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I don’t have time to detail everything I think you have wrong but re SpaceX one thing you leave out as a potential economic case is space mining. Could be insanely valuable.
Also most financial analysts value Starlink quite highly. Maybe you are missing something they are not.
The logistics of sending any kind of vehicle or probe to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt for mining are so ludicrously expensive in terms of energy/momentum spend that the astrophysics community has largely treated space mining as a joke proposal for science fiction books since about the 60s - and that's before you get to the economics problems (there is virtually nothing in space worth mining and returning to Earth that couldn't be extracted more profitably on Earth in the first place). The case for space mining is a complete, unsalvageable disaster. "Short" version:
I don't doubt that SpaceX will happily take the money of anyone foolish enough to ignore all of the above at their own expense and perform their services as advertised. But their business model does not depend on people with more money than common sense - their big moneymaker is, as others have noted, building a novel telecommunications network with broadband-like performance and selling it to the US government, using novel reusable rocket components that cost orders of magnitude less than the previous state-of-the-art and that can be launched quickly and regularly. I expect their next steps for profitability all revolve around expanding the use of this network to things like surveillance satellites, content providers, etc. I grant that they have some appetite for ridiculous vanity projects like the mars launch stuff, but this is ultimately a manageable marketing expense. But for anyone with some rudimentary literacy in the subject, it should be clear that space mining is not a sustainable business, and as a marketing stunt it is extremely boring (heh).
Why would there be californium on asteroids? You might find some plutonium from interstellar dust (although Earth is again a better source of that), but there's no process that generates californium near enough to Sol that it would actually get here before it decayed.
"On" Earth is plausibly not true, although "around Earth" definitely is. The most concentrated reservoir of antimatter in Sol System is Earth's Van Allen belts. Estimates I've seen are that you can't get the price below a billion a gram making it in particle accelerators due to inherent inefficiencies (currently it's more like trillions), while scoops in the Van Allen belts could conceivably do it for millions.
The elements that are most amenable to asteroidal extraction would be tellurium and the strongly-siderophile metals (Ru,Rh,Pd,Re,Os,Ir,Pt,Au), all of which are strongly-depleted in the crust due to tellurides and native metals (the primary forms of these elements) sinking into the core. Some of these are useful and as such humongously expensive. But, yes, there's the issue that you need to refine them on-site because of the delta-V needed for the return trip, and more generally the Space Bootstrapping Problem where a lot of space industries only make sense if there are other space industries to absorb their products.
A couple of mitigating factors I'll note:
if you were to mine asteroids with people, you would not need radiation shielding for the time on the asteroid, because you could use the asteroid itself - digging deep on asteroids is pretty easy energetically. You still need the radiation-shielded craft to get there, though, which sucks.
mass ratios look far nicer if you bite the bullet and start using nuclear. This sucks for takeoff from Earth because people will get apoplectic, but for things like a return mass driver or an orbital-transfer burn there's less of an issue there. This is getting into issues of "do you really think they're going to let Elon Musk buy a breeder reactor and reprocessing plant", though.
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"Getting places in space is convoluted to begin with, and all trips beyond Earth orbit require carefully calculated momentum assists from various heavenly bodies. The error on these calculations is pretty large relative to the size of most asteroids. It's infeasible to pre-plan a route so specific and so accurate that one could send a spacecraft to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt once, let alone reliably at different times. The energy and time cost for any such trip would be enormous as well."
I'm already lost on your first point. NASA has already done this. For both asteroid belt asteroids and near earth asteroids. If you don't swap your inches and centimeters then yes you can go to a specific asteroid. It is not too complex, we understand orbital mechanics.
There is no reason to mine in space while everything we need is much cheaper to obtain on earth. It’s unnecessary science fiction to build “industrial tech” settings that include asteroid mines and lunar helium farming or whatever.
This seems to presume that this state will persist into some unspecified eternity. Politics alone can make space mining plenty competitive. It's the same reason why "peak oil" predictions kept getting bodied.
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There is no need to mine the new world when everything is much cheaper to obtain in Europe. Some have argued that most colonies actually did cost their home countries much more than they brought in, but one can't argue with the results. THE USA!
The new world actually did offer resources not available, or available only in very short supply, in Europe.
Same could be said for space. You can't find 6 trillion dollars worth of platinum laying around here anywhere!
And if there’s ever a demand for $6 trillion worth of platinum the same way as for sugar and tobacco, you’ll have a point.
You don't know what you can use it for till you get that much! Heck tobacco wasn't even a thing before they brought it back! Certainly don't need sugar or tobacco, people just like them, pure luxury goods. Platinum has actual uses. From pure utils, tobacco and sugar have been huge negatives for human health and society including the horrible conditions on sugar plantations.
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Just from the sheer energy inputs, space mining rockets will not compete with terrestrial dump trucks while there are any appreciable mineral reserves on earth. When industrial civilization reaches out for asteroids, it will be "resorting" to spice mining, not "advancing" to space mining.
There is also the matter of $5 trillion platinum asteroids and the like, but the price of such metals would crater if you tried to sell any appreciable amount.
Space mining may become advantageous if we have significant material demands in orbit.
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THE SPICE MUST FLOW! It all depends on if how we value energy in the future. We are sitting next to a basically infinite supply of it.
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This goes directly into the big bag of wild ideas the might happen sometime in the future, that could be insanely valuable, and are never delivered. Can he please deliver on any of the other wild insanely valuable things he promised, before we entertain this? Can he at least do ship-to-ship refueling first?
Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I'm not one for "trust the experts" type arguments. It's not like there isn't a long history of eggs ending up on financial analysts' faces, in my short time on this planet alone.
Am I missing something here, or wasn't SpaceX the company that provided, under (substantially although IIRC not entirely) Musk's leadership, reusable rockets? That's a huge deal in terms of proven track record – basically SpaceX did something that the massive defense corporations failed to do for decades.
If Starship works (and it seems likely to) it will absolutely revolutionize orbital delivery. Going back to the idea of using Starlink to create demand, Starship is likely to drop cost-to-orbit enough to create more demand. (I don't think "Starship will work eventually" should be considered an Elon Fanboy Position, it's fundamentally a bigger rocket of the type we already know works! But this is rocket science, and I'm not a rocket scientist, so take that with a grain of terrestrial salt.)
Now, I wouldn't be surprised to see space mining in my lifetime (we know it is technically feasible) but I think the true reason SpaceX will do fine for the short-to-medium future is because space is a key national security concern, and getting moreso. There is a ton of money in national security, and SpaceX is uniquely suited to tap it.
Yeah... if reusable rockets were so great, orbital delivery would already be absolutely revolutionized, you wouldn't have to point to the next big thing that is just around the corner.
I believe the argument is that this is false. There aren't that many people who want to launch satellites, or do that many things in space. Is space tourism supposed to be the thing he'll make bank on?
This is where I disagree. I think he'll run out of hype before he manages to get it to work.
I'd like you to be right about it, but I'd be shocked.
Sure... but the glowies can pay Bezos instead.
It is!
I think quite the opposite – if you get the cost low enough, sending stuff to space becomes a high school science project and everyone wants to do it. Lots of amateur CubeSats in this vein.
Maybe you're right. To clarify, your position is that Starship will never make a successful orbital payload delivery? Or that it will never land successfully?
Right now they can't, can they? New Glenn is having its own developmental issues, leaving the only functional Blue Origin delivery vehicle New Shepard, which is designed for orbital tourism, not payload delivery.
I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
Can we do some back of the envelope calculations here? How low does the price have to go, for people to start launching satellites en-masse? How many would they want to launch? How many clients would SpaceX have to get to make a decent profit at such a low price point? How much can they launch before triggering Kessler Syndrome?
The bets I placed are on the former, and I admit that it's not impossible I will end up losing it. Fire-and-forget is a lot easier, after all, but I don't think Starship development is going well.
Hence, why I brought up EscaPADE. If they pull it off, that might trigger questions and concerns from SpaceX investors and clients.
I dunno, but I can speculate – it might be that they have lots on hand. Also, it's good to stress-test reusable tech like Falcon 9 as much as possible to discover potential failures, and less costly to discover them with a smaller rocket.
I'd say we are already launching satellites en-masse. You'll note that Falcon Nine started launching in 2010 and started reusing its boosters regularly around 2018; the steep US vertical ascent starts in 2020. You can also compare to CubeSat launches by year (which is not omnidirectional, but broke 100/200/300 in 2014/2017/2021. Since (AFAIK) the low price point has a profit baked-in, I assume as long as they have demand they are profiting at that rate.
Kessler Syndrome happens on accident, of course. Orbit, especially outside of LEO, is really big, and satellites are teensy-tinsy and decay in orbit. So the answer is "tens of thousands" but also that you do have more risk of Kessler Syndrome as you get more up there. However, even if we reach a point where we say "no more satellites" we'll still need to put more up as the old ones decay. Presumably we'll need lots of rocket launches for whatever space exploration we're doing, and possibly (as discussed) for tasks like asteroid mining or even decommissioning old satellites so that Kessler Syndrome is less of a worry.
Obviously, Musk and his sort want to go to Mars and the rest of the solar system. If you're doing that the demand for mass is much more than could be accommodated by satellites (I would imagine), at least until you get onsite resource production up and running.
I don't particularly think Starship development is going poorly. Falcon 9 had a number of failures on early launch tests. Both of its first two launches failed in the recovery phase, and of the first seven, four had some form of a failure. Yet, as I think we've shown, it's matured into a tremendously successful launch vehicle. Musk's whole "move fast and break things" shtick, as I understand it, is built around accepting more risk up front in exchange for faster results. Starship has had three launches so far, with what appears to my untrained eye to be progressive improvement. Unless the costs of these failures are high enough to cause SpaceX to run out of funding (which I doubt – they're made out of stainless steel!) my presumption is that they will simply move past the failures, as they did with Falcon 9. Now, I wouldn't say it's impossible that Starship is found to be unworkable, or retired for other reasons. I just know that accepting and moving past failure is something SpaceX has historically done (and is normal in aerospace development) so without specific reasons to think otherwise I sort of assume that that will be the case here – although I can certainly imagine a number of reasons it might not be.
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I could be very wrong about this, but as I understand it, Falcon Heavy is designed for high-mass launches. F9 launches are usually volume limited; being able to put more Starlink sats in orbit won't help you if you physically cannot fit more of them in the fairing.
You're correct about the volume limitations. They're currently working on an extended fairing option, but that's not to try to get the Falcon Heavy price/volume ratio lower than Falcon 9 - the bigger fairings won't even be reusable like their standard fairings are - it's to support a few bigger individual launches like conjoined Lunar Gateway modules as well as a few National-Security, Might-Be-Declassified-In-50-Years payloads.
But, I would say FH is designed for higher-mass launches; it was only originally that they thought that was necessary for high mass. FH design started before the Falcon 9 version 1.0 (with max payload to LEO of 10.4 tons or to GTO of 4.5 tons) even flew, and that wasn't enough for the DoD contracts they wanted, and they thought FH was the best way to get there ... but then improved Merlin engines and stretched tanks pushed the F9 payloads to 22.8t and 8.3t (fully expended, but for the prices DoD is willing to pay that's fine), and FH took them a lot longer than they'd hoped, and they ended up with a rocket they barely needed (9 launches so far, vs like 350 for F9, in part because a lot of "so heavy it needs Falcon Heavy" payloads ended up riding on upgraded F9s instead) but which they couldn't even cancel (IIRC Musk wanted to, and Gwynne Shotwell had to talk him out of it) because they already had those DoD contracts.
Despite agreeing to the extended fairing development, their internal strategy for fixing volume limitations is to forget about Falcons and finish Starship. 50% more mass capacity than FH with 550% more volume should be more than enough to ensure the latter limit isn't binding.
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Starlink brought in $4B in 2023, up from $1.4B in 2022, latest estimate $6.6B for 2024. Development via investment dollars is much faster than via cash flow alone would be, but it's not a necessity.
The bright side of having a problem so bad you want to graph it on a semilog plot is, it gives you room for multiple revolutions.
And your prediction came true - the first revolution did already absolutely happen, even with launch vehicles that are only partly reusable! I used to summarize this as "first place is SpaceX, second is the entire country of China, third is the rest of the world put together", but looking at the latest numbers, that still understates things. Q1 2024 saw launch upmass that was around 86% SpaceX, 6% China, 7% the rest of the world put together.
The thrilling news from Blue Origin so far this year was that they launched two BE-4 engines (original ETA: 2019) on the first Vulcan Centaur test. Again, "understates things" understates things here. The thrilling upcoming news is that they might launch New Glenn later this year (be sure to go to the New Glenn wiki page for that, though; the BE-4 page still says "The first flight and orbital test is planned for no earlier than late 2022,[27] although the company had earlier expected the BE-4 might be tested on a rocket flight as early as 2020.", because apparently editors there have the appropriate level of excitement here), and if they evolve it twice as fast as SpaceX did once they got their first partly-reusable launcher to orbit, they'll have a Falcon-9-killer by 2030, tops. Hopefully I'm being too pessimistic here, but Bezos himself shares my pessimism: see "Amazon buys SpaceX rocket launches for Kuiper satellite internet project" from last year.
Very nice, now show me their costs so we can calculate the profits...
The overwhelming majority of their launches is Starlink itself, a project of unknown profitability / sustainability.
To Mars... on first attempt...
So... what's your estimate on Starship being functional under those assumptions?
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