While I’m sure manned disasters like Columbia contributed to this failure, I think the largest part of it comes down to incentives. So far, there isn’t any profit in manned space missions.
As soon as the incentives line up, I think technology will rapidly catch up. If we had a product that could only be manufactured in space by humans (say, those 0-g nearly lossless fiber optic cables, if they couldn’t be made autonomously and if there was a sudden spike in demand for them) I think you’d see manned spaceflight boom.
That’s a real awkward turn of phrase in the context of Challenger’s last flight. Freudian perhaps?
More seriously, @Babale nailed it in one. Space operations as a dick-measuring contest vs. the Soviets was stupid-expensive for the small practical gains made. As and when spaceflight (manned or not) can be done for a profit, it’ll be done massively, not sparingly and sporadically.
Right now we’re in the interregnum where some things, communications & remote sensing satellites mostly, can make money, albeit not nearly what they could make if/when launch costs drop 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, taxpayer spending on Big Science, military, and other prestige projects is most of the rest of space activity.
It all comes down to cost. The Shuttle was supposed to dramatically reduce costs (or at least that was how it was “sold” as a program), and it obviously didn’t. The only way to reduce cost is reusability, but the failure of the Shuttle to do that sucked the life out of other reusability programs, to the point where even very recently many were in denial about the utility.
SpaceX has brought human spaceflight down from a billionaire’s club to a hundred-millionaire’s club. That’s a significant step, even if it’s irrelevant to the general public. We’ll see how Starship pans out. I think it’ll probably take one more generation to really be a middle-class thing, but it’ll be accessible to single-digit millionaires.
In 2019 Elon Musk tweeted that a ticket to Mars would be accessible to most people in “advanced economies”… but we know how ambitious he can be.
Very dependent on volume, but I’m confident moving to Mars (return ticket is free) will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k. Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if they want.
There are certainly a lot of open questions about that number. The ticket price is going to be dominated by the amortization of the Starship. It takes about 2 years to make a loop, and if the service life is 40 years, and we assume 100 people per flight, then only 2000 people can go per Starship built. So it had better not cost more than $400M if the amortization cost is to be less than $200k per passenger (say). That’s obviously unfavorable compared to an airliner, which might fly millions of people over its service life.
And clearly there are a lot of other costs as well, but the long trip imposes certain unavoidable limits.
LEO is much easier by comparison, because the upper stage can be recycled in less than two hours. It might make 1000 trips in its service life instead of 20. It’ll be dominated not by time but by cycle life. And you can pack a lot more people in for a quick trip to orbit than when they have to live there for 6+ months.
Yeah, I think Musk’s price would be just the variable costs of a flight. Even then, it sounds way too low.
Don’t forget that sending a Starship to Mars requires seven flights - the first flight for the ship, and six refueling flights. And to get home it needs a whole lot of fuel made on Mars, which is going to be really expensive. And it has to carry not just you, but all the stuff you will need to survive for two years on Mars plus the food and water for the trip, which will weigh several times what the passenger weighs.
Maybe one day when/if all this gets commodified and dozens of Starship flights go off per day, prices might come down where someone without millions could get to Mars. Until then, it’s going to be the rich and peoole going for scientific or commercial purposes.
The refueling flights are fairly cheap. A full load of propellant is about $1M, and if the tanker vehicles can be reused 1,000-10,000 times, the amortized vehicle cost is <$100k. So the propellant flight cost is <$100k per person.
The cost of propellant on Mars just depends on the capital and transport cost of the machinery. Thin-film solar could be pretty cheap. And of course you need a lot less propellant since there’s no booster.
I think the very low-ball estimates assume that solar continues to come down in cost, and that even on Earth, solar is used to produce LOX and methane. No electrical storage needs since you just make the propellant when conditions are good. Energy can get very cheap that way.
I think we are underestimating the cost of a real, passenger carrying Starship. There will be many millions of dollars in airlocks, all the hardware for a life support system, toilets, showers, communicatikns, etc. All this stuff will have to be inspected periodically under some maintenance program. The pressure vessel may have a max life, and will have to be inspected periodically I’d guess.
Every booster flight is 33 engine flights. Those also need inspection from time to time. And so it goes. All the little stuff adds up fast.
A large passenger jet costs roughly $25,000/hr to fly. A 747 going across the ocean and back can cost half a million bucks. Starship when finished out as a working spaceship will be very expensive and probably require a lot of expensive maintenance.
Everyday Astronaut released a video on Stoke Space:
They’re aiming to build a two-stage, fully reusable rocket. Methane booster along the lines of how SpaceX does it. A hydrogen upper stage built very much like a capsule. Heat shield on the bottom. Engines are placed in a ring around the outside, so that they’re largely protected from reentry heating. They aim to get an aerospike-like effect from it.
They’re depending very much on certain synergies working out. The heatshield is actively cooled by propellant, and they then use the hot propellant to drive the turbopumps. They then eject the waste gas out the center of the heatshield, which gives the aerospike effect.
A lot of what they’re doing seems to be giving themselves as much starting margin as they can, and then spending that on simplicity and manufacturability. Hydrogen propellant has a high Isp. The base-first reentry means no header tanks or other tricky bits. The expander cycle is inherently efficient. The ring setup means loads are transmitted directly to the skin. Etc. But then, it seems clear that they won’t be able to optimize out every last gram of mass, so they’ll need that margin to succeed.
They’re actually bending metal and doing hot-fires. They certainly have their work cut out for them, but I’m glad to see another interesting take on reusability.
100 flights isn’t much if the system works as planned. They eventually need to launch several times per day. one full refueling is six launches plus the original, somjust the refueling test program should just about get them there.
That’s the target, at least. They want to be limited by the orbital mechanics of the upper stage–something like a couple of hours to be in a position to land again. The booster will be much faster to turn around since it’s back at the launch pad in <10 minutes.
That’s assuming all their goals work out, of course, like that Starship doesn’t come back with 5% of the tiles missing, etc.
That’s the plan. That’s why they are using rhe ‘chopstick’ landing method. Super Heavy comes back, gets caught and put right back on the pad. Next Starship gets hoisted up, stacked, and off they go. When Starships come back, they get caught as well and either stacked back on a waiting Superheavy booster or put aside to wait for one.
An ‘aspirational’ goal is a turnaround time of under an hour. That won’t happen for a long time, though. But one launch a day could happen soon if everything works right.
If Starship is to be practical, it has to turn around fast. A Starship mission to anywhere but LEO requires seven launches - the original, and six refueling launches. If the turnaround time was even a week, the whole thing probably becomes unworkable. A Starship would have to sit in orbit for six weeks just for refueling, and with cryo fuels I don’t know if that’s even reasonable. It would certainly change the whole cost calculation.
It’s good to be skeptical. Whenever I get too excited about Starship I remind myself of all the things they have to accomplish before the system can be said to be workable. The chopstick landings, whether they can achieve a fast turnaround, in-space refueling, in-space restart of cold engines after a long time, maintaining landing fuel in the header tank without issue for days, weeks or months in space, surviving re-entry, etc.
Tomorrow’s atatic fire is huge. Starship has twice the thrust of Saturn V. Nothing this powerful has ever been attempted before. If that goes off wothout a hitch, I’ll feel a lot better about the orbital attempt.
I don’t think their orbital depot concept for HLS depends on that rapid a cycle time. They will have a custom depot vehicle that will very likely have cryocoolers and other components for long-term propellant storage.
It’s still better the faster they can launch, but my impression from the NASA win is that SpaceX had fallbacks for lots of contingencies. I suspect that even includes upper-stage reusability being a failure.
Yeah, you are right about that. SpaceX recently announced an ‘expendable’ mode for Starship that could lift 250 tons. The point being that even in expendable mode it’s still going to be the cheapest way to get mass into orbit, by far. Maybe they are getting ahead of possible criticism if they can’t get the re-entry figured out at first.
If Starship costs $100 million and they have to throw it away, that’s still only $400/kilo. That’s assuming at least Superheavy reuse. If they had to refuel in orbit and throw away the tankers, it’s still only $700 million to put a 250 ton payload into a fully fueled rocket in orbit. That’s still only 20% or so of the cost of a single SLS launch lifting 1/3 or the weight.
I had forgotten about the fuel depot idea. That does mitigate risk somewhat. A dedicated depot can be insulated, shaded, and otherwise designed for long term storage in space.
Ref the upcoming first flight of Superheavy/Starship, Shotwell also said
Keep in mind this first one is really a test flight. We can’t do stage-sep [separation] testing here, can’t separate the ship from the booster until we lift off. So this is truly a flight test. And the real goal is to not blow up the launchpad. That is success.
To be sure they need to do the 33-engine live fire first. Tomorrow. Which will be exciting to watch whether it goes nominal or catastrophic.
But she’s definitely trying to adjust expectations that, unlike NASA, they more or less plan to blow a few to smithereens on the way to success.
Which is not really news, that’s how SpaceX has always rolled. But after the last year’s comparative reliability of Falcon 9, they want to reset the clock so to speak on Superheavy back to “rapid prototyping stage”, not “mature production hardware stage”. Which all sounds good to me.
