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Notes -
You are seeing what the early part of an era of exploration or expansion looks like.
Commercially-driven exploration starts by trying to focus on the most profitable quickest returns, which are often closer, to further expand the new technology. When the Europeans began to build ships capable of traversing the world, they did not, in fact, immediately use most of those ships to traverse the world- they used them primarily for more profitable ventures closer to home. However, it was the capacity to go further which enabled the outlier minority to do the things that got famous.
Technological era innovations have similar examples. Yes, the telegraph enabled long-distance communications... but most investments were within or between cities already relatively close together. Yes, electrification has massive implications for making rural regions more efficient and profitable, but most electrical wiring started and focused in the cities. Yes, the American automobile revolutionized how people viewed distance and the ability to move across state and even continental scale, but things like the Interstate System trailed far behind. It didn't make the technologies less revolutionary.
What is currently going on with SpaceX and the reusable rocket technologies is that it is still scaling to meet the latent demand for low-earth investments that were previously priced out of application. There is still considerable profit, and market share, to be made, and currently SpaceX is about the only one making it. SpaceX is in turn using those profits to both expand capacity and develop new capabilities. The Falcon series is what prototyped the technologies for the Falcon Heavy, and the Falcon Heavy for the Starship.
Starship, in turn, is the new emerging and still experimental technology combination that- if it can be made to work, which yesterday was a significant step towards- will unlock a significant amount of lift capacity potential for beyond LEO activities.
The lift capacity gate is what limits what you probably think of as exploration, because the ability to lift fuel and resources is what increases range into deeper space. If you want deep-space transit, you want to lift material into space, where it is cheaper / easier / more technologically feasible to package it up and start pushing from a space gathering point than to lift all pieces at once from earth. That means cost-efficiency of lifting stuff, not just the capacity of stuff you can lift.
For example, the Saturn 5 rocket of the Apollo program to the moon had a LEO lift capacity of 118 tons, and about $5.5k per kg. The Starship is expected to have a LEO lift capacity of 100-150 tons, with a forecasted cost of around $1.6k per kg... possibly falling to $0.15kg ($150/kg) over time due to to reusability reduce the cost per flight as you don't have to keep re-making the whole thing.
Not only is Starship offering capacity on par or better than some of the heaviest lift rockets in history, but with a cost profile that is -70%of the Saturn 5 on the near-term side to -98% less expensive per launch over time, while offering more launches because the components can be reused rather than having to be built per launch. If you built 5 saturn-5 rockets a year, you could only have 5 saturn-5 missions a year to move stuff into space. If you build 5 Spaceships a year, you can have 5 + [Sum of all still-mission capable rockets from all previous years] missions a year, which is to say a heck of a lot more missions over time.
More missions means more opportunities to get stuff into space, including eventually deeper range mission preparation material.
To bring this all back to the age of exploration comparison- imagine if Caravels had the characteristic of having to be sunk the first time they landed on any foreign shore. Now imagine what exploration looks like if Caravels can land, restock, and go out again. This is the technological implication difference of SpaceX's reusable rocket technology.
In turn, the first caravels were in the 13th century. Magellan wouldn't circumnavigate the world until the 1500s. The carracks that Columbus used to reach the Americas were developed more than a century prior.
So when you ask-
Then given that we are literally on the 5th test flight ever of a new degree of capability, historically speaking 50 years from now would be very soon, let alone 15 or 5.
That's all fine, but shouldn't we then leave declaring new eras of exploration to historians? With everything you've written, it sounds like something that won't become apparent for quite a while.
There's a few issues here. One is - wasn't Saturn 5 optimized for the flight to the moon? It could deliver 50 tons to the moon in a single shot. Starship might have good (forecasted) performance to LEO, but it simply cannot make it to the moon, and even according to best case scenario projections will need a dozen or so refueling launches to reach the moon.
The second problem I have is the "falling over time do tue reusability", why hasn't this happened with Falcon 9? I consider it's announced costs to be a bit sus in themselves, but even taking them at face value, you don't see them dropping over time.
Finally, the third problem is that it's a forecasted cost. Musk's entire MO is announcing some product promising insane performance, falling way short, but acting like he delivered because you can buy something that looks vaguely like the announced product. Wasn't self-driving supposed to be safer than a human driver 7 years ago? Wasn't the Cybertruck supposed to be nearly indestructible and cost as low as $40K? Wasn't the Roadster supposed to be in production in 2019, and offer some insane range like 600 miles? Wasn't the Semi supposed to beat Diesel trucks in terms of costs, be competitive with rail, and be guaranteed to not break for a million miles? Wasn't the Boring Company supposed to cut tunnel costs to a fraction of what they were? What makes you so sure he'll deliver on Starship any better than he did on any of those?
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