Today was another tech triumph for Elon Musk, but I have a question: if there aren’t a lot of fat humans who want to go to the Moon or Mars, what will we be lifting into space via the (apparently almost ready for real use) Starship? Aren’t most of the things that we want to send into space getting lighter, e.g., communication satellites? “Average Commercial Communications Satellite Launch Mass Declines, Again” (2015):
The average size, or launch mass, of commercial communications satellites is declining. After the average launch mass reached a peak of 4,424 kilograms in 2012, it declined to 3,578 kilograms in 2013 and 2,755 kilograms in 2014. Even the launch mass of geosynchronous satellites, which are typically heavier than LEO spacecraft, declined in 2014. The launch mass of GEO satellites peaked in 2013, when it reached 5,288 kilograms. The average launch mass of geosynchronous satellites declined to 4,276 kilograms in 2014.
Could we get more scientific information about the other planets in the Solar System if we sent heavier robots to them? The Curiosity rover weighs 2000 lbs while Perseverance is 2,260 lbs. Sojourner was only 25 lbs.
How about space-based telescopes? Optics and mirrors are heavy. Maybe Starship will make launches so cheap that every astronomer can have as much space telescope time as he/she/ze/they wants.
From space.com:
“Life becoming multiplanetary would be at least as important, if not more important, than life going from oceans to land,” Elon Musk
The quote above should explain why the Starship is important, this is the first step toward hopefully expanding beyond our solar system. It is the first step toward ensuring our survival as a species beyond the life of our planet and solar system.
The Starship re-entry, with the front wing hanging on for dear life probably of the most exciting moments in space history, when you are just cheering on the Starship to hold together and make it to splashdown. The stainless steel construction is what probably saved the Starship, if it was carbon fiber it would have disintegrated with that much damage.
In 1910, powered flight was assumed to be a pointless rich people hobby. In the 1940s, IBM’s president predicted a world market for about five computers.
Space robots do excellent science in space exploration and will get much more capable in the future but nothing still compares to human space exploration.
You need heavy lift capability for building space stations, moon bases, nuclear propulsion modules and going to Mars and beyond.
In the next couple of years, we should be back on the moon, and then in the next decade on Mars, what a time to be alive!
When will the menace from the north stop?
Pavel: We should worry about “survival as a species”? Don’t we have 5 billion years before Earth becomes uninhabitable due to the sun going red giant? (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/02/23/stellar-evolution-and-me-too/ )
Our species is homo sapiens, right? We’re 300,000 years old. So we have inhabited Earth for less than 1/16,000th of our potential time here. Does it make sense to spend money on our escape from Earth today when our eviction notice is so far into the future? If present trends continue, won’t we have much better technology 300,000 years from now (when we will have used up 1/8,000th of our time)?
Earth will become uninhabitable due to low CO₂ killing plants and plankton in about 600 million years, well before the sun goes red giant. (Continental drift gradually takes carbon out of circulation.) So not as much time as you might think! Also, have you no poetry in your soul? Floating green cities on Venus, people in great insulated bubbles on the moons of Jupiter riding buggies in the methane snow, skinny folks prospecting in the asteroid belt and being persecuted. That’s the future for me!
philg: We do not have 5 billion years or even 300,000 years. An asteroid hitting the Earth or another catastrophic event could wipe us out, but those relatively low probabilities, but with the end result being the end of our species, it is definitely a worth while investment. But this is not the main reason, it comes down to resource and energy availability to our species at the current time. Society has about 50 years of oil left, current critical ores and minerals are in the hundreds of years at best, some ores could be depleted in less than 100 years. I am also assuming that any climate change problems do not have a big effect or can be solved. In best case we have about 1000 years and that is if we solve the energy availability issue by getting viable fusion reactors up and running. The window of opportunity to make our species multi-planetary could be closing very fast, measured in decades, you need to use the current available resources and energy to get to the next level, our species has only one shot at this before decline. Once the decline of available resources and energy starts, you are done, society at best will revert back to a much smaller population of subsistence farming and small low energy and resource communities, the same way we lived for hundreds of thousands of years before approximately the last 150 years. Most likely society will wipe itself off the planet through conflict during the decline. Society needs a critical level of knowledge, technology, resources and energy to move up the Kardashev scale. In 1000 years. our descendants, living on a simple farm, with very little technology, resources, energy and hope, could look up in the night sky and ask why did society chose not to become multi-planetary when it had the available knowledge, technology, resources and energy?
Philip, do you think that if, after Wright brothers proof of concept, we waited on aerial travel until we could build Boeing 787 or Airbus A350 to fly, we had now Boeing 7897 and Airbus A350? Why had to Columbus swim to America, he ought to wait for modern cruise developed before risking the voyage. Same applies to microprocessors and wireless technologies, they are already becoming obsolete while entering mainstream use.
Saying that, I would not confuse space or planetary travel with pleasures. I would thing that being supermax prison has nothing on long term space travel in modern spaceship.
Satellites might be getting lighter individually but they sure pack a lot of them into one ship.
They have a contract to launch the lunar lander. Hoping it makes space tourism affordable enough to take a few orbits around Earth on a blog commenter salary, but the landing is sketchy. Beyond our lifetimes, hopefully it builds space colonies.
I think robots do a much better job of exploring the solar system than any human ever could. I certainly am for more funding of science overall, just not human space flight. Especially sending more humans into Earth orbit.
I also think we have more pressing priorities than becoming interplanetary.
I’ve no objection to Elon Musk spending every last dime on human spaceflight, as long as it’s his money!
Starship is optimized for the launch cost, no single launcher can compete on per-kg basis. So it will just launch bunch of satellites at once for chip.
I watched the video on SpaceX site. It was beyond impressive. Specifically pre-launch they talked about future plans, very interesting to listen. Then the damaged wing and still landing of course. The fact that they were able to stream all of this through Starlink is mind-boggling.