[whaaaaat]

I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices down and induce demand.

Today, there are about ~1,100 metric tons of satellites launched into orbit annually. Starship is aiming for $100/kilogram cost per kilo to orbit. Let's get absolutely wild and assume that Starship takes over the entire world's launches. It would earn what, 1,100 tons * 1000 kilos/ton * $100/kilo = $110,000,000. $110M is... not a tremendous amount of money. It's definitely not enough to be building a fleet of rockets up.

Only about 20% of satellite costs are due to launch (and that was found in a pre-SpaceX era), so it's not likely satellite builders are going to optimize solely on cost. It's not an order of magnitude cost savings for builders. So SpaceX will have to find other means to compete -- reliability, capability, etc.

The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference. And that's not even counting the differences in payload capacity. Add several whole integer multipliers to account for that. For starship to need an "hours-scale" relaunch time, you'd need something like 50x+ the number of launches we currently have AND every launch in the nation to be on the platform.

It's a cool engineering target, but it's total nonsense for now.

[chroma]

Doesn't this argument prove too much? Long ago, compute was extremely expensive. The cost of compute went down, but people made tons of money selling more and more computers. The same was true for most technologies when they were first invented.

Yes, satellites are expensive compared to launches, but that's because launch costs are so high and launches are so infrequent. If you're spending the money to launch something into space, you'll also spend lots of money making sure that satellite is as reliable and as capable as possible. For example: The James Webb Space Telescope required a complex origami folding mechanism, but it could fit unfolded in Starship's payload bay. Removing that constraint would have saved the program hundreds of millions of dollars.

If the cost of something goes down, people buy more of it. This is basic economics, and it would be foolish to assume it doesn't apply to space launches. There are quite a few potential markets that would become viable if launch costs went down: space tourism, rapid point-to-point Earth transport (this would be especially useful for the military), cheap and rapid deployment of new satellite constellations, single module space stations, cheaper satellites due to fewer mass constraints, orbital radio telescopes, beamed power, space infrastructure such as asteroid harvesting, and so on. I doubt all of these things will exist in the future, but a 20x reduction in launch costs would make quite a few of them profitable. Just as how people 50 years ago couldn't have predicted all the future uses of cheap, fast computers, we can't predict all the uses of cheap, fast launches. What we can predict is that lower costs will increase demand.

[metadat]

More satellites == more space debris pollution, not really something I'm interested in supporting. Eventually we won't be able to safely get off this rock if there's too much space trash orbiting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris

[chroma]

I was addressing the comment about the economics of lower launch costs, not space debris. Similar to past pollution issues, I think it will be a problem but not a show stopper. There are already global standards for satellite end of life procedures. Most governments require that satellites be able to passivate themselves so that pressure vessels or batteries don't explode and create more debris. Geosynchronous satellites are required to have extra propellant so they can move to a graveyard orbit. Many satellites are put into low orbits so that atmospheric drag will cause them to deorbit within a known time frame. And lower launch costs will make it easier to launch spacecraft that can clean up debris.

Also, reusable spacecraft such as Starship actually reduce the amount of debris created per launch, as most space debris comes from spent upper stages. Of the 25 recent debris producing events listed on Wikipedia[1], 16 were caused by debris that would not be created by a reusable spacecraft (either an upper stage, a payload adapter, or a fairing).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producing...

[Titan2189]

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

[metadat]

Thanks! This is the link I was searching for but didn't find.

[panick21_]

By that same logic you think humans should not use ships right? I mean, more ships, means more ocean debris?

[avmich]

Unless you specifically send satellites to hunt for debris and bring it back. We have NORAD database of flying objects and Starship possibilities... hmm, I wonder if more satellites == less space debris pollution with such an approach...

[metadat]

What's a database going to do for you when your craft runs into debris? Nothing.

[chroma]

These databases (which include collision risks) are public. Satellite owners use them to make maneuvers so they can avoid getting too close to debris or other satellites. Since these collision risks can be predicted days in advance, it takes very little thrust to prevent them. Even cubesats without propulsion systems can change their orbits, as their orientation affects how much drag they experience.

[metadat]

Agreed, this will generally work up until the Kessler Threshold is reached.

[why_at]

I think a big part of the motivation to have many launches within hours is because in order for Starship to deliver anything beyond low earth orbit it will need refueling by many other Starships acting as tankers.

This means that for one mission to the Moon for example you might need >10 Starships to launch, and it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days.

It remains to be seen if they will actually reuse a booster on the same day, but there is a use case for it.

[avmich]

> it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days.

A hydrogen stage for Soviet N-1 rocket was designed so that it would be used near the Moon. The shelf life was going to be about 11 days (I think astronautix.com has this datapoint).

Starship is bigger, and methane/LOX is hotter than liquid hydrogen. Will it be storable for a month?..

[avmich]

http://astronautix.com/n/n1blocksr.html

[HPsquared]

I wonder how much improvement a "sunshade" type thing could make in reducing boil-off.

EDIT: or even just orienting the heat shield itself towards the sun, it probably has a fair amount of insulation ability at normal temperatures too.

[wffurr]

The 80% cost of satellites is in large part optimizing them for infrequent high cost launches. Bringing the cost of launch down means we can launch a lot more stuff and that stuff doesn't have to built to the same quality as e.g. the James Webb or even an Intelsat GEO satellite.

This kind of launch capacity is going to change the entire economics of building stuff for space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... has some interesting writing on this.

[dark_star]

It's not nonsense. To refuel Starship to land on the Moon like the NASA HLS program proposes [1], it will take 16 Starship Tanker flights [2][3]. So 16 launch, transfer propellant, land, refuel and refill propellant on the ground, and repeat.

For Mars launches, which is what Starship is mainly designed for, it's also 8-16 Tanker flights to fully fuel a Mars Starship. But SpaceX anticipates sending fleets of ships each synodic period (2 years), when Earth and Mars are closest. For a fleet of 10 Starships, that would be 10 launches of the Mars Starships, then 160 launches of Tanker Starships to fuel them.

You might debate whether Mars colonization is possible or desirable, but Starship and the high launch rate is designed for refueling Moon and Mars landing vehicles.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Planned_launch...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

[whaaaaat]

I think you are being taken for a ride, but hey, if SpaceX does this in the next 15 years come find me.

[mulmen]

Starship is intended to be human-rated. It’s possible to get anywhere on Earth in an hour. One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes. Rapid reusability becomes very important in that situation.

For Mars and Moon missions multiple Starships have to launch to refuel the Starship that will actually take the trip. Like, a dozen or more. Again, rapid reusability of the booster is appealing in this situation.

[dlisboa]

The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes, if ever. Maybe in the US because Musk is the government now. Just risk aversion will inhibit it, plus the economics for it will never make sense either.

Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.

[LeroyRaz]

How is a starship in anyway like an ICBM?

ICBMs are weapons, and are dangerous because you target them at specific targets and they explode.

How is starship coming down significantly more dangerous than a plane? If they can demonstrate similar levels or reliability (a huge ask), then I don't see a problem.

[lazide]

ICBM’s take a payload (warhead) and deliver it from the launch point to somewhere on the earth very far away (on another continent).

If you don’t see how earth to earth starship use couldn’t be construed as a type of ICBM, I suspect you’re thinking branding means a lot more than capability.

[mulmen]

The B-2 famously bombed Afghanistan from Missouri. That doesn’t make the 747 a weapon.

[lazide]

If you don’t think a 747 should be considered a potential weapon, then…. 9/11. Literally.

Same as trucks/cars and carbombs.

For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.

[samatman]

Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive.

Trucks have blown up buildings. Anything is a weapon if you arm it.

Conversely...

[mulmen]

> Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive.

A fully fueled 747 only carries about 190 tons of fuel and 140 tons of cargo. How do electronics turn that into kilotons of explosives?

[Aaargh20318]

> The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes

The US military actually has a contract with SpaceX to develop this to enable cargo drops, and in a later stadium even personnel, in 1 hour anywhere on the planet.

I suspect that if you're at the point where the US military intents to drop cargo or soldiers into your country within an hour, they're not going to be too concerned with asking for permission.

[JacobThreeThree]

Just setup oil-rig style landing terminals in the various oceans.

He's already landing Starships in oceans.

People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.

[tsimionescu]

1st class is 18h of extreme comfort. Starship would be a few hours of extreme discomfort. It's very likely much of the target audience wouldn't even survive the accelerations if they were allowed to attempt it.

[hparadiz]

It's 60 minutes to any point on the planet. 100 people fitting comfortably with a lot more room than a current airliner. The G forces are meant for humans. Very different considerations. No need to bring food or have bathrooms when the flight is that quick.

[tsimionescu]

The G forces are meant for astronauts, not for regular people rich enough to buy this flight. And the whole point of first class is that you pay for luxury. The duration of the flight barely matters, the luxury is the point, and a rocket just can't offer that. There are very few situations where rich people would be willing to put up with the discomfort for a shorter trip.

Especially given that the total trip time will likely be much longer than the flight itself. Consider that you can't take off or land Starship anywhere near a densely populated area, it has to be at least a few hours away by car from anywhere that people actually live.

So you can take a chauffeur to the airport, go trough priority and special luxuries as a first class passenger until your flight for say 1h total, board your 15h flight spent in luxury, and then a limo waits to take you to your destination 30m away from the landing airport.

Or, you can get driven for 3 hours out to the Starship launch site, board the rocket, probably in a special life support suit, wait some hours on the ship for it to be filled (humans are never allowed to approach an already full rocket), fly for one hour in an extremely bare bones flight that literally feels like a roller-coaster (so forget any kind of phone access, you'll be lucky not to puke while just holding on). Then you'll arrive at your destination landing area, ready for some limo to take you on another three hour trip back to civilization.

So you've saved maybe 8-10 hours, being extremely generous and only for the longest haul flights possible, but got none of the luxuries you'd expect. And you get to pay much more for the whole deal.

Remember that the Concorde halved or less the Paris-New York trip, and gave all the luxury you could want, and still went out of business.

[mulmen]

Starship is to an ICBM what a 747 is to an F/A 18.

Noise is a major concern for sure. But when the competition takes 18 hours you can put the launch and landing sites in very remote places where that’s less of a concern then feed them with planes or trains.

Regardless of how practical you think this is it is the reason SpaceX is pushing rapid reusability.

[whaaaaat]

> One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes.

The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.

Then you'd need the infrastructure to actually operate the rockets. That includes refurbishment, grounds crews, basically a whole Kennedy Space Center operating to launch these things.

And on top of that, you'd need an urban area willing to deal with constant sonic booms. Even one launch/landing cycle from these rockets is multiple sonic booms. The noise would be unbelievable. No urban center is going to allow regular starship launches out of it, so you'd have to go a loooong ways out. Which then means either a long boat ride or a short flight back to the city center. Which entails baggage transfer and potentially significant delays.

On top of that, space flight is not easy on the body. You can't just put grandma on a rocket and trust that it'd be a comfortable experience. Both the exit, zero-g, and re-entry portions of spaceflight are significant w.r.t. the forces they exert on the body.

It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.

[mulmen]

> The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.

That’s the case today but they’re essentially all disposable so far. If it meets expectations the cost will be much lower, approaching the cost of fuel.

According to Quora (yuck, I know) fully fueling a Starship snd Super Heavy costs about $1m [1] and a 747 is about $200k [2]. If Starship can carry 1,000 people that’s $1,000 per passenger in fuel. A 747-8 can carry up to about 600 people for $333.00 per passenger.

3x the price in fuel is something but Starship can get to orbit on that fuel load which means anywhere on earth. The 747-8 can “only” go about a third of the way around the earth on a full tank. So it’s within the realm of economic possibility especially considering the enormous time savings.

If all we cared about was fuel efficiency we’d use trains and boats for long distance travel. Time is money.

> It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.

Correct. The difference is more like an airplane vs an ocean liner or train.

I agree it is impractical but it is a reason for rapid reusability.

A smaller version of something like Starship could be more practical for earth-to-earth service.

It’s already the case that some people can’t fly for health reasons. Space travel won’t be for everyone but the fact is availability will continue to expand.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-cost-to-fully-fuel-a-Spac...

[2]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fill-a-747-je...

[imtringued]

Great, now we can subject millions of people to hearing loss for the benefit of billionaires being too petty for international flights.

[mulmen]

The ticket price would be more like first class airfare so not limited to billionaires.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting operating Starship anywhere near populated areas so hearing loss also isn’t a concern.

[verzali]

If you don't operate it near populated areas then that negates the faster transport. People don't pay a lot of money to fly to the middle of nowhere, they pay a lot of money to go between populated areas. If Starship has to land 200km from its destination city, then you need to plan for several hours of onward travel.

[mulmen]

It doesn’t negate the faster transport because it’s 18x faster. That leaves time to take a short flight on both sides.

[wasmitnetzen]

Starbase is like 10km/6mi from Port Isabel (5 000 people) and 30km/18mi from Brownsville/Matamoros (700 000 people). That's not that far.

[fastball]

$100/kg is the cost, not what they are charging. The only missions that will be launched at cost are SpaceX's own payloads (Starlink satellites / Mars colony shenanigans).

[martyvis]

I think they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. While their own Mars goals will need 100s if not 1000s of launches they also see new customers that would want launch and even recover much larger payloads than what are feasible today

[whaaaaat]

I think that's a reasonable attitude to a point, but like, it doesn't scale infinitely. Build it and it will come to 50-100x today's launch capacity? And Mars is still a laughable pipedream. Doing 100s of launches will cost SpaceX so much more than they are making selling launches to the rest of the world, it simply makes no sense.

And like, I'm a space enthusiast. I think we should be out mining asteroids and setting up space living quarters. I just... hourly starship launches don't make any sort of logical sense.

What they do make sense as is a marketing gimmick for Elon to get on stage to appeal to emotions of investors and nerds online. It's a gorgeous dream! I want it to be! But it's just a clever emotional appeal to get you to not think too hard or too critically.

[avmich]

> Build it and it will come to 50-100x today's launch capacity

Yes, because Starship promises 50-100 times cheaper delivery of kg to LEO.

Read https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... on the subject.

[whaaaaat]

Let's take the pessimistic estimates of Falcon 9 Heavy, which are about $3000/kg to LEO. (The optimistic estimates put it closer to $1500.)

You are suggesting that pessimistically, Starship is aiming at $30-60/kg to LEO. (Or, using the optimistic estimates, $15-$30/kg to LEO).

I don't think in even Elon Musk's wildly optimistic press conferences he pushed a number below ~$100/kg to LEO. I don't know where you get the idea that launch costs are going to come down 50-100x.

[avmich]

Back-of-the-envelope calculations look like this: fully reusable Starship's flight costs roughly the cost of fuel, which is 1-2 million dollars per flight, both stages. If the Starship carries 150 tons to orbit per flight, and it costs $1.5e6, then we have the price of 1 kg on orbit equal to $1.5e6 / 150e3 = $10. Which is rather comfortably 100 times cheaper than SOTA.

Wildly optimistic would seem to be even lower estimations. If both oxygen and methane we can get from atmosphere - and we have both efficient detanders and demonstrations of e.g. Terraform Industries which use solar panels and oxygen to pull CO2 from atmosphere and produce CH4 - then the question is of optimization, and we're just starting here for this application. So, a flight of Starship might get cheaper than $1 million - the question is, how much and how soon?

[whaaaaat]

I haven't seen anywhere suggesting a $1-2m launch cost is a reasonable target. Sure, maybe $10m is achievable, but $1m is so far off it's not useful as a cost estimate.

[mulmen]

The asteroid belt is even further than Mars so you need rapid reusability for that too.

[whaaaaat]

You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to get to meaningful asteroids, and in fact many fantastic candidate asteroids come much, much closer than Mars.

[mulmen]

They don’t come as close as LEO though so you still need rapid reusability.

[mgiampapa]

The asteroid belt doesn't have nearly the gravity well to send payloads back from, but it seems much harder to make propellant there in situ.

[whaaaaat]

Some asteroids are water rich, some asteroids are mineral rich. Many mineral rich asteroids appear to be 'hydrated', meaning that among the rocks they contain ice. Solar power will be more effective on an asteroid in NEO than on the surface of Mars, but gravity will be lower. I don't know that we, as a species, really know which will be harder. They'll require different technologies, but the raw materials exist in both places sufficient to manufacture fuel.

[mgiampapa]

We have a lot of experience with chemical processes like fractional distilling that will take a lot more work in micro-gravity. Yeah there are tradeoffs, but my hunch is the surface of Mars will be a lot more familiar.

[dark_star]

It depends on what you are thinking critically about - what is your frame of mind. You don't see a viable business here.

But SpaceX does see several possibilities. One is supplying a US Moon base and US space stations. Since Starship/Superheavy rockets are so inexpensive to build (about 100M in expendable configuration [1] even doing something like that would be profitable for SpaceX.

For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.

It might also be that a nation state might want to fund something like that to establish a base there.

Again, you may see a viable business in Mars colonization. But SpaceX does. So do other people. It was conventional wisdom that Starlink would not work, but it is now quite profitable. [2]

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

[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/billionaire-elon-musks-new-s...

[imtringued]

You seemingly ignored the cost of the return ticket, which even with your fantasy numbers would cost many millions of dollars.

Cramming one hundred people into a starship is eerily reminiscent of overloaded slave ships. The assumption is that you will die on the journey or at your destination.

[verzali]

They don't really plan for people coming back from Mars, for most of them its a one way ticket...

[tsimionescu]

> For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.

Musk has lied many times about many things. This one in particular makes less than 0 sense - Starship has nowhere near the capacity to take 100 humans to Mars even just including the provisions needed for the trip, unless you assume that those people will essentially sit in their own little cell for 2 months.

[whaaaaat]

Thank you. I was timed out, but I was going to say there's 0% chance of Starship taking 100 people. Do you have any concept of how much water, oxygen, C02 scrubbing, food, shielding, medicine, and infrastructure you need to support 100 people?! Imagine the device they have on the ISS, multiply it by 20, and then pack all the water it uses in a year in advance onto the ship. Then pack 100 warm bodies in there too?

It's simply not possible in the ship they've designed.

[avmich]

Bill Gates once complained that independent developers, other software companies aren't keen about building software for Microsoft's modern graphical environment, Windows, so he had to put his own engineers to work on that. Legend then goes that it's how Office application suit was born :) .

With SpaceX Musk surely understands he's aiming way higher than the capacity of the modern space launch market. Your, whaaaaat, reasoning was - and unfortunately even now sometimes is - the standard among the industry professionals. That's why rather early on Starlink - the project which was going to employ Falcon's capacities - was born.

With Starship we see some obvious uses for launches - orbital tankers - because Starship doesn't really fly anywhere from LEO without refueling, Solar system probes - we probably going to see many, space telescopes, unmanned satellites of many kinds, manned orbital stations. I hope a Moon base - or several - would be another customer of Starship launches. Elon was talking about picking some slice of the world market of cargo and passenger transportation. Maybe we'll see some other uses which we don't see today.

The point, roughly is that, yes, here we have "build and they'll come", and SpaceX will help them to come in all possible ways. So I disagree that it's total nonsense, it might be actually a very good idea.

[Narishma]

> Legend then goes that it's how Office application suit was born :) .

Legend indeed. All the main Office applications either started on the Mac and/or were bought from third-party developers.

[avmich]

This is a legend :) some apps were running under DOS even before porting to Windows... But still a legend no worse than some others :) .

[Narishma]

No Office application came from DOS to Windows. They either came from the Mac (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) or directly started as Windows apps (Access). Word for DOS was a completely different application with no relation to the Mac and Windows versions.

[avmich]

I guess the Word for Windows is as related to Word for DOS as Atlas V is related to Atlas II. Thanks.

[HPsquared]

Vertical integration has always been a key aspect of SpaceX (and Tesla for that matter). Starlink is perfectly in line with that strategy.

[steveoscaro]

They’ll need something like 8 or 10 tanker launches to fully refuel an orbiting starship that will then depart Earth orbit. That’s the initial use case for quick turnaround at the launch pad.

[JacobThreeThree]

>I've never understood this, because the economics of hourly launches just don't make sense. There's not nearly enough demand, even assuming they drive prices down and induce demand.

There's no demand for travel that would take you to the other side of the earth in 1-2 hours?

[mullingitover]

> The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference

There's an interesting post[1] on r/enoughmuskspam drawing some conclusions (based on well documented history) that SpaceX is just an extension of the 80s Star Wars/SDI program. Little easter eggs like the fact that the Falcon rockets are named after the DARPA FALCON Project, Musk's ties to directors of the SDI program, etc.

If the real goals of the SDI program are to be realized, i.e. winning WWIII by knocking down all the enemy ballistic nukes, the US would have to put a lot of mass into orbit. You'd need some kind of cheap heavy launch system to put Brilliant Pebbles[2] up there, or as we're calling it these days, Starshield[3].

I think this is 100% the plan, and Musk has gone so hard right because the Heritage Foundation was the original proponent of SDI/"Let's start and win WWIII" and they're still the power players behind the republican party. (Fun fact, SDI and Brilliant Pebbles were heavily pushed by Dr. Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.) The stuff about populating Mars is just an exciting story to tell the rubes so they don't go asking questions about your massive space-based weapons platform.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

[chroma]

Your claims are simply incorrect.

First, Musk has been talking about Mars since before he founded SpaceX. Other people such as Adeo Ressi, Robert Zubrin, and Reid Hoffman have reported Musk talking about colonizing Mars as early as 2001. It was only after that that he went to Russia to try and buy old rockets, thinking that landing a greenhouse on Mars would excite people about space again.

Second, Falcon 1 was named 18 months before the DARPA FALCON project existed. And the contract that SpaceX was awarded was less than half a million dollars. Nine other companies got similar contracts, including AirLaunch and Orbital Sciences Corp. Only Andrews Space, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman got phase two contracts.

Third, the Starshield program is almost entirely a product of the Biden administration, and its capabilities are nothing like SDI. Current Starshield satellites are similar to that of Starlink, but owned and operated by the US government. They have better encryption and probably some observational capabilities, but they are incapable of intercepting ICBMs. An SDI program would require technologies very different from what SpaceX has been developing. For example: SpaceX uses liquid fuels, while interceptors would have to be solid boosters.

And finally, SDI is unworkable for several reasons. It takes time to launch a satellite constellation, and during that time an adversary would be incentivized to launch their nukes (since it becomes a use it or lose it situation). Or they would build more anti-satellite weapons and ground based lasers, allowing them to take out enough interceptors to launch a devastating nuclear exchange. And even if the system remained intact, it would do nothing to stop hypersonics, bombers, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and nukes being smuggled into the country. People realized this long ago, which is why (in addition to cost) SDI was cancelled.

The only way your model of the world could be correct is if Musk was a brilliant con man who has spent the past quarter century risking his fortune to develop reusable rockets for the sole purpose of building a system that everyone knows would not protect the US in a global thermonuclear war. And he's somehow kept this secret from the public this entire time, even though he's leaked many other embarrassing secrets. Musk is far from the sanest person around, but such a claim stretches credulity to the breaking point.

[mullingitover]

You might think SDI is unworkable but Mike Griffin doesn’t[1], and he’s been working with Musk for decades now. Meanwhile Starshield started launching in 2020 under the Trump administration.

You were right about Falcon though, it wasn’t DARPA but the actual SDI Falcon laser program [2].

I don’t claim to know everything and I could be wrong, but it is very unlikely that we’d know all the details the super secret weapons system if SpaceX is actually building it. The parts they wouldn’t be able to hide, however, are definitely visible.

[1] https://spacenews.com/space-development-agency-a-huge-win-fo...

[2] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/12982617

[panick21_]

Mike Griffin is one of the most involved people in US space for many decades. Of course he has some connection to many companies including SpaceX. And of course he wanted to encourage and create a more dynamic space company environment in the US.

But to see all this as some sort of linear story is just a conspiracy.

Yes people in the 80s who were part of Starwars continued to exist and continue in many place in the US government. And they still believe in many of the ideas in the 80s, specially Missile defense.

Many of them are space nerds, and simply want to see more space development in general. And they are not secretive about that, there are plenty of interviews you can look up. The whole OpenStack project came about because somebody from Starwars wanted to bring in young people to NASA. The whole company Plant came out of that too.

Specifically in regards to the early 2000s, the reason for DoD support for launch was that after 2001 they realised that they didn't have enough sat capacity over the middle east, and then they realised it would take far to long to launch new sats. Since then DoD has supported various programs for small and rapid launch. DoD has continued this, most recently with the company Firefly. That was the reason for early support for SpaceX and others, not any great dreams of Starwars ideas.

SpaceX however wasn't really able to get in with DoD much, the whole Starwars grand scale idea had no real power at DoD. NASA and the needs to supply station that made SpaceX able to continue to exist and develop. That built Falcon 9.

SpaceX themselves then pushed for Falcon 9 reusability and cheaper price. That then in turn made many old-heads at DoD dust off old plans that were shelved in the 80s and started to look into what could be done with the new capabilities that SpaceX dropped into their labs.

Remember, SpaceX wasn't the only company talking about reusability. Rocketplane Kistler had far more support from 'the establishment'. So Musk was just one of many people who want to do things in space, and most people thought he was likely gone fail.

Starlink was a natural thing for SpaceX to do. LEO internet, was a thing people had been wanting to do since the 90s. And SpaceX jumped on it with private funding. They for sure knew they would likely be able to sell to the government, but they also knew that it wouldn't be easy or fast, so they designed it as a consumer system primarily.

Now that SpaceX the largest producers of rockets and sats, of course DoD would look to them for various other projects. And SpaceX wants to make money, so if DoD asks for bids on some projects, then SpaceX will likely bid if they think they can make money.

Mike Griffin has worked with Musk, but they have also fought each other quite a bit. Even in the early days. Just recently Mike Griffin was the spearhead in the anti-SpaceX lunar lander campaign.

Basically, there is no real story here. Literally everything in modern US spaceflight was influenced by the money that flowed into the space industry in the 80s under Reagan. Many of the same people and same ideas are still around and as the space industry develops, many old ideas are warmed up, and new ideas are developed.

[mullingitover]

I don’t look at it as being a conspiracy but as the DoD doing its job (with different political groups having different ideas about what that job is) and building technologies and systems to win wars. My take on Musk is that he’s hyperfixated on what one political group wants to do with SDI, and that’s why he’s suddenly obsessing over supporting them. Republicans certainly don’t care about any science nonsense happening with taxpayer money. They want weapons.

[panick21_]

I don't think Musk cares much about winning wars or these Starwars DoD projects. He wants to get to Mars. If DoD pays SpaceX to build something, he might do it, but that's about it.

His all-in for republicans is partly because he is anti-regulation and because he has always been a free-speech all the way guy, even before he was more directly political.

He really turned more MAGA during the pandemic when in California, the politicians didn't want to allow him to reopen the Tesla factory.

[askvictor]

As if I needed more things to worry about...