Sounds like an excellent way to spread the pork and support each of the space contractors.
When funds are spent based on politics and “strategic” concerns, not maximizing odds of success for the instant mission, odd “stuff” is bound to occur.
Just to be clear, SLS costs about $4 billion per launch, and that’s before amortizing development costs.
You could put together almost any Rube Goldberg system based on commercial rockets and it wouldn’t amount to a slice of bacon compared to SLS.
SLS is completely useless for anything outside of Artemis. It even failed at one of its original mandates–the Europa Clipper mission–because its solid boosters cause so much vibration that they’d have destroyed the probe.
And that’s bad, right?
SLS costs about $42,000 per kilogram to orbit. Falcon Heavy (for example) costs about $2,400.
So yes, unless the goal is to waste money, SLS is bad.
And it’s bad even for “strategic” reasons. It’s unusable for anything outside of Artemis. It would be uncompetitive even if the price were comparable to commercial rockets due to the poor cadence (less than a flight per year!) and the aforementioned vibration problems.
It’s the Falcon line that gave the US a massive strategic advantage, completely eliminating any reason to use Russian rockets, for instance. It forced ULA to stop using Russian engines, gave Arianespace a way to stop using Soyuz, and allowed the US to give them the middle finger when it comes to crewed launches to the ISS.
All that said, Congress is Congress, and some are going to fight the elimination of their gravy train. I think everyone recognizes the reality of the situation, but to get SLS out of the picture will require some wheel greasing. I certainly won’t be put out if that means one of SpaceX’s US competitors (Blue Origin especially) gets some contracts thrown their way.
Bezos expects Blue Origin to be more valuable than Amazon (which is currently worth about $2.3 trillion) some day:
It’s clearly… aspirational.
The first company that can truly unlock space resources will be worth quadrillions of dollars, not trillions. You can expand in any direction in 3 dimensions. Capture even a tiny portion of the asteroid belt, powered by an infinitesimal fraction of the sun, and convert to something usable, and you can trivially exceed any Earth economy. Getting there will be quite the trick, though.
SpaceX jumped to $350B valuation recently. Expansion of Starlink once Starship is functional might get them to $1T. Getting much past that will likely require actually building something permanent in space.
What does this even mean? SpaceX is privately held.
Privately owned businesses have valuations. For example privately owned businesses are bought and sold all the time. When people do this they get a valuation. Or when many business loans are made. SpaceX has other investors other than Musk; they need valuations when determining whether to invest.
I’m gonna go ahead and call this one a miss.
Yeah–private valuations can’t be directly compared to public ones except in a very loose sense. The company declares a value of some number and institutional investors can buy in at that price or not (and internal stockholders can sell). If they get reasonable uptake, you can say the company is valued at that figure.
It’s probably more accurate in the long run since institutional investors are a bit less swayed than public ones by what Jim Cramer is currently screaming about on the TV.
I think you would need a cislunar space infrastructure on the order of the “High Frontier” proposals before asteroid mining would be profitable; and even then it would probably only be in the context of supporting operations for other purposes in high orbit. It isn’t like you can send out a spacecraft and harvest platinum nuggets for return to Earth.
A lot of this stuff is way out there. But possibly the first thing that makes sense is to move computing infrastructure into orbit. It’s going to be a while before we have an IC fab in space, but maybe all the other stuff can be built–solar panels, structure, radiators, antennae, etc. Ship up the small, high value stuff from Earth.
AI training and the like isn’t latency sensitive, so the servers can be far away from Earth. Maybe even move it closer to the Sun for more solar, though heat rejection then gets harder.
C’mon, there are still more than three weeks to go!
Chinese Tiangong space station just had a near miss with Russian space debris.
Link loads okay though no preview, sorry.
https://fxtwitter.com/mickeywzx/status/1865608916446622154
In 1963, the US released 480 million copper needles into orbit as the culmination of Project West Ford.
It appears that in 2025, SpaceX will release tens of thousands of Chiquita bananas into orbit as a part of Operation Fruit Hat:
(seriously, no one knows what the connection is here, except that the previous Starship flight carried a single stuffed banana, and they seem to be running with the theme…)
At $6.2 million per banans, that’s a lot of coin.
With a fully operational Starship, it could be as low as $10/banana, fulfilling Lucille Bluth’s prediction: It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
($10M/launch, 150,000 kg/launch, 0.15 kg/banana)
I’d suggest the connection is that Elon is bananas.
Also, I had not been aware of Project West Ford. For the others like me:
Wow, that’s wild.
In short, the helicopter’s on-board navigation sensors were unable to discern enough features in the relatively smooth surface of Mars to determine its position, so when it touched down, it did so moving horizontally. This caused the vehicle to tumble, snapping off all four of the helicopter’s blades.