved ultimate profitability. Yesterday I was considering how the Italian renaissance was fueled by the materials left over from Roman overbuilding. The price Rome originally paid in labor was an enormous savings to the renaissance builders. I don't see how space can be profitable but societies must grow.
- pmontra 3y ago
  How do you define profitability for a entity like Rome or its current equivalents, let's say the USA, China and maybe Russia? As Italian, we're still profiting from what the Romans built and from their general hegemony.
  - airstrike 3y ago
    There's always an element of time to money, so your argument and the parent's don't contradict in that the romans might have not been profitable in the near term yet what they created was very profitable in the long term
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Mostly on the idea that as the Roman Empire expanded its currency was devalued by precious metal content. That sort of pattern signifies to me decline. I understand that the currency may have been just keeping pace with the efficiency of trade. It seems to me that if trade was as efficient as Rome was hoping it would not have collapsed. Another way to look at it is that the empire ran into a labor shortage and contracted back to a sustainable size.
- pixl97 3y ago
  > how space can be profitable Figuring out how to get large nearly pure metallic asteroids in earth orbit would go a long way in figuring out that profitability.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    The problem is that there seem to be plenty of easier to solve problems that would have an immediate effect on the dignity of human existance. I love the challenge of space technically. My concern is confusing technical challenges with profitable/worthy pursuits. I say this as a collector of inertial guidance systems.

lupusreal 3y ago

[dead]

api 3y ago

If you want to build spaceships to fly around the solar system, being light still matters a lot and inflatable modules are a great idea. That’s because your constraint is delta-V which is expressed in terms of the mass you are moving around. More mass requires more propellant and energy… which means more mass requires more mass.

godshatter 3y ago

If they use Starship to bootstrap mining, refining, and manufacturing in space, then this ceases to become a problem. At that point we're talking about how much cargo Starship can move, not how much infrastructure.

chriswarbo 3y ago

> Such constraints were tackled by old innovations like assembling space stations using modules launched separately, or more recently, with inflatable modules like BEAM (sadly not in development anymore). Another good example is JWST, which required an elaborate (and therefore risky) "unfolding" process. The costs of such approaches seem somewhat self-reinforcing: a failure would be very costly, so it's worth spending more on validation and testing; that extra expense would make a failure even more costly, justifying even more spending on testing! (In that sense it's similar to the tyranny of the rocket equation: having to carry more propellant in order to propel that extra propellant!)