SpaceX designed reusable rocket first stage to slash costs. Everybody said reusability only makes sense when there's lot of flights - because large development costs have to be distributed across many flights.
So, roughly, to ensure Falcon-9 flies a lot, SpaceX invented Starlink which could use a lot of flights. Now they have a well-functioning rocket company - 2-3 second stages built per week, and ocassional first stage - and the Starlink, which is already in black.
Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization?
The bright dividing line in the history of the west coast was when the first transcontinental railroad was built. It transformed everything at a pace that astonished its predictors.
Currently, we launch little things into orbit. With big, cheap rockets we can launch big things, like an interplanetary craft, a spinning space station, robots to spread out through the solar system, even a moon base.
But the question is what can they do that's more useful than communication satellites to people on Earth? That is, who pays for the rocket launches, and why?
More space science and exploration is nice. We'd get more for less. But I don't think space exploration budgets will increase?
> Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization?
While I agree that there will be payloads built specifically for Starship's massive capacity, most aren't going to need that much space.
Historically, an entity (company, academia, government) that wants to launch a satellite has had to not only buy/build it, but also buy the rocket, then wait months/years for launch. Some small satellites have been able to hitch a ride on launches of larger payloads, but even there the timing is out of the smallsat's owner's control.
With Starship, an entity only has to build a satellite. As it nears completion, the entity will go to spacex.com, find a day with a Starship launch with sufficient open capacity, and reserve a slot. If the satellite is delayed, the reservation can be moved to another day (perhaps with some percentage of the deposit withheld if too close to launch time). In other words, Expedia for space.
There will be as many Starship launches as needed. Maybe the combined Starlink+outside customer demand will at first result in one launch a week (less frequent than Falcon 9's launch cadence, because of Starship's greater capacity). Maybe over time it will rise to two, three, five, seven, ten, 20 weekly. The more frequent and more consistent the launch cadence, the more confident customers will be that a launch slot will be available when they want one.
international shipping, and _maybe_ eventually travel
you can launch a rocket from anywhere on earth to arrive anywhere on earth in under 30m. first we'll just have better express package deliveries (oh, and military logistics). but eventually they'll decide it's safe enough for people to ride on and you'll just kiss the Kármán line on your way to and from lunch in Kathmandu
There is no market for Mars. No one needs, or even really wants, to build anything on Mars. Taking a human there just to show that we can might be a cute publicity stunt, but that's the only possible rational motivation for Mars in the next 500 years or so.
Mars One demonstrated the demand. An immigration ticket to Mars costing $500k to $1M would be profitable for SpaceX, and there are probably 100k - 1M people worldwide willing and able to do that.
If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.
There are too many bad assumptions baked into that question to attempt a meaningful answer. I don’t even know if you’re being serious or taking the piss.
1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k.
2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay.
3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency.
If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.
No, there are not. There are people willing to spend money on this illusion, but the vast majority are not actually going to do it. Their best case scenario is that this never becomes attainable, and they can just remain with the image that they are supporting something like this.
Where you so convinced these people don’t exist? They do. They organize annual conferences. They spend their free time posting incessantly in the nasaspaceflight forums. It is a subculture that is out there.
I don’t get mad that there are companies targeting niches that don’t involve me. But when SpaceX does it…
There are many fandoms that organize conferences and spend their free time posting on forums. That doesn't mean they'll get to fly on the Enterprise or in the TARDIS or anything else.
The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails.
Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns.
If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on.
The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.
Mars One is a cute prospect when it's just a dream, once reality sets and those people realise that the novelty of being in an inhospitable place, millions of kilometres away from any semblance of a life (air, water, food, nature, hobbies, loved ones, etc.) wouldn't be a good choice to live for 20-50 years I highly doubt that even 1% of those millionaires would still choose to be shipped off.
When life was hard and the prospect of getting to new land on a frontier to potentially improve your (and most of the time your family's) life, it gave people very potential tangible benefits to go there against the risks.
Going to Mars, a deserted place where living a bare life is only ever possible if a lot of life support infrastructure in small pods is running 24/7 without a hitch. Where there is no direct benefit in terms of human accumulation, not at least for a few generations.
Which millionaire living a good life on Earth would consciously choose living in a cramped pod with strangers for the rest of their life, to look out onto a Red Desert of nothingness every day?
The novelty of doing a short walk around will disappear fast, the motivation of "let's build a city here" would be 100% dependent on the provisions sent by Earth, and there would be no end in sight for your life in little pods while you toil away Martian soil, lose muscles, have to consume a diet of potatoes, while at any time if your life support systems fail you and everyone else you might bonded with are done.
Explorers without much to lose on Earth might embark on this, millionaires living a cushy life not so much.
Just because it’s not for you doesn’t mean there aren’t people who have dreamed their whole life of doing this and would sell everything they own to pay their way if given the opportunity.
Of course there is, there are people willing to do a lot of things. At the same time the overlapping of people with the means to do it and willing to endure the conditions is extremely small...
You are attacking an argument I didn't make, my argument is that the people who possess enough to be the ones paying for a one-ticket to Mars are much less inclined to go live under those conditions. You are going to need a lot of people if you want to transform a barren planet.
Imagine that a significant number of people went, say, to Mars. Now they are there, and suddenly they want better conditions. Could it trigger crash program in terraforming to improve the conditions, so that mere decades away Mars would be more hospitable? What money couldn't do here?
The framing of the question is odd. It makes the colonists seem passive spectators. What is holding back the terraforming of Mars is not money but human agency--people living there and doing the work. The people who want to go, want to take part in this endeavour. They're not going to go there and then sit on their behinds and lobby for better living conditions; they're going there to do the work themselves of building a 2nd garden of Eden.
No, the thing stopping the terraforming of Mars is any realistic idea of how to do it. Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have the technology to terraform a barren, cold, almost atmosphere-less planet to make it livable to humans, but not before then. And it will still take 1000 years to reach a livable state after you start.
And however this may be achieved, it definitely doesn't require humans living on Mars to do it. In fact, it is almost certainly going to only be possible if you don't have people there already, with life support systems adapted to the old status quo.
Terraforming has been well studied and we certainly have very good ideas for how to accomplish it. It is a centuries-long process, and no one is claiming otherwise, but not some impossible fever dream. The biggest gains are from rising temperatures, and global warming is something we actually have some experience with, after all.
I don't see how you expect it to be accomplished remotely though, without people on-site to build things, repair things, and most importantly create and expand local infrastructure so as to not need imports from Earth.
Terraforming is a pipe dream, just the atmospheric pressure issue alone is way out of reach. How do you expect people to increase the atmospheric pressure of a whole planet by 80k Pascal? Do you have an idea of the scale that is, to bring all that gas into a whole planet's atmosphere and make it stay there without being blown away by solar winds since Mars doesn't have a magnetic field?
It's not "well studied", there are a few studies on how it might be accomplished but all of it is unproven and untested, no one has ever done anything close to terraforming a planet, reality has a pesky way of getting in the way of untested proposals.
No, terraforming is not well studied at all, to any extent. There are some fun papers on it, but that's it. Global warming on Earth is not comparable to terraforming a planet, it's like saying that we know how to heat the oceans of Titan, after all we can heat our baths every winter here.
Even if we somehow fixed Mars' atmosphere (extremely difficult, but there are at least some ideas), we won't fix anything else. Mars is much farther away from the Sun, so it's always going to be much colder, whatever else happens to it. And it's covered in toxic dust and barren rock, that there is no realistic way to convert to livable useful soil. We should probably first "terraform" the deserts of Earth, as it will have much more value, and would be a good test. And of course, Mars has nowhere near enough water to sustain a significant human population + industry (the whole quantity of water ice is estimated to be similar to the great lakes). And most likely there is no natural water cycle that works at a human scale, due to the distinct lack of massive oceans.
There was no market for a second global internet either, it already existed. If you build it they will come.
I think we see it time and time again, the steam engine, the internet, when you create something that enables radically new possibilities, people find ways to put them to profitable uses. The people inventing them have vision, they have ideas about what they could be used for, but ultimately nobody can predict how things will be used. We will probably be pleasantly surprised by the ways people are going to use mass scale space travel.
If there are people there there will be a market there. I do expect that there will be people there within 100 years, probably sooner, if not for any reason, because a really rich guy that runs the most capable space launch company wants to make it happen.
Elon has publicly stated that he wants to die on Mars. Considering that SpaceX has already launched a Tesla into an orbit that intersects that of Mars, it's not too farfetched to say that it's an attainable goal for him by EoL.
Elon has publicly stated many things that were outright lies, and many more things that were extraordinarily optimistic timelines (FSD next year, hyperloop, starship earth to earth, extremely cheap tunnels, Covid respirators, etc). His public statements mean less than nothing overall.
There's an implied part where there's some living on Mars first and his goal isn't just to die in a crash landing shortly before he was going to die to life support systems giving out. Merely getting to Mars is difficult but plausibly attainable within his lifespan, but that is likely to turn out to be the easy part.
You can imagine them, but they are not actually realizabile with current technology, and there is 0 purpose to actually doing it. Making them self-sustaining to act as a safeguard if the Earth is destroyed is also way, way beyond our current technology.
Why? 150 metric tons of concrete (what one starship can carry), is enough to build 4 single family homes. A standard excavator is 10-20 tons so you can carry 10-15 on one starship. It doesn’t take much more than that to build a deep hole and make a concrete hab. These would have to be modified for mars but not significantly. I’m not sure what this technology is that we don’t have. It sounds like you could have a functional research lab on mars with less than 5-10 starship trips.
Purpose is purely subjective. You could have said the same thing about the ISS before it was built but it has been invaluable.
First, starship is not a working rocket today. It will be made to work, but that's still in the future. They are now at a stage where they can take one completely empty rocket and put it in LEO, with a little bit of fuel left over for descent. Getting a fully loaded rocket in LEO, then sending another twenty rockets to refuel it in space, then powering it on a trajectory to Mars, with enough fuel left over that it can safely land on Mars, is still probably around a decade away. And then getting it to launch again from Mars and land back on the Earth is a whole other can of worms, especially if you want it to leave with living humans on board.
Secondly and more importantly, we don't have the robotics knowledge to do arbitrary construction projects in this way. Digging through frozen rocky terrain in the extreme conditions of Mars is not easy, and we don't even do that autonomous here on Earth. The Mars Rovers are at the forefront of technology in this area, and they can just about move over the rocky terrain.
And of course, sending people there to operate the machines without first having a shelter is not an option, they will likely die of radiation poisoning long before they finish the project - the thin metal walls of a rocket are not a good radiation insulator.
It is making the majority of its revenue from populated areas in wealthy countries [1].
Making it very susceptible to the improvements in the rollout of fibre which is happening in most countries. For example in Australia they are upgrading our fibre network to 1Gbps which is 10x the speed of Starlink.
In Australia for example rural areas are all being wired for fibre.
And you only need to lay fibre once and you can benefit at least for the next century if not longer as we continue to invent new ways to multiplex data.
Do you have any source on the plans for rural fibre? My parents just keep being told to be content with Sky Muster. Australia is huge, it's going to take multiple decades to build out to even a fraction of the communities.
>My parents just keep being told to be content with Sky Muster. Australia is huge, it's going to take multiple decades to build out to even a fraction of the communities.
Starlink was designed for your parents, and everyone else in that situation.
Yep, my parents are on Starlink right now and are loving it.
GP was saying that fiber is coming to all rural areas though, so I was wondering if there was any truth to it.
Personally I think anywhere that has copper right now (and my parents do have an old crusty POTS line running to their home) should be built up to fiber - if we could do it before we should be able to do it again.
My mother lives in a small town half an hour outside a major city and has starlink because all of the national telcos, regional fibre ISPs, or local WISPs didn't want to take on the capital expense. If it weren't for starlink they'd be using 4G hotspots for everything.
>In Australia for example rural areas are all being wired for fibre.
What? Thats simply not true at all. I'm guessing you don't live in Australia, or you'd realize how much rural area there is, and how ridiculous that sounds.
What is actually happening is some areas previously served by FTTN (fiber to the node) or FTTC (fiber to the curb) or other, older technologies such as coax are being upgraded to FTTP (fiber to the premise), but there are around 500,000 Australian homes and businesses served by fixed wireless (4g) and around 400,000 additional homes and businesses only served by satellite.
I am willing to be corrected, but I have not heard of any plans for the NBN to upgrade anybody currently using a wireless/statellite connection to fiber.
The intention has always been to upgrade everyone to fibre but there is obviously a question of budget and priorities. So in the interim they will continue to align the technologies on speed as best as they can.
But you can skip the queue so to speak if you're willing to pay for it:
The bigger satellites that are coming to starlink will allow much narrower signal beams, which in turn will allow far faster speeds for the same interference-to-gso budget.
Not an either-or, if I need internet I need it, and have all manner of backups for power and internet. I added starlink to complement fiber, cable, and mobile broadband. Simply put I cannot be offline for any reason other than medical incapacitation / death
You’ve assumed that the customers in developed nations are primarily fixed installations. Starlink is wildly popular with the rv/sailboat/second home crowd.
I also wouldn’t be betting on US terrestrial internet providers to outcompete anything.
Also people living in stealth campers (fancy converted vans with no windows), of which there are more and more every year in HCOL cities. You can only get so much data with 5G.
I don't think this is correct. As far as I understand it, Elon/SpaceX did attempt a previous investment in satellite internet, but it had died long before Starlink came to be in 2014.
If Falcon 9 was a company it would probably be profitable and Starlink could probably pay Falcon a fair price and still be profitable. Obviously SpaceX is not profitable overall because they are investing tons in Starship.
It would be fascinating to see how the proceeds of such an offer were split.
I've heard whispers that SpaceX has a bunch of debt that is collateralized by Tesla stock, if that's true there is clearly a case for margin pressure there.
There is the open question of what SpaceX will do with "all that lift capacity, if you give all earth to orbit contracts to SpaceX it still takes a long time to pay back that investment. Starlink was a good fit for Falcon 9, and murmurs that it is cash flow positive not withstanding, having your finger on "world internet" is cool[1] until the world takes it away from you.
On orbit refueling, which means having a fuel depot in orbit that has active cryo chillers operating to keep fuel for long periods of time, could be that answer since there is nominally "unlimited" demand for fuel in orbit, but the technology to make that work still has a lot of unknown unknowns. (I loved the ULA concept of using fuel boil off to run an internal combustion engine in the fuel depot that did active refrigeration, but that is still untested)
Still, having the only functioning orbital gas station would have even more leverage than having the only world internet. As Exxon et al have shown, you can extract a lot of value from people who can't get their gas anywhere else. Let's say a Starship flight costs $150 million to put 10 tons of cryo-fuel into orbit, can you sell it at $20 M/ton to customers? It only costs $250 - $300 to "make" liquid methane, maybe $200/ton for oxygen. That's some healthy markup and that would definitely make money.
[1] I am a Starlink customer and it has made working remotely from anywhere actually possible, that said if they decide to squeeze really hard that could cease to be the case.
With working Starship, it's much easier to put industry on the Moon. The first product could be oxygen from the rocks, which could outcompete Earth-based oxygen for refueling on LEO.
We actually seem to have more and more need in the space-based industry. Not only unique products requiring microgravity to get produced. For example, right now we need a lot of data centers - and those could be placed in space, reducing load on Earth environment and power.
And all of that increase in activity is going to go through Starships initially. SpaceX is in a really unique position. In XIX century nobody thought they'll need to use railroads to travel far and often. But there were many railroad-building companies. Now we have problem figuring out why we need cheap massive access to space. Could it be that we won't find uses for it?
Seems low to me. It seems quite plausible for SpaceX to be able to complete a space mining operation given their current operations and runway. If you can bring a trillion dollar rock back to Earth or at least LEO every few years, that's quite a valuable company.
Spain now had way more wealth the its neighbors, relatively speaking, even if it didn't have more wealth than before. In a world of mercenary armies and continental trade, that matters a lot. Sure, maybe the mercenaries are now asking for double what they asked before, but they're asking your neighbors for double too, and your neighbors didn't also get a huge injection of gold.
Also, gold wasn't used to build things, so it contributes very little to wealth (jewelery and decorations notwithstanding). Having a huge injection of iron or uranium or tritium or helium or lithium or other rare and sought-after elements today would be an entirely different story.
Of course, the whole idea of bringing an asteroid to earth to mine is pure sci-fi at this moment, so this is all moot.
Those resources already exist on earth, for which it'd be cheaper to just mine it out of the ground, than to spend the energy to bring ore back (then spend the same amount as earth mined ore to process!).
The one thing those asteroids have going for it is that it's already in space - so if you were planning on building a space station, space ship or something of that nature, you might be better off mining in space to produce the materials for it (and save the launch costs, for the one time cost of launching space mining and manufacturing plants).
The actual wealth in an economy is the value of goods and services. Money is not a good or a service. Increasing the amount of money does not change the value of goods and services, it just devalues the money (inflation).
As opposed to a lack of money being a friction that prevents a country from being wealthy?
It is very easy to point out how an economy with perfect information and perfect cooperation has zero demand for money, but reality works very differently.
I always laugh at the size of Smaug's gold hoard in the Hobbit movie. Unleashing even a fraction of it would make all the gold in Middle Earth worthless.
I don’t disagree. Someone above said bytedance is valued similarly which I find really surprising given the value-prop of the two companies couldn’t be further away from each other. One tries to suck time and energy away from humanity while the other tries to expand our human capacity beyond our planet.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager SpaceX to be valued more in the long run.
> If you can bring a trillion dollar rock back to Earth or at least LEO every few years,
. . . you'd destabilize the world economy, and your trillion-dollar rock would either no longer be a trillion-dollar rock, or else your trillion dollars won't buy nearly as much as it would have before.
That depends. Right now we have a scarcity mindset with regards to certain materials. A trillion dollar rock could open up new use cases we never imagined before because it was too cost prohibitive.
Maybe if they ever get anywhere close to asteroid mining their value will go up. They’re closer than anyone else, but they’re still very far away from that. When Starship is making regular flights, and making regular flights beyond Earth orbit, they’ll be in a position to start thinking about asteroid mining. Tho I think Moon operations will take up enough of their time, they may not spend much time looking at mining. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe they’ve talked much about mining on their roadmap.
How is there so much sci-fi wishful thinking so pervasive here? How do you even imagine that any technology could safely move an asteroid to LEO every few years (and probably have it crash into the Earth a few years after that)? Nevermind a technology that we would develop in the next 100-500 years?
I would be willing to bet that SpaceX will be long gone as a company before the first successful (cash-flow positive) asteroid mining operations will begin long in our future. And that it will barely be a memory by the time we start bringing asteroids closer to the earth to mine them, if that ever happens. They will of course have made some serious contributions to this future, but this is waaaaay beyond anything we'll see in our lifetimes, and companies just don't tend to live that long.
The naysayers for your comment seem to believe that you mean a trillion dollars worth of minerals will be delivered to Earth immediately when they get the asteroid into orbit.
Let's be honest, the US ban is all political. If they find a way around it, the goalposts will be moved.
Remember the last dispute was solved by paying Oracle a lot of money (a bribe) to onshore all of US citizens data... Yet a few years later and suddenly that isn't enough.
So, roughly, to ensure Falcon-9 flies a lot, SpaceX invented Starlink which could use a lot of flights. Now they have a well-functioning rocket company - 2-3 second stages built per week, and ocassional first stage - and the Starlink, which is already in black.
Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization?
How much SpaceX as a company will cost then?
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