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.)
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.