It's kind of funny that we are on the verge of having too much launch capacity. Right now, SpaceX fills their launch schedule with Starlink satellites, as nobody can produce satellites for launch fast enough to fill their launch vehicles at the cadence they can be operated. And that's only for Falcon. Starship, if it works, will give us so much launch capacity that we'll be unable to fully utilize a handful of vehicles for more than a decade.
Every satellite today is at the end of a long production chain with lots of bottlenecks, finding funding for launch being only one of them. We'll need assembly lines of them to feed this rocket.
Launch capacity as a whole was never really a big bottleneck and is also driven by demand and supply. But even cutting down cost didn’t really meaningfully increase demand, as Falcon showed.
SpaceX is already in the spot they cannot utilize Falcon capacity - if you look at their earlier plans, they were expecting to lunch them more than once per week long time ago. Instead, even with a bulk of their launches being internal ones, they are still way below that goal.
Assuming Starship can deliver on their design goals, we’ll see if another price cut will actually drive up the demand.
It's also likely that lowering launch cost does (and already has) increased demand. But the timescales are large. It took SpaceX less time to make a reusable rocket than it will take the industry to pivot to more and cheaper launches.
But it is starting to have an affect already. There are multiple companies talking about launching and maintaining satellite "constellations", not just Starlink. Launching and maintaining that kind of network is difficult if you can only launch once a year and it costs what launches cost 10 years ago.
Starlink is the only thing that will keep SpaceX from imploding while they wait for people to understand their value.
Needing, and bankrolling, several hundred launches over several years will gradually get people used to the idea of bulk freight to orbit, and some will find other plausible uses for the capability, and shepherd the idea through fundraising channels. It will take time.
I am curious how long it will take the currently low volume and high margin satellite production industry to re-align to the new paradigm which requires higher volumes and lower margins.
I could see the incumbents being very reticent to do so.
It’s not the new paradigm which requires higher volumes and lower margins, it’s SpaceX’s business model which requires it (or, I suppose, expects it)
It is possible that there is a cap in how much stuff people want to put into space.
(EDIT: I do think it’s possible for SpaceX to exist as an entity that is simply smaller and not wasting its time trying to make its CEO Baron Harkonnen , but hey corporate ownership law amirite?)
Am I alone in thinking that the Earth is finite and humanity has already outgrown it? We need to start making use of resources in space, because if we don't the ecological consequences are dire. Space doesn't have a biosphere. We need to take all the terrible things we're doing to this biosphere and move them out. There is no other long term solution. The needs of humanity will only continue to grow, even if our population levels off.
I very much get the picture that New Space has an if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach which is soon facing a reckoning. It is very important that the whole of society pivots their thinking to the only thing that will give Earth a long-term future.
> It’s not the new paradigm which requires higher volumes and lower margins, it’s SpaceX’s business model which requires it (or, I suppose, expects it)
I used the wrong word there. I was thinking more in terms of: SpaceX enables higher volumes, etc..
I know it's not a perfect analogy but cheap and predictable global shipping enabled business models which were not possible before.
Maybe cheap and predictable access to space will do the same.
Any company that wishes to compete with Starlink needs to be careful of costs. One reason OneWeb ran out of money is that they ended up spending 2X/satellite than their plan, in their fancy high volume factory.
Incumbents are governments, and government's favorite thing to do is increase economic output so as to increase tax revenue among other things, so I'd expect governments to find way to incentivize launches.
As far as how long it will take, it didn't take long for a single company to revolutionize the industry, I expect that those that want to keep up will fill the gap. It's honestly probably going to be mostly new names, some of which we have not heard of yet.
Eh...SpaceX has investors knocking down doors trying to throw money at them, even before starlink was announced. They'd be fine without starlink, though I am excited for orbital internet.
Investors is one thing, customers another. It is possible customers will appear, but most uses don't seem to need many launches.
Even a really big telescope doesn't seem to need more than 50 launches, $2.5B. A moonbase needs fuel depot runs in the tens per year, and the occasional crew exchange, all under $1B/y.
Starlink is much bigger than that. It isn’t life support. It’s the ultimate cash cow, profits from which are in at least some part expected to fund some part of a Mars mission. This is why SpaceX isn’t public - your wall street shareholders would suffocate Musk with lawsuits before he would be able to finish saying ‘Martian mission’.
Agreed that Starlink will be a huge cash cow, anyway until competition surfaces. $60B ARR?
At issue is whether and when their planned launch capacity ever finds other customers. Once all 30k birds are up, will there be other uses for the launchers, besides going to Mars? Do they need more than a dozen or two, for the job?
Starlink's orbit is so low, especially the large constellation, that it requires almost constant replenishment of birds due to extremely fast decay (order of 1-2 years of useful service life?)
So yeah, if they ever launch the whole 30k, they'll be flying quite often; the first replenishment will likely happen before the constellation is complete if the start slow.
If someone made having my mouth professionally cleaned more convenient, I would change the schedule to every 3 months instead of every six.
We can anticipate some businesses would benefit from having low-cost access to microgravity environments - right now you carefully select your experiments, because it's extremely costly, but, if it weren't, you wouldn't need to.
While satellite/probe/crewed-craft building has an extensive industrial chain with multiple bottlenecks that would hold it back if launch costs plumeted, there are others that have few and that would be enabled.
We'd probably need a lot of barriers so that people don't launch cubesats for $100 in volumes that make LEO dangerous.
And if someone had self-cleaning easier, you wouldn't be going in for cleaning at all.
Nobody cares about satellites themselves. What they care about is using them for something useful. Communication and imaging. At some point, both markets will become saturated.
I don't know what level of demand there is for them, but it's entirely conceivable that it will be long-term limited by something other than launch costs.
> Launch capacity as a whole was never really a big bottleneck and is also driven by demand and supply. But even cutting down cost didn’t really meaningfully increase demand, as Falcon showed.
I disagree. The excess payload and cheapness of Falcon 9 created a huge market for smallsats and microsats as secondary payloads. If you look at the _number_ (not mass) of operational payloads since Falcon 9 has come online, the numbers have been shooting up dramatically (and that is excluding Starlink). There's been a 5-fold increase in the number of smaller satellites being launched (excluding Starlink) since the last decade.
I think you argument hinges on the fact that demand shows up immediately after the price is cut. That would require there is a backlog of payloads which are just waiting for the price to be low enough. That is obviously not true, I believe lower prices are dramatically accelerating the demand as evidenced by space sector investment (1), but the demand curve is lagging because building space vehicles is hard.
...mostly because reliability must be so high and launching mass costs so much. If you can launch mass cheaply, and accept lower reliability, space vehicles should be much easier to build.
> That would require there is a backlog of payloads which are just waiting for the price to be low enough.
Not only that, but they'd need to integrate with Starship and, right now, we aren't even sure which way the payload needs to go once the target orbit is achieved (it looks like it's sideways, while every other launcher releases the payload forward).
But isn't it SpaceX plan for getting to Mars to require something like 35 Starship sized lifts to get all of the supplies needed for one trip to Mars? Sounds like builtin needs for launch right there. Wasn't this "I can't get to space on my own so I'll sue everyone that can" Bezo's main critique in one of their attempts to make fun of SpaceX?
But who'll be paying for that trip? Does NASA have enough astronauts to crew a Mars base in addition to a Moon base? What private companies would want to do with Mars that can't be done on Earth? I'm all in for astronaut selection to be less rigorous (since I wasn't flying supersonic jets and earning a PhD when I was 18 - seriously, the bar is waaaaay too high) and would be delighted to be able to work that remotely, but I'd expect to be paid to go and have a return ticket already paid for.
How does it become profitable though? Maybe Musk can fund it as a very expensive pet project, but if the Mars base doesn't produce anything that can't be gotten more cheaply closer to Earth, the money must run out at some point.
I've been doing a compare&contrast to SpaceX colonies on Mars vs 15th century colonies to the new world.
Travel time to "home" seems close enough in terms of months long voyages. Haven't decided which journey is the more treacherous option.
The 15th century colonists came to a place that was resource rich in whatever a colony could need: food, water, building material, etc. Martian colonists will not have that luxury.
New world colonists faced an indigenous poplulation that Martian colonists won't have. Probably a good thing, as the examples provided by the new world colonists on how to interact with indeginous people does not bode well (at least for those who continued to follow).
Communication time back to home is actually in the Martian colonist's favor. As is the fact the area will have been surveyed quite exetensively in advance of arrival, so preparations can be better made with that knowledge. Full detailed maps will be available as well. This will help finding more barren wasteland even easier than just wandering around looking for barren wasetland. Effeciency will be key with the constrained resources.
> The 15th century colonists came to a place that was resource rich in whatever a colony could need: food, water, building material, etc. Martian colonists will not have that luxury.
But this is the key point: there were plenty of desirable things in the Americas. There is absolutely nothing of any value whatsoever on Mars that can't be found much, much more easily on Earth.
The adventure and freedom to shape a new society (relatively) free from historical constraints might be valuable in itself for some people. I might be interested, but the quality of life and size of closed system habitats would need to improve by a large factor compared to what exists currently.
That's anti-value: it is much harder to live in ungoverned land than decently governed land. If you're fleeing North Korea, you'll flee to China or South Korea, not to an anarchy.
Once the powers that be regarding the colonists realized ownership issues were going to be had with the indigenous population, those relationships didn't go so well though. that's what I meant by those who followed. "Hi, here's a lovely friendship blanket" doesn't speak well for relationships with those indigenous people.
I’m not sure what the intersection is of people (1) rich enough to do this, (2) willing to slum it in a tin can where none of the wealth they’ve accumulated thus far would even let them retire because the entire economy has to be constructed ex nihilo first, (3) have nobody binding them to Earth, either because they don’t exist or because they came with them to Mars, (4) is not too anti-social to function despite #3.
Don’t get me wrong, when Musk first announced this I was very interested, and could just about afford the target price. But then I tried a much more minor relocation — Cambridge to Berlin — and found myself much lonlier than I’d been primed to expect by my experience moving to Cambridge in the first place after I graduated.
It might be fine, I just wouldn’t assume that now.
The uber rich person doesn't necessarily have to be one that goes. It just so happens this one wants to. Some uber rich person could see it as just another way to generate money, so funds the endeavor while spending those earnings on terrafirma.
Depending on cost, Starship could fund itself purely off space tourism. Numbers as low as $100 per kg to LEO are flying about.
If SpaceX hit something like that, we enter a whole different paradigm because a trip in relative comfort to orbit becomes comparable to middle class holiday prices.
If you can send an average person to orbit for the price of a trip to Disneyland, your launch demand functionally becomes infinite. This would become the thing to do for so many people.
It's sort of like CPU manufacturing: making a CPU is a peak technology, multi billion dollar undertaking - but because we can sell the things for like $250, everyone on the planet now has one.
Space access may go the same way if SpaceX get anywhere near those lower numbers. Blue Origin did one interesting thing recently, and that was launching William Shatner suborbital - if you can send a 90 year old, you can send anyone.
Building the official hotel would become the next obvious thing, complete with spin gravity. It would be a while new dimension.
A $300 billion trust fund with 5% inflation-adjusted returns gives you $15 billion per year indefinitely. At $1.5 million per launch, that’s 10,000 Starship launches per year just out of the trust fund. About 1 Megaton IMLEO indefinitely. Anything else, like servicing a permanent NASA and international base on Mars or the Moon or Starlink or whathaveyou would be on top of that.
One way it becomes profitable: paying colonists for research.
There are plenty of people here here who could benefit, possibly even financially, from research there. Paying what is essentially a monopoly on research capability on mars would be one avenue of profitability for the project.
Also think about this: once there's a profitable economy there of some kind, you'll get all sorts of capital interplay that doesn't actually need physical financial instruments to make happen, only networking.
This is the biggest issue with Musk's Mars colonization plans right now. He seems to be taking the approach of "build it and they will come" with his efforts to bring down the cost of getting payload to orbit (and thus the cost of interplanetary transportation), however even if he succeeds at that goal I don't really see how that's going to result in a self-sustaining city on Mars.
We've had the technology to colonize Antarctica pretty cheaply for quite some time now. I don't see any self sustaining cities there; just small research bases. Why should Mars be different?
Musk talks frequently about a self-sustaining Martian city becoming a "backup for humanity" in the case of some global extinction-level event (Asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc), which is all well and good. But who's going to pay for it? In order for Mars colonization to actually happen, it needs to be not only affordable, but profitable!
To what end? "We should colonize Mars because then we could go to Europa more easily" just kinda begs the question; what economic incentive exists for going to Europa?
It's like saying we should colonize Antarctica because then we'd learn things that would make it easier to colonize the North Pole. Doesn't really answer the question.
At the end of the day, space is what's next. Humans are explorers. We left the safety of the cave, we built ships to cross the vastness of the oceans. We're now building ships to cross the small section of the vastness of space we can.
So far, it's private money moving that direction. It's not tax dollars. If some uber rich asshole wants to spend his money on this, so be it. It's his money. If it doesn't work out, okay, we learn from it. But not going is just not going to happen. It's part of the human experience to ask "what's next" and then do it. Less adventurous can sit at home. The meek shall inherit the earth, the bold are going to space!
By all means; spend your money however you want, but a few billionaires using their personal wealth to fund Mars colonization efforts "just because" isn't going to be nearly enough to build a self-sustaining city there. Musk is talking about sending hundreds of Megatons to orbit every year, for the foreseeable future[1]. He wants an armada of one thousand Starships departing for Mars every 26 months[2]. That's what it would take to build a self-sustaining city on Mars, and it's a multi-trillion dollar effort; not the sort of thing that can be funded by a few wealthy donors.
The only way I can see large-scale Mars colonization happening is if there's a strong economic incentive for that. It isn't going to happen just because a few people want it to, or think it's the "next step for humanity".
In theory Mars can put stuff in orbit for a much lower cost than Earth can. The delta v is so much lower that you could supply Earth orbit from Mars with less fuel than launching from Earth.
Great, here's some more Martian rocks for space. We don't have a lot of variety here on Mars, but what we do have, we've got plenty of it. We got some red rocks, some slightly less red rocks, we got some red dust, we got some red sand. Is that what we really want to launch into orbit?
Mars has water (probably, or there won’t be any colonies), and CO2. Water, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Methane, all of which there could be a demand for in orbit.
But according to GP, those rocks are really expensive to get off the ground, so, enjoy these nice Martian rocks instead. They're the generics to your name brand.
The difference isn't being stuck in a metal tube, it's being able to see space. See stars/constellations etc in person. On a sub you don't get to see anything. And I haven't heard much about the views from Antarctica.
But demand isn’t hyperelastic, is it? If anything, a quick reduction in price would reduce total revenue (and total profit even more) as demand wouldn’t immediately keep up. It takes time for mass demand to respond.
It seems unlikely that there were more payloads sitting around waiting to launch. If there were, then second stages (always expended), fairings (imperfectly reused), and weather/pad/ship operations are all possible limiting factors.
I think it's hard to say there isn't demand since it was so ridiculously expensive prior to SpaceX. Getting things into orbit at this price point is quite a new thing. In a recent post on this blog, he talked about how before SpaceX, even basic things headed into orbit had to be redesigned entirely to satisfy grueling mass requirements. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a few more years for people to realize that they're not subject to those restrictions anymore and to fully understand the import of that. (Indeed, the prior post I mentioned is called "Starship is Still Not Understood.)
We have always had too much launch capacity. You will notice that every program estimates prices based on how many launches occur a year, with the price going down the more launches there are. Large launch vehicles are less expensive per mass to orbit than small ones. There are huge economies of scale.
It isn't that SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity and so fills it with Starlink satellites. SpaceX has a lot of launch capacity because they're launching so many Starlink satellites. They only make large launch vehicles and they can only hit the prices they do if the launch regularly. If they stop manufacturing their own demand the price will rise precipitously.
SpaceX is currently subsidized by investor money. The steady state remains to be seen.
One of the reasons the Saturn V was discontinued was that there was no need for such a large vehicle. It was cheap per unit mass to orbit but there was not enough demand to justify it.
I am still utterly baffled by the way people are impressed by a reusable launch vehicle. This stuff is old hat. This person worked at NASA! They probably worked on systems that were launched on Shuttles!
I'm a bit baffled as to how you dont see how Falcon 9 and Starship are different to the shuttle. Much more re-usable, must faster turnaround. And hence much cheaper cost per kg to orbit. Granted that Starship might turn out to not work (Musk likes to gamble, thats what innovation _is_) but even Falcon 9 is reusable in a much more comprehensive way than the SLS ever was.
Henry Spencer at least helped to popularize the idea (if not invented the phrase himself), that Space Shuttle wasn't reusable, but rather refurbishable system. Both 1st stage boosters and 2nd stage engines had to go through detailed inspection and maintenance after each flight.
to be fair to them the idea is not new and shuttles could not have worked the way Space X rockets do, for that it requires sensors and computing power not available at the time.
Back then, there were no commercial entities designing and launching satellites. The first two Telstar comsats were basically international collaborative experiments between national-level telcos; Telstar didn't actually get under way with operational comsats until the 1980s. Similarly, Inmarsat, the maritime comsat company, was founded in 1979. The first GPS prototypes weren't launched until the 1970s, and the civilian use of GPS didn't take off until the late 1980s. And in the 1960s, the only people with Earth Resources Satellites were national-level spy agencies.
Short version: civilian space applications barely existed until 1-2 decades after the Saturn V was cancelled. The current efflorescence of communications, positioning, observation/meteorology, and broadcasting satellites were foreseeable and foreseen, but the entire manifest of commercial satellite payloads through 1990 could probably have fitted on top of a single Saturn V (although the need to deliver them to different orbits, over a 30 year period, would have made this a non-starter).
Finally, NASA had a program for Apollo science missions (from 1966 onwards), the Apollo Applications Program:
Only two AAP missions eventually flew -- Skylab (plus three crew launches aboard S-IB stacks, and a spare "lifeboat" stack), and the Apollo-Soyuz Mission (IIRC ASM used the "lifeboat" stack for the US flight). The proposed Venus fly-by was cancelled, the Saturn V launcher to carry the Viking Mars lander was cancelled, and so on.
Alternatively, we had a near-miss: given there was a solar maximum around 1972, the Venus flyby would probably have killed the crew (who would have died of radiation sickness weeks from Earth, live on TV). The Viking landers got to Mars and the Voyager probes launched atop Titan III-C anyway: the only real need for Saturn V was for crewed missions in the absence of something cheaper/better/more reusable. (Alas, the Shuttle turned out to be a white elephant with a couple of lethal design flaws.)
> Alternatively, we had a near-miss: given there was a solar maximum around 1972
I think that by the time they actually built flyable hardware for that mission, they'd learn to properly shield the crew. They could at least hide behind the propellant tanks.
Except that the 3rd stage would be empty by then :-(
BTW, it'd be a cool movie, even if a bit Apollo 13-like.
> Alas, the Shuttle turned out to be a white elephant with a couple of lethal design flaws
Indeed. The Shuttle shouldn't even called "reusable", but merely "fixable" or "rebuildable", if you got lucky.
In any case, I'd have loved more Skylab workshop launches and the AAP permanent lunar presence. The modules were huge compared to ISS ones. It was a tragic loss to have Skylab fall to Earth because they didn't have the money to build something to boost it up a little.
The Skylab reboost mission was originally targeted for 1981, IIRC; but it was going to fly as a Shuttle payload, and in the meantime, Skylab de-orbited a couple of years early (just as the Shuttle flew a couple of years later than planned) due to a poorly-understood phenomenon. (The ionosphere extends upwards when it gets hot due to a solar maximum/solar flares, which increased the drag on Skylab, which caused it to drop into a lower orbit ... positive feedback ensued).
Skylab wasn't great, but if it hadn't re-entered prematurely it could have been fixed up (new solar panels FTW!) and refurbed internally (methane scrubbers!) and used as a learning platform for a new space station, rather than the USA going nearly two decades without one.
If and when that happens I'll re-evaluate. I don't buy the SpaceX marketing about the Starship for a millisecond. (And I'm baffled why a government contractor that isn't publicly-traded is marketing to the public in the first place.)
Even without Starship it would make sense to switch from current model of unique single item satellite production to a library of standard cheap mass produced designs. Instead of one JWST that takes multiple billions and decades to complete, we can have 10 or 20 less capable satellites built on the same budget. Same logic could be applied to communication, weather, terrain mapping and other kinds of satellites.
> Instead of one JWST that takes multiple billions and decades to complete, we can have 10 or 20 less capable satellites built on the same budget
These 10 or 20 telescopes can be as capable as the JWST. And not only because they could just be manufactured copies of the original.
Remember the original budget for it was about 500M. A lot of the ballooning price was because they had extremely tight weight and size constraints (for example, the sunshide had to be insanely light, because almost all of the weight budget had already been allocated)
By using Starship, weight can absolve many sins...
> By using Starship, weight can absolve many sins...
This is one reason I always liked sportscars with small engines - it's much more fun when you have the same acceleration with a smaller car. There's also little subtlety in a 10 litre V-12...
On top of that there are many new small to medium launch vehicles in the pipeline.
Astra just made it to orbit a few days ago. Firefly almost did, and might very well do so on the next attempt. Relativity is supposed to launch next year. And then there is Blue Origin New Glenn , which also may (eventually...) be ready.
The launch market hasn't really grown much, despite Falcon 9 lowering the cost quite a bit. SpaceX gets a majority of revenue from government launches.
I wonder what will happen to all those new companies.
The production chains for aerospace are very long. It takes time to absorb extra capacity even if no other step in the chain were not constrained. We'd need more exoric alloys (or just use steel, weight be damned, as SpaceX is doing) and reinvent a lot of industries to be able to match that capacity to put stuff in orbit.
We'd also need to invent new uses for sattelites, things we don't do now because launching is too expensive. Their suborbital passenger transportation is one such new demand generators, but only if they can solve launching and landing near population centers.
Production chains would get a whole darn lot shorter if they didn't have to machine everything to spider thinness from exotic metals and build it to fold inside a thimble.
Trains huh? I'm pretty damn skeptical of that; those sort of semi-submersible platforms move around a whole lot more than your typical train station. Helicopters are the obvious choice, or ferries if you need a greater capacity. I'm more skeptical of trains to offshore platforms than Starship itself.
Regular helicopters make more sense to me. They're already used extensively with offshore platforms, so why invent the wheel? The jet fuel they burn is a pittance compared to the hydrocarbons being burned by the rockets. And they have a much better carrying capacity; a Sikorsky S-92 can carry 19 passengers in one trip. Electric helicopters could do what, two or three per trip? Maybe a few more with future battery tech, but I don't think conventional helicopters will be phased out anytime soon.
> They're already used extensively with offshore platforms, so why invent the wheel?
Because that's Tesla's business. Plus halo effect - you don't want to board a spaceship by flying on a helicopter designed 30 years ago.
Remember that battery weight scales linearly with number of passengers, so building a larger battery operated helicopter just needs more motors and batteries. We don't have large e-copters because it costs a lot of money to certify one for 20 passengers and, until now, there is very little demand for that.
Could use a high-speed hydrofoil too. Helicopters aren't the safest mode of transportation, and are horrible in bad weather that a boat would brush off with ease. Plus if we're sending 100 people on a flight, that's quite a few large helicopters plus landing facilities.
Absolutely, a high speed ferry could have great throughput; it seems like a great choice if they're going to put a few dozen or more people onto one of these rockets.
Hasn't "too much capacity" existed since the moon missions? It was too expensive , but most other missions did not need those huge rockets. It wasn't utilized either. Remains to be seen if spaceX's capacity will be utilized.
It was huge capacity, but at a higher cost, so you try to get your payload to fit on the cheapest rocket you can.
Starship turns everything upside down and, suddenly, makes the cheapest rocket a Saturn-V class heavy booster. With it, it's cheaper to add a huge kick stage to your Neptune probe to make it get there faster, put more solar panels so you don't need to deal with compliance around an RTG, or just use steel for structural elements (because why not?), and so on.
The question is price. If capacity is cheap, then you don't need to fill it with a billion dollar sat to justify the launch. We can start sending cheaper things to space, such as product/medical design labs to fill the cargo bay.
The real bottleneck is the US governments regulatory requirements for entry to the space launch industry.
If it were easier - say, if Starships were locally available within all the other states on Earth - then we'd be witnessing a massive move to space. This may yet come, but its not going to happen at the magnitude we'd all like, for as long as the US Government is gate-keeping things.
Let's maybe see the magic rocket fly first, at the promised cost to orbit. Musk enjoys making promises about doing stuff at huge scale and fractional cost.
The entire article seems to hinge on taking all of Starship's promises for granted (not just the ridiculously low cost to orbit, but also in-space refueling and other sci-fi ideas!). I think skepticism on this very premise is more than warranted, as you're also saying. The ampunt of people who just want to believe is almost astonishing.
I don't disagree that skepticism may be warranted, but I think that people are also willing to believe in SpaceX's ability to solve hard problems, given their track record.
As far as I can tell and have heard other people much smarter than me say, there's no real physics-level barrier to any of Starship's goals. There's plenty of tough, tough engineering problems to solve, but it doesn't require unobtanium in order to work.
SpaceX has already pulled off landing an orbital-class first stage (not to discount the prior work in the form of DC-X and others, but they weren't orbital), and they've gotten to the point where they can refly those stages many times in relatively quick succession. Seems reasonable to believe that they can figure out Starship, even if it may not be in the exact form or on the exact timescale that they want.
It's important to distinguish engineering promises (where SpaceX has a great track record) and economic promises, where Musk just applies the same algorithm over and over (promise 10x performance for 1/100 the cost). I don't doubt SpaceX's ability to build an amazing rocket, but I wish there were more realism about the claimed costs of mass to orbit. See hyperloop, cheap tunnels, electric cars, batteries, you name it.
The SpaceX business team is worlds above the business team (if there even is a business team) for any of Musk's random ideas. He may be making up all of the estimates himself, but unlike the other examples he might not be.
NASA has invested more than SpaceX in the Space Launch System (think $20B plus in spending). This will be a rocket that is disposable, every launch it lands in the ocean, all work lost. Estimated per launch costs and sustaining costs for all the facilities involved run about $2B-$3B - NASA isn't saying actually.
Anways, once things are head to head we will get to see if Musks promise of cheaper access to space vs the rocket with tons more money invested pans out.
Facility List for SLS by the way to give you just a sense of the cost base Musk is competing against.
Booster Fabrication Facility (BFF) - 45-acre site at KSC used to refurbish, manufacture, and assemble the
aft skirt assembly and forward assembly for the SLS boosters. Includes the Multi-Purpose Logistic Facility
used to receive, inspect and store shipped flight hardware.
Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) - Large (456 ft H max) vertical rocket integration facility. Floor load
capacity of 12 million lbs, cranes located throughout building. Handling and storage of hazardous/
nonhazardous commodities.
Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) - The Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) was built in
1986. It is a Level 4, class 100,000 clean room that can be used as a Payload Processing Facility (PPF)
and/or a Hazardous Processing Facility (HPF).
Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) – 832 acre production complex located in New Orleans. MAF is one of
the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres (174,000 m2)
under one roof. Includes two Vertical Assembly Buildings. Current site of the majority of core stage
manufacturing and assembly and planned location for EUS manufacture and assembly.
Systems Integration Lab (SIL) - The Systems Integration Lab (SIL) supports end-to-end integrated avionics
and software integration, check-out, verification, and validation. It demonstrates real-time flight control
of a launch vehicle, such as SLS, during ascent. This lab at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Alabama, not only includes the flight computers and avionics identical to the core stage
avionics but also includes emulators for the rocket’s boosters and engines, the Launch Control Center
and Orion.
Systems Integrated Test Facility (SITF) - The Software Integration and Test Facility (SITF) at MSFC on
Redstone Arsenal integrates and tests software specifically for the SLS Core/Upper Stage avionics
system.
Software Development Facility (SDF) - This Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 3 certified facility at
MSFC performs a complete range of flight software activities from requirements development and
analysis, software processes and planning, design and development, to systems integration and
development testing. Products developed at the SDF are installed and tested at MSFC’s SITF.
Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) – At MSFC on Redstone Arsenal, the HOSC is capable of
distributing secure mission voice, video and data anywhere in the world. Includes Engineering Support
SLS Engineering Support Center (SESC) - Engineering Support Center (SESC). Certification runs for
contingencies are performed by engineers responsible for the major elements of the SLS. Located in the
HOSC, the SESC leverages remote architecture built for the ISS Payload Operations Center to allow
engineers to focus on the engines, boosters, and stages of the SLS during testing and launch.
Advanced Manufacturing and Weld Facility – Located in MSFC’s Building 4755 on Redstone Arsenal, this
friction stir welding facility uses advanced robotic tooling to weld barrel or dome segments up to 33 feet
in diameter.
MSFC Flowrate and Structural Test Stands –Located at MSFC on Redstone Arsenal, designed to push, pull
and apply pressure loads to SLS cryogenic tanks. Cutting-edge technology is also adaptable for future
large-scale rockets and systems. Testing and data can be safely monitored from a control room via fiber
optic cables.
Stennis Space Center – Multiple propulsion testing facilities for components, engines and stages located
near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Facilities include the B-2 test stand used for the SLS core stage green run.
Formerly used for Saturn V and Space Shuttle testing, this stand is equipped with a 195-ton (US), main
derrick, lifting crane, with a 20-ton jib crane and is capable of static-firing test articles up to 33 ft in
diameter.
The thing is though, Starship is so radical that even if it only delivers on some of its promises (I think it will fly in one form or another), it’s going to be a game changer.
So for example if it’s not as cheap as expected, it’s still huge that it can deliver volumes larger than the interior of the ISS to orbit in a single launch — that alone means much less of a need to resort to exotic materials and expensive engineering to cut down on weight and volume on projects like the James Webb Space Telescope. It could also have huge implications for which types of orbital stations it’s practical to build.
The previous article in the series (linked at the top of the article) discusses this. The author discusses the track record and suggests that while the system is not proven yet, there is a good chance it will succeed.
SpaceX has a good track record of success with their rockets and with this project in particular. They seem to have the skills and backing to make it work, and they aren't discouraged by setbacks. Of course it is not guaranteed to succeed, but it seemed clear to me that the point of this article was to explore what could be done with starship if it does succeed.
I don't follow at all closely, but my impression of SpaceX's track record vs. Musk promises is that they're usually late but usually get there in the end, in functional terms if not in exact approach. Is that wrong?
My take is, they tackle problems whose difficulty is increasing exponentially. Making a rocket that flies, from scratch, is X% harder than building one that already exist. Making it land again, X%. Reusing it, X%. I'm also skipping intermediate points here - like about the engines have a particular closed-loop design that is more fuel efficient.
Starship seems to, again, require a few of these X% improvements. And the thing about exponential growth, as Covid kindly reminded us, is that eventually it is overwhelming.
So I don't think you can simply extrapolate from "they have a good track record of solving hard problems", because the problems they tackle are getting harder and harder.
Well, extrapolation is always poorly justified in the first place. Extrapolation where problems get exponentially harder is just speculation IMO.
I wish them well, but I'm tired of all these blogs writing about Starship as if it's a done thing, to the point of writing about delivery costs. It might happen, it might not.
Is there something particularly far fetched about in orbit refueling? In-orbit docking and pressure equalization is a long solved problem. Is there something I don't know about?
For any liquid in microgravity the name of the game is ullage. Gasses will self-equalise, but liquids clump together and stubbornly refuse to move the way you want them to.
The typical solution, which is in the context of relighting a liquid fueled rocket that is coasting in microgravity, is to use some other engine to push the fuel in one direction, providing enough initial ullage to light the main engine after which the thrust from the main engine provides the rest.
For refueling it is normally assumed that the target and resupplier are stationary when docked, or at least not accelerating to their next set of orbital parameters; they are station-keeping. The typical solution doesn't work there, so there is research to be done on just how the refueling will work in practice.
> I know dozens of astronomers who would donate half their meager salaries in perpetuity so they didn’t have to endure That Guy dragging Jill Tarter and insisting that it was an alien artifact, ever again.
This sounds mind-blowing, except that current public sentiment seems strongly against space exploration and that may catch up with budgets.
Even though SpaceX does the launches, it is government agencies that deal with launching missions, and government budgets are influenced by public opinion.
I would caution against giving to much credit to social media / leftist politicians railing against spending money on space when we can use the money on earth. These people have a loud platform but I don't think most people agree with them. Similar to how so many loud 'woke' people make you think democrats are all focused on forcing workspace equality no matter the cost or anti cop. Social media and indeed traditional media (both for and against) looking for clicks has spotlighted these people but their influence is limited amongst the majority. I think most people are excited about space and mars and all for it, understanding that creating a base on mars or the moon is a completely unrelated thing to fixing global warming here on earth. I say this as someone that votes democrat.
I’m not sure why you think current public opinion is opposed to space exploration? It’s definitely opposed to space tourism for the rich, but that’s a separate thing.
There's a strong anti Mars settlement sentiment going on, not just anti "space tourism". The idea, which I don't really subscribe to in this context, that we should utilize whatever resources we assign to space towards fighting climate change and fixing problems here on Earth.
Trying to live underground on a dead planet might just prove that we need Earth. Lots of people say space tourism is silly and then go gas up their car while complaining that Teslas are how the coastal elites will take their retirement.
To add on, I think there’s a lot of value to be had in the various science that can only be done with boots on the ground on Mars. The rovers have been great don’t get me wrong, but a team of scientists with a Starship full of equipment can do volumes more research in a couple of weeks than a rover can during its entire mission, including things that weren’t originally planned.
What we learn there can be helpful for understanding the history of the solar system as well as planetary dynamics (remember that in terms of well-studied planets, we’re currently at sample size = 1).
How fast do we actually need to learn about Mars? How far are we willing to go, how much are we willing to spend just to speed things up there?
We don’t live in the 1950s or the 1890s any more. We are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our explorers like we did when we went to the moon or Antarctica in the 1960s and 1900s respectively. We are not engaging in juvenile races to “get there first” which is both expensive and dangerous.
The space exploration of today is more collaborative and careful then the explorations of the past. So we don’t risk the lives of our explorers nor the unnecessary expenses of getting things done 20 years when we can do it in 50 for far less money and with infinity more safety.
It’s difficult to answer that question with any level of certainty. That said, there’s a line of thinking that we should do these things while we still can, because there’s no guarantee that we’ll continue to be able to do them. I tend to agree with that.
So it’s not about trying to race and and get there first, but rather making sure that the opportunity doesn’t pass us by.
As far as cost goes… these sorts of missions are expensive relative to the amounts of money most of us work with in a regular basis, but compared to the vast sums that get put toward far more questionable and frivolous uses it’s a drop in the bucket. If saving money or rerouting funds to more deserving causes is a goal, there’s several tens of bushels of lower hanging fruit elsewhere that should be looked at first — anything with scientific purpose should be trimmed last.
The 2 Rovers from the last 2000s cost about a billion dollars.
If we can get someone to moon for $2.9 billion (contract that spacex just won), I think that's worth it.
This completely ignores the political aspects. Once China makes significant progress towards landing on the Moon, the US will definitely ramp up as fast as possible. Nationalism is a virus that's undefeated...
Just to put it out there: An individual car owner is insignificant when talking about climate change. This is regardless of how the car is powered. A Tesla owner that owns stock in Shell and votes conservative is much more problematic then a non-voting F-150 owner that works paycheck to paycheck. However both of them are insignificant next to the Shell board of directors or the US government who bear the real responsibility here in prolonging climate inaction.
This is all just to say. A non-voting F-150 owner who talks shit about rich people going to space is actually not doing any damage while filling up his truck, next to that rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope in a singe space visit for his own amusement.
>”…that rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope in a singe space visit for his own amusement.”
None of the space tourists so far have been particularly known for their conservative politics. Nor do I find space tourism to be some lauded thing in conservative circles.
I’m basically just shifting the responsibility from the consumer to the people with the power to influence said consumption. This is basically just extending the logic of “If everyone is making the same mistake, blaming every individual is futile. Perhaps the system should be altered in such a way which makes it harder for people to make this mistake in the first place”.
So to answer your question: “How rich”: Rich enough to own significant stock in polluting corporations.
I think mars settlement is an eventuality, someone will be there. I also think that settlement of mars has a huge first mover advantage, maybe unlike anything else in human history. It may even come before that with the first permanent lunar base and launch platform.
Anyone that has seen Blade Runner and the news should see that as a concern.
The rich would spoil Earth and defile it and then move off to the ultimate gated community of Mars, leaving us to deal with the consequences of their actions.
This has always been a bad idea based of unrealistic science fiction.
Mars is the spoiled planet, and will be until some point technology is a lot further along. The rich are not going to run away to some wonderland. Earth is the garden, and nothing else is like it in space.
Yep. The list of things that could make Earth a worse place to live than Mars is very short. A big enough asteroid to liquefy the entire crust would do it, for a while. A "mere" dinosaur-killer wouldn't be enough. Nor would nuclear war. Most of the rest of the options are still sci-fi, like Grey Goo events, or a very contagious very deadly infectious disease (and that would have to have some way of sticking around for a long time, for an orbital habitat or sealed earthbound habitat not to still be better than Mars, since you could get back more easily once it was gone or we had a way to fight it).
Otherwise you've gotta start stacking disasters to get close, and even then it's pretty difficult. Mars is really bad.
Just look at decadence in rather inhospitable environments on earth... Let's take Dupai or some deserts in USA with golf courses. No way whole Earth will get worse than that. And basically we already have luxury lifes in such places, air conditioned malls, apartments, cars. Over use of water to water lawns...
Also, it is not like you couldn't vastly more cheaply and easily build Mars bunker on Earth. As we are centuries away from planet scale geo-engineering.
Agreed, I think another thing missed by so many is that if we can settle mars that same technology can be used here on earth to make inhospitable parts of the planet usable again should we mess it up badly enough.
Yes I know that. But do THEY know that? I’m not so sure. Elon/Bezos seem to think you can hand wave/buy the radiation away like they do their problems on earth. Maybe with absolutely massive amounts of money they could find a way. And we would be the ones footing the bill for that.
It is a fact that we could launch light sails, and even heat up Mars a bit. The idea might be silly, but at least it is thinking big. Some other big idea will be better, including several of those listed after the light-sails bit.
The earth-sized radio telescope made out of Starlink transceivers is an obvious winner. Total coverage ground radar using the transceiver antenna is another.
>>> public opinion is opposed to space exploration
It's always been true ;)
If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!
I don’t really think that’s the case - it’s more nuanced. Most Americans are pro space exploration [1], but against manned missions and colonization efforts [2]. I have a strong feeling most people are probably also against boondoggle projects like SLS and seemingly-constant massive cost overruns on things like JWST.
This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesn’t make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons.
> Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant.
When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed.
Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.
I honestly don’t understand why public opinion matters so much for space exploration while the military budget is not held to the same standard.
Honestly though several really nice space exploration projects have been well founded by several governments (including India, China, Europe and North America). Some really silly projects have also been privately funded (e.g. space tourism for the rich). People are rightly questioning how people get so insanely rich that they can afford this. They ask if they are paying their fair share of taxes, if they pay their workers fairly, and which contracts the government have offered them.
If you separate those two classes of space projects I bet you would find way more support for the former (or at least some indifference) while you would find that people vehemently oppose the latter.
If you put it to a vote, majority of Americans will allocate public funds towards stimulus cheques and not the military.... what majority of Americans would allocate funds towards is not necessarily the thing that gets done.
But doesn't Starship dramatically reduce budget needs for exploration? The whole point of the essay series is to try to get institutions and researchers thinking about the economics of exploration with a steady cadence of reusable Starship launches.
Oh I get the purpose of the article and it got ME excited. However, I'm concerned about other voices which may speak out against it in the context of my original reply.
It'd be interesting to follow this thread and see if this sentiment can be heard here.
A human in ONE day can explore more than a rover in a year.
There's no comparing the amount of research which can be done by a teleoperated rover to what can be done by a real human on-site.
As a comparison, Opportunity rover covered 45.16 km in 15 years. The Apollo 17 crew covered 35.74 kilometers in 3 days.
A human can also mine and bring back valuable stuff. Initially rock samples for testing. Eventually minerals (asteroid mining comes to mind). Space exploration does not pay for itself commercially at this point. Maybe that's one more thing Musk can change.
A rover can do that too. In fact, Perseverance already has the ability to collect samples and prepare them for a future pick-up mission.
It is just that we are not found of sending people and letting them die there, so a human mission implies a return mission, and if there is a return mission, of course you want to bring back souvenirs.
In fact, a sample return mission can be seen as a step towards a manned mission. First you try to bring back a pile of rocks, then you consider bringing back humans.
And yes, humans are far more efficient than robots at space exploration today, but robots keep improving, and I think it will take many years before we put people on Mars, so by the time we are ready for a manned Mars mission, we will probably have much better robots. Not as good as humans, but digging lots of rocks and moving faster than a snail will probably be well within their abilities.
Will anybody really ever come by to pick up Perseverence's samples?
That has struck me as really implausible. If it could carry the sample containers to wherever it fills them, it could carry them to wherever it ends up, too, and whatever is supposed to fetch them could make a single stop. Sending another lander just to sweep up after it seems massively wasteful.
Sending a lander to pick up the samples is worth it just for the technical aspect.
Making a successful return trip would be an important milestone, we never did anything close to that before. Yes, moon landings, but the moon is 100-1000 times closer and 10 times less massive than mars, with half its surface gravity.
If it ever happens, the "get back samples" mission is likely to focus on that technical aspect more than anything else, it may not even have a way to explore and collect samples. So let Perseverance do the collection because it is what it is designed for and put them in a neat pile so that the other mission can focus on getting them back.
Further missions should be able to do both collection and return, maybe even take people, but starting small may be a good idea, especially if human lives are at stake.
I get what you're saying. It's ineffective to robotically collect them this way (ever), and if humans go collect them, they could just collect a lot more while they're there, making it all pointless.
Perhaps an answer is that one of the contingencies being covered by the Perseverance sample-collecting is against future contamination? Maybe the NASA missions have been extraordinarily careful about not contaminating Mars with earth microbes, but they're worried that future commercial crewed missions won't be able to be so careful. Then when the humans get there, they'll have some unspoiled sample containers to experiment on and compare to the post-human samples.
Perseverance will take samples from a variety of locations, and cache them in one location for pickup. The pickup mission won't need to drive around the surface for a year with drilling equipment.
That was not the description I read in official materials: that said the plan was to leave the sample containers on the track. It can't be both, and there can't be any uncertainty. Did they change plans?
It seems to me that Bezos and Branson have done irreparable damage to public perceptions of space exploration. Flying up billionaires does not inspire people.
I think it depends on how it is done. The Inspiration 4 series was well-received on Netflix and they had a billionaire on board who paid for the mission. I think the dearMoon mission could also go very well and inspire people.
I don't know anything about this, but I was surprised to read about the light sails proposal for heating Mars.
> Mere dozens of such Starship launches would be needed to substantially increase net insolation on Mars and begin raising the temperature, without the emplacement of any surface infrastructure.
Heating sounds like a good step, but aren't the major challenges a lack of atmosphere and magnetosphere? Having one without the others seems a bit useless to me. What am I missing?
It really does. Brings me back to when I was kid and would pour over every issue and to learn about what the FUTURE would bring. Very impressive thoughts about the what the power of cheap scale can do: “Quantity has a quality all of its ow “ really hits home.
The post mentions an expendable version at 15m d but that can't be done on either the current iteration (9m) or v2.0 (12m). The original plan was for 15m but that would require around 100 raptors to get it off the ground!
We should expect to see a bunch of alternative configurations for Starship. A big fairing is just one possibility.
On Falcon, and in the future with conventional Starship, Starlink launches are volume-limited, not mass-limited. Thus, a Starship with more interior space would allow them to send up many more satellites per launch.
When they get their production line up, we might see them launch Starlink in disposable second stages, dispensing with heat shielding and landing engines, and with substantially smaller fuel tanks, leaving room for more Starlink cargo. They could park the carriers in orbit, and gather up the Raptor engines to bring home once enough have piled up there; and maybe turn the empty hulls into a fuel depot.
Launching, say, 150 satellites at a time, that's more than a hundred launches to fill out the constellation. It should not be hard to find a use for some fraction of those hulls given they have already been boosted to orbit.
They'd need a stage0 systems built specifically to support a 15m large fairing. I'm not saying this will never happen, I just don't think it will be on the cards for a long time, if at all. Basing things around 9m/12m may be a better idea if they want to get something in the sky sooner, rather than later.
I am thinking now that if they want Starlink to be a demonstrator for their freight service, they will more likely eat the cost of launching on non-customized vehicles, and of landing, refurbishing, and re-using them, instead of leaving them in orbit.
You'd need to build an entirely new stage0 system. How would a 15m fairing fit onto the current orbital launch pad?
Not saying it can't be done, just that it's not as simple as just whacking a larger fairing on, there are lots of considerarations to deal with. Perhaps it's worth it for 15m, but then again even a 9m would be a vast improvement from 2.4m
> For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
As I've noted in other replies, you'd need an entire new stage0 to accomodate this. Even larger than the 2.0 planned. It'd be have to be made especially for this.
> The post mentions an expendable version at 15m d but that can't be done on either the current iteration (9m) or v2.0 (12m). The original plan was for 15m but that would require around 100 raptors to get it off the ground!
However, that's not obviously true. This is just a fairing. The fairing can be made wider w/o adding engines or making the booster (or the bottom of starship) wider.
Then you mentioned the stage zero issues, but if an expendable starship with a wider fairing doesn't need to be reused then there's plenty of space right now between starship's nose and the launch tower for a wider fairing, and a crane can be used to stack it instead of the chopsticks if the wider fairing makes using the chopsticks impossible. Even if modifications to stage 0 are needed -or a new one altogether-, if SpaceX ends up building more stage zeros elsewhere (like, say, at Cape Canaveral), they'll have a chance to accommodate larger fairings then.
Certainly. First things first. They have a year's worth of testing ahead of them just to make 100t to LEO reusable launch vehicle a thing. Once they've done that they'll be able to build a new stage zero, work on larger and smaller launch vehicles (smaller because why let others take the by then obsolete Falcon 9's business?) (larger only for large telescopes and such).
Did you read the same post I did? TFA talks about a "15 meter diameter payload fairing". I don't see why Starship couldn't do that. Full quote:
> For a relatively trivial fraction of the overall telescope budget, non-recurring engineering costs could weld together an expendable Starship variant (no TPS, no flaps, no landing legs) with a 15 meter diameter payload fairing. Almost overnight, endless gnashing of teeth about the relative mirror diameters of Luvoir or Habex, or the relative difficulty of performing coronography with a segmented, non circular mirror, go away.
I've never heard it mentioned by anyone working at SpaceX or any commentators (bar this person, it seems).
You'd have to build an entire new stage0 system, for starters, even if you've built a new one for starship 2.0 as it wouldn't accomodate the larger fairing size.
Considering it took them roughly 2 years to develope Starship from scratch, even if that's the case, it would still be an order of magnitude lower cost than anything else, wouldn't it?
I like the idea of a ringed station made of starship shells. But I wonder if instead of making hollow starships and then having to deal with all the engines and fuel tanks when converting to a ring segment, perhaps it would be possible to make a tubular section which fits over the outside of starship like a sleeve? I suppose it would need cutouts for the flaps since that starship would ideally be reusable, and it would need to be two halves since there is no way to slide it off if there are flaps there. But IDK maybe it could work!
One way to use excess capacity is to become an airline... Looking at the types of projects that Musk has been working with (Boring, barges, etc), it doesn't strike me as fully ridiculous
SpaceX is launching their first commercial package(DART) to leave Earth orbit Nov 23(?). They did a demo of this capability with the Mars orbit roadster a few years back. The 2022 manifest has a lunar package and another asteroid probe. (My source is the 131 launches in Wikipedia and I could hace missed something.)
The article seems to take wildly optimistic cost, capacity, and capability claims for granted. It then verges on the ridiculous, talking about Mars terraforming with giant light sails. I couldn't read past that, as it seemed to go into more and more examples of improbable technologies that are stopped by many more concerns than launch capacity.
Dreaming is fine, but Musk has a track record of not delivering on his over-optimistic promises. And a dream is not enough to overpower gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. There are very hard physical limits on how efficient a rocket can be, even in the most optimistic scenarios.
Last I saw, the roads are full of Teslas and there have been 5 crewed launches to orbit on reflown Falcon boosters.
Without Tesla, the electric car market would probably be farther behind, and without SpaceX we'd definitely still be flying astronauts on Soyuz. These achievements seems routine now, but it's important to take stock of their significance.
"We were already doing X with proven technology" is not really a good argument. In the United States, people have had video displays in their homes since the 1950's. Are we going to ask what new has been done in that field since then? Also, sometimes you have to rebuild technological capabilities on a new foundation in order to move things forward. Yes, humans have been able to send humans into space since the 1960's (though not beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972). SpaceX only recently caught up with that capability. They still haven't sent anyone beyond low Earth orbit. But they're catching up, and using a foundation of technology that will allow us to wildly surpass what was possible with the technology of the 1960's.
Cryogenic in-orbit refueling is not breaking any physics laws and allows to reset the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation from orbit, so you can gain 2 orders of magnitude on payload weight.
The hardest part would be logistics management (10 tanker launches for refueling a Starship)
Musk has a track record of over-promising and under-delivering both on time and product, but deliver he does. And the over-promise is usually so bonkers ridiculous, that when you scale it back it's only somewhat ridiculous and a lot more than the people who were predicting complete failure.
Every satellite today is at the end of a long production chain with lots of bottlenecks, finding funding for launch being only one of them. We'll need assembly lines of them to feed this rocket.