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Exciting times. By mid-next-year spacex might make space travel an order of magnitude cheaper ($60mio vs $200k, aka launch vehicle cost vs fuel cost). It will l

• ceejayoz 14y ago
  It won't be just fuel cost - personnel, recertifying/rehabbing the reusable equipment, etc. Cheaper, but likely not $200k by a long shot.
  • ricw 14y ago
    Of course not. But those are the primary costs of launch. Coming to think of it, fuel costs are probably smaller than dev and personnel costs. Nonetheless, it'll be a magnitude smaller than current launch prices. A typical series A round should allow startups to launch their own vehicles which is currently completely out of reach..
    • zacharycohn 14y ago
      Fuel is only something like 2 or 3% of the cost of a typical launch.
      • gbhn 14y ago
        I think that's the OPs point -- recoverable gear could potentially make fuel a limiting factor. (Although I don't know if this is realistic: there must be a lot of personell and equipment involved with refitting and firing a rocket into orbit, even if the rocket itself is free.)
• Retric 14y ago
  There are limits to how much stuff you can put into space and many of the more useful orbits are getting fairly saturated. However, cost is what prevents people from using most orbits so there is a lot of room up there.
  • jessriedel 14y ago
    First, the spatial safety margins given to satellites don't really depend on the volume of the craft, so enabling much cheaper per-kg-to-LEO can greatly increase the amount of stuff up there in the same number of crafts. Second, I'm sure there are all sorts of clever ways to dramatically increase what we can fit up there if it were useful. Cheaper lift costs make it both cheaper and more valuable to clear space junk, etc. The amount of raw space up there is massive, something like millions of cubic miles per satellite. (Surface area of Earth is 200 million square miles, times an easily accessible LEO altitude range between 120 and 170 miles, gives 1 million cubic miles for each of the 8000 satellites, operational or otherwise, currently in orbit.)
    • Retric 14y ago
      It's not just the satilite's you need to worry about try and put 10x the crap into orbit and suddenly the 300,000 pieces smaller than 1 cm below 2000 km altitude becomes 3 million. (It's paint flakes etc.) Which dramatically increases the amount of shielding required to survive the sand blasting and further increasing tiny junk up there and eventually the required shielding may become untenable. Now, at some point clearing space junk is going to be worthwhile, but I think we are still a long way from that point.
      • jessriedel 14y ago
        Thanks. My understanding is that the amount of space junk produced per satellite launched is purposefully much lower now than in the past.
  • arjunnarayan 14y ago
    If the safety margin doesn't depend on the size of the craft, I could conceivably see a single platform host a hundred modules from various different startups. So you'd only have one "satellite" in LEO, but it would have a hundred module slots rented out. You'd just have to pay to raise your module up to LEO and hooked up to it, for a 3 year lease, or something of that sort. That's probably a startup idea in itself. The whole selling shovels in a gold rush, etc.