I disagree. If Starship fails, the most likely reason will be technological. Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high).

And if it fails, who will spend billions on a new vehicle?

Stoke Space: They are working on Nova, which is designed for 2nd-stage re-use, and they've got a novel architecture. But they are not well-funded and if Starship fails, it is likely that investor sentiment will shift away from full reusability (you know how investors are). And even if they succeed, their current vehicle can only get 3 tons to orbit. That means each launch must cost less than $1 million to get to the $300/kg target. In contrast, Starship can loft 100 tons, so it can cost up to $30 million per launch and still hit the target.

Blue Origin: They are still working on 1st stage re-use, and even assuming they get that to work next year, they are at least a decade away from testing 2nd stage re-use. And their current designs don't have any of the cost-savings in Starship (like launch-tower catch).

And that's it! There are no other companies seriously working on 2nd-stage reuse.

If Starship fails, there will not be another contender for cheap flights to orbit for decades.

I would actually argue that Apollo and the space race damaged reusable launcher projects more than the Space Shuttle. Before the mad scramble to the Moon there were many interesting infrastructure projects and incremental manned mission planned as well as partially or fully reusable launcher or variants of existing expendable launchers.

Then everything that was not contributing to MOON ASAP was thrown away & massive spending on space hardware essentially normalized. The end result (Apollo) was impressive and achieved the goal (first on the Moon) - but was also totally unsustainable, resulting in a big crunch and a lot of setbacks and slowdowns.

Another contributing factor has been military involvement - again, wee need that milsat on orbit and we need it now, costs be damned. ICBMs not being exactly reusable does not help. Even the Space Shuttle design being perverted into its partially reusable clunky form can be traced back to military requirements.

>It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever.

Really?

SpaceX conducts more than half the world's rocket launches and deploys 80% of the world's satellites.

Demand takes some time to ramp up, especially with quite expensive and complex stuff like Satellites. SpaceX is now even launching competing constellation comsats (project Kuiper), private manned space missions and there are quite a few manned space station projects under development that would be basically unthinkable without the cheaper lift Falcon 9 provides.

As for "How much Starlink could we possibly need?" I think the answer is simply "YES". Even when you possibly somehow satisfy all your Internet access customers, you can start adding other services, like mobile phone coms (already in progress) or maybe imaging or hosted payloads.

Haven't the economies of scale already kicked in a little? Starlink is profitable. I'm not sure if spacex minus all starship costs is profitable. I'm pretty sure they're quite good at building them faster, better, and for less now. Please show me otherwise. I guess you could call that more learning curve, but that's a fuzzy line.

I guess overall I don't understand your point. What does it matter that the majority of their payload mass was their own? And nobody asking for something is certainly not the same thing as nobody wanting/needing it. See: cars, computers... Starlink now exists and I'm quite certain people love it and rely on it. Wouldn't exist without falcon 9. Starlink basically solved the last mile problem, surely you'd agree rural folks having access to Internet is a good thing?

They made their own demand for falcon 9, with that scale bringing down costs enough to raise demand for basically every research org needing satellites to contract with SpaceX.

I don't think we can definitively predict the demand either way for payload at $300/kg or whatever without first getting there, but Jevons might have some ideas.

Starlink is both a successful commercial service making money hand over fist and a vital strategic asset for the United States. Put simply its one of the most transformative infrastructure projects of the 21st century. SpaceX found a winner and is doubling down on it I don't blame them.

> The thing is, there is no demand to get that much stuff into space.

You mean no other company except SpaceX has such a demand. But SpaceX does in fact have such a demand and are using it to make a profit.

Small governments don't understand that they can have space science programs rivaling NASA for super cheap. That's what's holding demand back imo.

Demand comes at a curve, the cheaper you make it, the more demand there will be. The demand for satellites and eventually human travel is practically infinite if the cost is low enough.

If Starship cuts cost to orbit by at minimum 1/3 and at maximum 1/100th demand will skyrocket (pun intended) either way.

Sure, not directly. But most of that is imaging and communications payloads, and the vast majority there is being purchased by militaries and intelligence agencies.

Government still props up this whole market.

Fair point!

I should have said that the space economy would remain small.

Question for the audience, because I've always been curious.

Have there ever been any historical plans for a permanently-transiting interplanetary craft?

A large craft is built, accelerated up to speed (since time wouldn't be a factor, high Isp/low-thrust engines could be used), then left looping between Earth and X at constant high speed, with smaller (and shorter-term) craft accelerating to meet it (e.g. underway replenishment with crew and fuel transfer) or decelerating at the destination.

Heck, if you've got something optionally-crewed, you could have it continuously burning for years to build up speed.

Or do solar system astrodynamics make waiting and then burning like hell from orbital speeds during optimal transit windows more efficient?

Lots of things are harder in space; maybe even everything. But it has some benefits, like abundant solar power, lots of room, and line-of-sight to large chunks of Earth.

Almost all the problems can be solved by cheaper access to space, whereas the benefits cannot be easily recreated on Earth.

Is it guaranteed to work? My point is that we don't know, despite confident assertions one way or the other. If it does work, the benefits are clear, and that's why it's worth trying.

Simple: VC money. The only thing surprising to me about that is that the pitch wasn't "AI in space".

My take: The idea that heavy computing in LEO is better than sending data down to Earth sounds very naive. Starlink is great proof that the bandwidth is plentiful and the latency is good, once the equipment is modern. Definitely cheaper and easier than cooling a datacenter.

Common folk assume that the space is super-cold, so it must be good for hot servers.

After the Challenger disaster (1986) it was clear that the Space Shuttle was never going to accomplish its cost and reliability goals. The US military had bet everything on the Shuttle, so it needed a new launch vehicle. The one clear requirement of the new launch vehicle was that it had to be expendable. In fact, the name of the program was "Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle"[1]

Remember also that when SpaceX started to develop Falcon booster reuse in 2011, every major aerospace company said that reusable vehicles would never make economic sense. Even after the first Falcon 9 recovery and re-flight, most aerospace companies thought reusability was a dead-end and that belief came from the refurbishment cost that Shuttle had to go through.

I count from 1994 (start of EELV) to 2021, when NASA launched astronauts on a reused booster and Peter Beck famously fulfilled his promise to eat his hat if Rocket Lab ever worked on a re-usable launch vehicle.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Space_Launch

SpaceX started with the business plan of low cost, mass producible single use launchers. Falcon 9 was not designed with any level of reusability in mind. There was a major redesign to add landing hardware, but the whole reason for Starship being a totally new design was the reusability that a Falcon "super-heavy" derivative could never achieve.

In the 80s, the reusable spacecraft people got sidetracked into SSTO designs, which have horribly small payload fractions. The Delta Clipper and DC-X families were meant to be reusable, but they never scaled up to something that could deliver decent payloads to orbit.

With one company being so far ahead is actually a good thing: No tragedy of the Commons. Or reckless gambling on unproven technology.

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