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SpaceX has grown to 87% of the tonnage to orbit
- cdchn 2y agoIs there any breakdown of what the total tonnage to space is used for? What % is exploration / research, telecommunications, surveillance/imaging, other?
- bagels 2y agoMuch of it is Starlink.
- cdchn 2y agoHow much? And what are other companies putting in space?
- bagels 2y agoI don't know. I'm sure someone has calculated it, but I don't have time to find updated numbers. Check this out though: https://www.n2yo.com/ https://www.n2yo.com/ The most massive things up there are spent rocket upper stages + ISS. The most numerous things are tiny debris. The most numerous intentional things are Starlink satellites, by a large margin.
- cdchn 2y agoYeah I was hoping the HN community could provide some insight there, because my searches came up fruitless.
- bagels 2y agoOne problem you'll find is that manifests are not completely public, and the mass of each item on the manifest isn't typically published either. We're left with estimates of individual satellites, and aggregate estimates based on rocket payload capacities.
- WalterBright 2y agoI keep hearing that Elon Musk is a "fraud". He's about as far from a fraud as one could get.
- iknowstuff 2y agoyea getting tired of people confidently asserting their ignorant opinions about spacex and tesla based on ragebait headlines.
- blackhawkC17 2y agoMusk has his faults, but most of his critics have nothing close to his risk-taking ability and grit. It’s usually people who have hardly ever risked anything to start a business, nonetheless in a cutthroat industry. If you gave most people $180 million, they’ll happily retire into the sunset, not invest it in very risky electric car and aerospace companies like Musk.
- kibwen 2y agoOnce you have enough money for you and your children to live comfortably for the rest of your lives without lifting a finger, there is no risk whatsoever to spending whatever money you have left over. At no point was Elon Musk ever risking his comfort or the future of his family's financial well-being, unlike actual rags-to-riches entrepreneurs with skin in the game and actual consequences for failure.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThis applies to every billionaire and millionaire, he risked a larger percentage of his wealth than 99% of them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 2y agoIf you read his biography, he was at one point within 4 hours of being reduced to a net worth of about $100,000. He risked everything he had. He also came to this country with nothing but a suitcase, slept in youth hostels, and took sanitation jobs to support himself. He's exactly the classic American self-made zillionaire industrialist.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoOnce StarShip becomes fully re-usable, that percentage will go closer to 100.
- cryptoz 2y agoI'm excited to see how RocketLab's Neutron could maybe add a second real player. Somebody's gotta do something! But yes indeed, Starship being operational and reusbale will absolutely dominate. We're looking at multiple Starship launches per day, right? Eventually. Each with far more mass-to-orbit capability than anybody else, and per launch. It's going to be 1,000x the rest of everyone combined. We will need more useful metrics though. Many of Starship's tonnage to orbit will be fuel for other missions, and this will clutter the stats. Of course, tonnage-to-orbit will still be a metric. Even "useful tonnage to orbit" (which is even an Elon-touted metric I think) will be tainted by the large number of fuel launches (Which are useful of course, but not the same as active hardware). Other than RocketLab/Neutron, realistically, what other competitors are there in reusibility for the next 10 years? Is BO going to burst on to the scene with a surprise cadence of useful orbital launches and flip the discussion a bit on strategy? - I mean, so far SpaceX is so ahead in the game based on their iterative development that any suggestion that BO has the right idea is falling flat. Clearly SpaceX has the right idea. But gosh!! There's gotta be somebody! to compete. Neutron isn't even quite at F9 level - there is no Starship competitor at all AFAIK.
- lupusreal 2y agoIf Starship starts to work as advertised, everybody else except maybe Blue Origin (if New Glenn also works as advertised...) will be out of the business. The government backed organizations will continue as well, but commercial launch providers will need to find billions of dollars to build competing platforms without being able to start small and build their way up like SpaceX did because small boosters will no longer be economically viable. Blue Origin might be able to pull it off since their backer has very deep pockets, but their track record so far is dogshit so I'm not betting on them.
- jagger27 2y ago
- option 2y agoI wish Elon abandons US culture wars, Tesla and focus on this. Think about it, if (and this is a giant if) he successfully pushes humans to become multiplanetary species by colonizing Mars, he will objectively be the most important human being who has ever lived.
- lurking_swe 2y agoone reason that spacex has been so successful is because he isn’t getting in the way. he hired Gwynne Shotwell as the president and chief operating officer (COO). She runs a tight ship. She doesn’t waste her weekdays posting on social media or getting bad press lol.
- option 2y agoI agree that Gwynne should be getting more praise than she gets now. But Elon is phenomenally good at getting from 0 to something that works. And colonizing Mars has many, many various needs beyond Starship that have never been done before.
- lurking_swe 2y agomy opinion is that Elon is fantastic at very early stage startups, like what SpaceX was years ago. I don’t think Elon is as helpful after a companies become more mature. That’s why I worded my comment the way I did. :)
- asadotzler 2y agoSpaceX is not at the early stages because LEO transport is not the destination, Mars colonization is. In that light, we're not even at fully reusable rockets yet and then there's making them cheap and reliable and then there's the actual transport of large amounts of stuff and people to Mars. That's what SpaceX is about, not lofting up com sats and astronauts. So, no, they are not mature yet except on one tech they need to get to Mars and that's being operationalized efficiently by Shotwell just fine. The rest of SpaceX's much harder work, still in its infancy.
- redwood 2y agoI wasn't clear, is this across all time or only over the lowest recent period?
- johnneville 2y agothis year
- jmward01 2y agoThis is what happens when an industry is shaken out of a rut. I hope aviation is next. It is equally behind.
- thunderbird120 2y ago>I hope aviation is next. It is equally behind. SpaceX took the launch market from a niche, almost artisan thing to something which actually does volume. There is no comparable improvement to be made in commercial aviation unless someone snaps their fingers and wills into existence both all the technologies and regulatory changes necessary to make flying cars work.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoBring the cost per craft mile down enough to enable everyone to have their own lounge space for current ticket prices, for example?
- nojvek 2y agoAlmost 50% of the cost of flying is fuel. Then there's a bunch of fees on every airport the plane lands as well as costs for parking in that airport. Airlines run on thin margins and junk fees. Cost per craft mile comes down if we drastically reduce price of energy (no real jet fuel alternatives anytime soon) and build a ton of new airports with low regulation / low overhead costs.
- jmward01 2y agoRuts are there because everywhere you look is worse than where you are at, but that just appears to be true because you are in, well, a rut. I can think of a few ways aviation could break out of its rut. I originally thought the aviation rut would break because of autonomous or near autonomous aircraft enabling safe and more efficient small aircraft. That would have led to cheaper more personal travel and broken the hub and spoke nightmare system we have now. We would have gotten into a whole new optimal for aviation. The rut was too large though and getting to that level of automation isn't happening any time soon without some other massive change. I now think the thing that will do it is electric. Batteries are getting so much better along with electric motors and soon (a few years?) batteries will outpace JET-A enabling a massive shift to smaller, cheaper aviation. I think this push will be so strong that it will finally break the aviation rut. Whatever the eventual reason, and there will be a reason, when we get out of it we will see radical changes to the whole industry and we will look back, just like the space industry is now, and ask 'why did it take so long' and 'how did we do things so slowly/badly?'. Here is a quick aside about ruts. I almost wrote up the math of this once. Ruts are caused by the algorithm we all use, linear regression. It is powerful and good at what it does. Assess, step, assess step. So simple and so powerful but totally misunderstood. In a fixed world if you throw a dart and use linear regression to find a better optimum you will almost always find a way better place than where the dart initially landed. But we don't live in a fixed world. In a dynamic world you still think you are selecting for optimality, but in reality you are selecting for stability. If the world keeps changing but where you are at is standing still then you are in a rut, a stable point. A rut is a local optimum where the walls are higher than your assessment vision and those walls, for whatever reason, don't get lower than your point even though the world is changing. If they did you would see the route out and take it. An algorithm to bust out of this is to double your step size every time you go back to your starting point. If you do this then eventually you will 'break out' and finally be able to find a new optimum that is likely way better than where you were at before. An interesting counter-intuitive consequence of all this is that the more visionary the industry, the bigger the eventual rut it will get caught in. Aviation, space, medicine have all been in massive ruts -because- the people in them are so smart and can see so far. When they finally got caught in their ruts those ruts were massive. The break out will be equally massive too (as we are seeing with space right now) There is a lot of fun math behind ruts. I am surprised by how underdeveloped it is. One thing is sure though, aviation is in a deep one and when it does break out it will be amazing.
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- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoAnd it's even worse (in terms of lack of alternatives) than the headline suggests: The next two entities visible on the chart are the Chinese and Russian space agencies. Sanctions likely mean that most Western companies can't access at least the Russian capacity. If you're looking at at least marginally Western-aligned or neutral countries, you have a Japanese and Indian company with ~1% of SpaceX's launch mass each, and everything after that, including ULA, is so small it's only visible on the inset zoom-in chart (together less than 1% of the entire mass).
- TheAlchemist 2y agoAn important data point - something like 60% of that number comes not from customers, but from their own Starlink.
- delichon 2y agoWhich has 3 million customers in 99 countries. Starlink is their retail department.