CASEY HANDMER'S BLOG has a hugely important piece on Starship. If a space firm misunderstands this passage:
"A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing."
It's doomed
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/sta…
His blog's comparison of NASA's SLS based Artemis architecture versus a Lunar program based on Starship makes the point.
This is a phase change difference in access to space akin from the X-Atlantic air travel jump from Charles Lindberg to the wide body jet in 5-years.
2/
For the logistical types, these are your current price points:
$100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo
$1,000,000/kg(+) for deep space exploration.
Starship will do 100 ton (+) chunks for <$10m per launch.
It will be launching several hundred times a year w/in 5-years.
3/
Starship will be doing 1,000(+) flights a year in about seven to 10 years.
And no one in the NASA or the incumbent space industries world wide are doing jack to prepare for that reality.
4/
Casey Handmer's point is how will...
"NASA and industry will have to find a way to produce 100x as much stuff for 1/10th the price. Rovers will have to be $1000/kg and we will need 100 tons of them every year."
5/
That isn't where NASA is
Nor Boeing,
Nor Lockheed Martin,
Nor Aerojet etc. etc.
They are all pretending the SpaceX's Falcon & Falcon Heavy rockets don't exist
6/
Another of Handmer's point's --
"History is littered with the wreckage of former industrial titans that underestimated the impact of new technology and overestimated their ability to adapt. Blockbuster, Motorola, Kodak, Nokia, RIM, Xerox, Yahoo, IBM, Atari, Sears, Hitachi,
7/
...Polaroid, Toshiba, HP, Palm, Sony, PanAm, Sega, Netscape, Compaq, Enron, GM, DeLorean, Nortel.
What we are seeing here is an industrial/institutional version of Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions. People invested in the old ways
8/
amazon.com/Structure-Scie…
...will be displaced by those who believe in the new, relevant, scientific & technological paradigms.
And politics will follow this shift.
9/
Starship's success, and it is looking increasingly successful, will be akin to a seed crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution.
The first fully successful Starship orbital launch & return will kill stock values of every other space launcher firm overnight.
10/
And the NASA SLS architecture - long nicknamed the "Senatorial Launch System" for its major supporters - will not survive past the 3rd launch.
What there will be left of NASA after Starship enters regular daily service is conjecture. I too, like Handmer, hope it can adapt.
11/
But whatever comes after...it won't include the Senatorial Launch System.
/End
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