totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[Beccab]

https://www.gao.gov/assets/b-419783.pdf

 GAO report on the HLS decision is out. The [DELETED] appears to refer to an orbital fuel depot, as in expendable starship tanker ala Deep Space Starship

For reference:

[peewee69]

In terms of financial returns from Starship development, surely space mining ops are more feasible now? How much mined material could SpaceX land back here on Earth?

[mikegarrison]

13 minutes ago, tater said:

There's not really any market, however (unless you count P2P travel, which I don't, because it's astoundingly unlikely IMHO).

NASA will not get a huge budget increase, that's not a thing.

Commercial launches in total is on the order of the NASA annual budget—at current launch prices. So even if SpaceX hoped to magically capture ALL of the NASA budget (not even remotely plausible), the total launch market is noise.

There is no economic case for colonizing Mars (sorry Mars fans). There's no economic case for cislunar except to capture some of the NASA budget (great f you are a tiny company, sorta meaningless for a large company). All of this work is spending money, it's not for making money. If they manage to get enough in business that it offsets costs? That helps their goal, nothing more.

The only way this makes sense economically is if they think they are creating a new market.

[tater]

2 minutes ago, peewee69 said:

In terms of financial returns from Starship development, surely space mining ops are more feasible now? How much mined material could SpaceX land back here on Earth?

Space mining might be useful for space applications (because it's already in space), but the cost per kg, even if grossly lower with SS is not lower than the same cost here on Earth. Mining might become economically feasible with low enough costs to start experimenting with it, but I think it takes a while.

Just now, mikegarrison said:

The only way this makes sense economically is if they think they are creating a new market.

True. Not sure what that would be, though...

Humans is a great and functionally endless market, but I think you and I agree on rockets WRT travel safety vs the safest type of transport on Earth, airliners, lol.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

27 minutes ago, tater said:

All of this work is spending money, it's not for making money

Mostly I agree with you... Mars and Lunar missions for the foreseeable future are academic endeavors and 'look what we can do' national vanity projects.  

However - there are industries that can and will want access to space if launches become economical.  Communication and information services are the obvious ones - but others should arise.  Also - there are many Universities with astronomical cash reserves that might be interested in buying rides to various places (again academic and vanity projects). 

Someone, at some point, will buy a launch to try to find gold and etc on an asteroid to bring it back.  Once that happens, we get to see if the modern economy can adapt, or if we see analogs to 16th century Spain https://erenow.net/modern/aspects-of-european-history-1494-1789/18.php

But as I and Mike and others have pointed out - I think SX is perceiving a market that no one thought existed a few years ago 

Edited August 10, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[magnemoe]

28 minutes ago, tater said:

There's not really any market, however (unless you count P2P travel, which I don't, because it's astoundingly unlikely IMHO).

NASA will not get a huge budget increase, that's not a thing.

Commercial launches in total is on the order of the NASA annual budget—at current launch prices. So even if SpaceX hoped to magically capture ALL of the NASA budget (not even remotely plausible), the total launch market is noise.

There is no economic case for colonizing Mars (sorry Mars fans). There's no economic case for cislunar except to capture some of the NASA budget (great f you are a tiny company, sorta meaningless for a large company). All of this work is spending money, it's not for making money. If they manage to get enough in business that it offsets costs? That helps their goal, nothing more.

I agree at least for quite some time, NASA budget is pretty fixed, if they can get larger payloads cheaper they will get very happy and can do lots of cool stuff for the same amount of money. 
Other actors, it will be an significant growth but its still not serious money for an decade or more.10-20 year down the line after prices dropped, depending on the big feature stuff will start to speed up. 
 

[cubinator]

Going to space isn't about economics. 

When I go to Mars, I don't want to bring one dollar with me. I'm not going so that I can make some kind of "economy" or "monetary value" for anybody. I don't give a damn what money is up there, nor which country I'm from.

I'm going because it's beautiful, fulfilling, challenging, exciting, and interesting. And because I think it will open up the opportunity for more people to get to do it too.

So whenever I see someone point out the complete lack of economic reason to go to Mars, I think to myself, "Well, of course! We're not doing it for money, we're doing it because we want to! And all this will occur despite society's fixation on the mathematics of money, which is just one tool to help us keep ourselves organized while we go about our lives."

[Beccab]

52 minutes ago, Beccab said:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/b-419783.pdf

 GAO report on the HLS decision is out. The [DELETED] appears to refer to an orbital fuel depot, as in expendable starship tanker ala Deep Space Starship

For reference:

From page 68 about the Lunar Starship:

“Specifically, the evaluators credited SpaceX’s design, noting several features including:
• Spacious crew accommodations that [DELETED];

• A [DELETED] configuration for [DELETED] of the mission, which will
provide additional protection from [DELETED] by the crew;

• [DELETED] with dedicated [DELETED], which will enable the crew to [DELETED] and [DELETED] the vehicle while providing needed redundancy and crew resource management during high-workload landing tasks;

• A robust medical system including additional capabilities such as [DELETED]; and

• “[E]xceptionally detailed and mature [DELETED], which “will greatly improve the operability and safety of the final Starship design.”

 

Theories:

Spacious crew accommodations that [blah blah more space, doesn't really need explanation probably];

A [?] configuration for [?] of the mission, which will
provide additional protection from [?] by the crew;

[Airlock?] with dedicated [elevator?], which will enable the crew to [enter?] and [exit?] the vehicle while providing needed redundancy and crew resource management during high-workload landing tasks;

A robust medical system including additional capabilities such as [anything medical requiring large mass/space]; and

“[E]xceptionally detailed and mature [engine], which “will greatly improve the operability and safety of the final Starship design.”

Edited August 10, 2021 by Beccab

[cubinator]

2 minutes ago, Beccab said:

which will
provide additional protection from [?] by the crew;

radiation

[tater]

8 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

However - there are industries that can and will want access to space if launches become economical.  Communication and information services are the obvious ones - but others should arise.  Also - there are many Universities with astronomical cash reserves that might be interested in buying rides to various places (again academic and vanity projects). 

I doubt they have meaningful amounts of money, though, and they don't buy spacecraft NOW when they spend 10s of billions on research per year (aggregate), so them spending on that is presumably predicated on a profound drop in launch costs. SpaceX has to sell a LOT of launches clearing a million bucks per launch vs clearing 10s of millions per launch.

The car/truck market is trillions per year for comparison.

 

16 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

I agree at least for quite some time, NASA budget is pretty fixed, if they can get larger payloads cheaper they will get very happy and can do lots of cool stuff for the same amount of money. 

If transport to space gets cheaper (which sans competition might not be very much, why leave money on the table?), then sure, NASA can concentrate more on doing stuff in space, vs getting TO space.

 

8 minutes ago, cubinator said:

So whenever I see someone point out the complete lack of economic reason to go to Mars, I think to myself, "Well, of course! We're not doing it for money, we're doing it because we want to! And all this will occur despite society's fixation on the mathematics of money, which is just one tool to help us keep ourselves organized while we go about our lives."

Everything is about money at some level for the foreseeable future. That might stop when we reach post-scarcity, but definitionally any Mars colony will have extra scarcity for a long time, it won't be post scarcity. Anything scarce you want costs money no matter how you care to do the math. Even things you want that can be created locally takes the time of fellow humans, and has some value as a result. Local goat farmers on Mars can make some nice artisanal cheese in their agri-dome, but the number of goats is finite, as is the amount of milk and hence cheese. Everyone might get some grams of it per batch, but what if you want 2 crackers with cheese, and not the 1 allotted?

Once the AI robots can just make everything you want, then it's not a problem, until then, what has lifted humanity out of subsistence where the huge majority lived in abject poverty? Markets. I think they continue as it is the human norm to create markets in every society above a certain small size.

For the colony to buy stuff HERE, regardless of their utopian dreams, will require money. So maybe the billionaire founder tries to make transport nearly free, but all the rest of the stuff in the rockets? Purchased.

[mikegarrison]

26 minutes ago, tater said:

The car/truck market is trillions per year for comparison.

But there was a time when it wasn't. Now it is. A new market was created.

There was no market for internet search engines until there was one.

That's the gamble here. There was no market for trains before trains were invented, but massive, massive fortunes were made by the railroad barons. Same for Google and Amazon and Facebook.

On the other hand, people have tried making flying cars for many decades, and none of them have ever gotten rich from it.

[tater]

4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

But there was a time when it wasn't. Now it is. A new market was created.

There was no market for internet search engines until there was one.

That's the gamble here. There was no market for trains before trains were invented, but massive, massive fortunes were made by the railroad barons. Same for Google and Amazon and Facebook.

On the other hand, people have tried making flying cars for many decades, and none of them have ever gotten rich from it.

No, I actually agree, as does Jeff Bezos (it's the heart of his "I didn't have to invent credit cards or the post office to build Amazon" line of thought).

It's just a matter of what large markets are plausible—though I suppose if either of us have a brilliant idea we should just try and do it, lol.

Mining is clearly one possibility—rare Earth elements in some asteroid that could be redirected to cislunar and extracted. Grossly cheaper access could certainly enable exploration along those lines that is not at national space program cost levels.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

rare Earth elements in some asteroid

I have a strong suspicion that Lunar is immediately more profitable - scrape 20 feet of regolith with a bulldozer sized probe and hopefully find ores in the 15-30 grams per ton range (using lunar gravity and water, maybe) is less of a technical challenge than trying to figure out how to separate ores in microgravity. 

 

Just spitballing - I don't suggest any of it is easy, but 1/6 earth gravity is better than nothing 

[mikegarrison]

15 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I have a strong suspicion that Lunar is immediately more profitable - scrape 20 feet of regolith with a bulldozer sized probe and hopefully find ores in the 15-30 grams per ton range (using lunar gravity and water, maybe) is less of a technical challenge than trying to figure out how to separate ores in microgravity. 

 

Just spitballing - I don't suggest any of it is easy, but 1/6 earth gravity is better than nothing 

There is no evidence that the moon has any ore that is not easier to get from the Earth. To the best of our understanding, the moon was basically made from the crust of the Earth.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Just now, mikegarrison said:

There is no evidence that the moon has any ore that is not easier to get from the Earth. To the best of our understanding, the moon was basically made from the crust of the Earth.

I know.  

Nothing has been found... Yet.  But if you think about that it has the same basic building blocks and the remnants of orbital bombardment... Something has to be there 

We just need better prospectors 

[tater]

3 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

There is no evidence that the moon has any ore that is not easier to get from the Earth. To the best of our understanding, the moon was basically made from the crust of the Earth.

The extraction and transport costs are exactly the problem. Stuff can be rare on Earth, but still so much easier to get at that it makes "free" stuff is space in fact look too expensive to bother with.

1 minute ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

We just need better prospectors 

I think the prospecting will likely be best done on NEO bodies that we can nudge into cislunar. How likely we are to find any of interest? We have to wait for results from missions like OSIRIS-REx ( @IonStorm)—and indeed mining startups will need exactly that sort of expertise. Imagine being able to get investors to allow multiple missions of that type shotgunned to asteroids nearby to find mining candidates where the cost per mission is something the VC guys will not blink at (vs the huge costs now). Where the cost is low enough that everything need not be "perfect the first time since we get one shot," but instead just "good enough, we'll lose a few, we can always send another."

 

[MKI]

44 minutes ago, tater said:

It's just a matter of what large markets are plausible—though I suppose if either of us have a brilliant idea we should just try and do it, lol

This is a "startup fallacy", where you take an idea and are just suppose to "just do it" and your suppose to succeed. Except all successful startups don't focus on just the idea, they focus on the execution so they can stay ahead. Any good idea will just get re-worked by competitors that try to catch up. The idea just gives you a "time investment head start", bigger/better the idea, more time you might have, but ultimately it turns into an endless marathon race, rather than a sprint to market with a good idea. This is where the idea that "everything is a remix" comes from.

Don't get me wrong, you need a good idea, but to be successful long term, you need to build out capabilities to stay relevant over time,  and stay ahead of the competition.

 

On the topic of "what large markets are possible" is an interesting one, because SpaceX by itself will essentially be the only market vendor in town for the foreseeable future. Its hard to gauge how many people will show up to this market, because its the first of its kind. I'd compare it to trying to guess how much Google would be worth when it was still hosted in a garage. Or on the flip size, how big the VR market would end up being (its not big and might never be big).

 Assuming Starship sticks around in only LEO, there are at least a few big names that come to mind who would love to leverage its capabilities. Governments always have money, and will happily put more money into getting bigger/more-awesome stuff to orbit more often, even if its just to "keep up". What about private enterprise that want their own space hotels for the ultra rich? Scientists could leverage access to space a whole bunch of ways that weren't possible before. Imagine paying for a CubeSat launch to send up a larger Hubble? Or sending out simple "budget" probes into deep space, like New Horizons to every planet every month. Maybe build an orbital construction facility and build out even larger deep space transportation if Starship doesn't cut it? Or build out the entire star shot project in orbit overtime and send multiple groups of probes to multiple targets? 

 

I think the one area that wont easily benefit is the average person. As even though Starship should be crazy cheap, its still crazy expensive for the average person. However, that doesn't mean its capabilities wont find their use. Its possible more Starlink-type infrastructure projects leverage easier access to space. There are potentially multiple markets that could benefit, all because of 1 new capability. 

 

 

 

 

 

[CastleKSide]

2 hours ago, tater said:

There's not really any market, however

Its true there really isnt a target market for launches on the scale Starship hopefully will allow. Falcon/Falcon heavy seem like they would be capable of vacuuming all of the "orbital launch market" into the hands of SpaceX if they focused on that. This is of course ignoring the catchup factor. I expect F9 will have competition at some point and there is a good chance they will find ways of iterating on the "barge landing" model that (may) be able to undercut SpaceX. Industry leaders never stay on top for long if they aren't innovating themselves to maintain their lead. I have always seen the speed and force behind Starships development as that private company mindset of not resting on your laurels applied to a sector that never has seen it before.

Thats a side point however. If i recall past criticisms, I think the point you are trying to make is that it doesnt matter how advanced or fantastical your product is, if no one will buy it it doenst matter. Which of course you are correct. I dont think it is correct to assume "there currently is no market" means "there wont be by the time Starship becomes operational." I have a much more muted timeline for that of 4 to 5 years (at least) to iron out the all the technical issues they have not even discovered yet and that for me is just "working unmanned launches with payload." Not refueling and certainly not manned flight. But lets actually look at economics:

SpaceX cannot maintain Starship as simply a "billionaires toy." No matter how rick Elon is or manages to become, a business needs to be turning a profit and that means customers.

Proposed customers/revenue stream at various times:

P2P personnel: not happening. Certainly not happening to support Starship with the timeline i suspect will happen
P2P  cargo: Less insane that manned p2p, but sill enormous engineering challenge, regulatory challenge (sonic booms are no ones friend) Most importantly however, I dont see it as a multibillion market. Cargo ships are more efficient and in mass transport, efficiency is key. Worldwide air cargo per year is ~60 million tons while worldwide seaborne cargo is ~11 billion tons. What fraction of the 60 million on airfreight will be willing to pay at least 2 times the price for their cargo to be faster? Unknown, but I would hazard if you dropped a fully functioning starship with p2p capability into SpaceXs hands immediately they would struggle to do 1 million tons of cargo a year. Might supplement Starship operations, but I dont see it ever managing to become a main business model. The only reliable customer I see would be military.

Mars base:  To have an economic mars base in the near term, Mars would need to have something worth exporting. It simply doesn't. If someone *else* manages to set up a functioning colony, then there becomes a market for transferring supplies. But that is dependent on someone else floating the cost of actually building and supporting the colony.

Moon Base: Most of the same problems with Mars, except it becomes much more likely to find someone else to foot the bill. Especially when you broaden it out to beyond US government as the possible customer. Russia and China have both made talk of founding a lunar colony. If regulations change to allow SpaceX to support international efforts like that (and those countries also go thru with their plans) I could see cargo runs becoming a viable income stream for Starship. I dont see even China and Russia combined managing to fully support a sizable moon base with their existing launch vehicles and I could see them using starship as an interim solution while they develop domestic capacity. Likely? probably not due to politics, but its at least possible. Another possible country would be India who could see an operational starship as an opportunity.

2 hours ago, cubinator said:

When I go to Mars, I don't want to bring one dollar with me. I'm not going so that I can make some kind of "economy" or "monetary value" for anybody. I don't give a damn what money is up there, nor which country I'm from.

While I understand the sentiment, you still need to pay for the ticket. Either you, or someone else. If you are going to mars and expect more than just to be dropped down with a finite life support and then die, the bill becomes even bigger. Again, as rich as some people are, in order to support a permanent human presence anywhere off world, there needs to be economics considered. Motivations do not make ability irrelevant.

So now lets go to ones that I think might actually work:

Starlink: this obviously is the fastest to become a reality .  Launch cadence does seem to have been a limiting factor for rollout and telecoms has the market to bring in the necessary billions. Will it be enough? Probably not long term, but will hopefully be enough to float the R&D costs for a few years. And maybe not just for Starship. As many of you have pointed out..

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The only way this makes sense economically is if they think they are creating a new market.

And on the list of possible market which i wish i could go into more detail on but this post is already far longer than I thought it was going to be

Space Mining: since transport is a big issue I dont see how a monumental revolution in transport capacity will be irrelavent. Will it be enough? Certainly not on its own, but it at least is a possibility.
Space Manufacture: This is an even bigger what if than mining, because its something that we seriously have no idea what is possible. Lack of transport in this area has made R&D into zero g manufacturing nearly impossible. There have been no real advantages found, but to say we have enough data to eliminate the possibility that we will find some even in the next 5 years is just wrong. We just dont know.

I see the most likely customer for many starship launches within the next 10 to 20 years is a commercial research base either in low earth orbit or lunar orbit looking into manufacturing technologies. Probably funded by the semiconductor industry giants of NVidia/AMD/Intel or thier successors. They have the cash flow and existing techniques are rapidly hitting their limit for increasing circuit density.

[Flavio hc16]

I see that you everyone are forgetting one of the biggest market in the world: health. Where is the only place where we can print complex biological structures ( aka organs) without them breaking? Yeap you guessed it: in space. What happens when someone can sell a 3d printed organ for like 10/20k $ and make a profit? Trillions in revenues ( yes, trillion with a T). There is a crapton of stuff we can do  and make in space once the price of reaching orbit fall substantially: making nearly perfect cristals, proteins and who knows what alloys you can create in space.

[zolotiyeruki]

I'm sure the NRO would *love* the ability to put a spy satellite in orbit with an 8-meter primary mirror.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, tater said:

I doubt they have meaningful amounts of money, though

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73

Lots and lots of Money 

[tater]

3 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Lots and lots of Money 

Large endowments, but they don't spend that much on research. 10s of billions total. Only a small fraction would ever be available for anything space related.

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

We just need better prospectors 

I wonder how hard it would be to make prospector probes out of Starlink chassis’s. Because that’s the sort of fleet of inexpensive prospector probes that is needed for a proper survey. Nudging an NEO into HEO would certainly be bonus

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

11 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I wonder how hard it would be to make prospector probes out of Starlink chassis’s. Because that’s the sort of fleet of inexpensive prospector probes that is needed for a proper survey. Nudging an NEO into HEO would certainly be bonus

I actually forsee someone pulling the power plant off a small used dozer and slapping in a Tesla battery (or 6)and a software suite plus solar panels. (maybe some plutonium to keep the fluids cycling at night) 

Presuming Musk is correct about payload - Percy sized rovers will seem quaint 

... 

And absurdly expensive. 

https://miningglobal.com/video/asi-testing-out-new-autonomous-mining-dozer

 

Edited August 10, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[tater]

 

The first one enlarges to insane size