The Meaning of Starship
The capability being developed by SpaceX is going to change everything.
Imagine, several years from now, you run a space startup and are pitching to a potential investor. Suppose your company has a close loop life support technology that allows the production of cheese from waste, bypassing the need for an animal, and you want to supply this to various commercial space stations and space habitats that have recently been constructed. Mid way through your slide deck the investor holds up his hand to stop you and asks the question you’ve been dreading: “Isn’t it going to be cheaper just to send up more cheese with Starship?”
Today, Starship test flight IFT-3 was launched, largely successfully, and although the scenario above is still some way off, there are a lot of business models, and entire modes of thinking about space, that will be undermined when the vehicle is ultimately ready for flight.
A Perfect Ascent
After a short delay to clear the range of wayward boats, the Starship/Superheavy took off with 33 engines working well. Hot staging worked and, contrary to IFT-2, all 13 engines for the boost back started and the burn seemed to complete successfully.
However, the booster seemed to lose control as it approached the sea and the landing burn failed.
The ship completed a perfect burn and entered the intended trajectory. On orbit there was a test of the payload door and a liquid oxygen transfer demo. A planned in space ignition of the engines was cancelled.
Before and during reentry, the Starship seemed to have lost attitude control. Before loss of signal it was clear the vehicle could not keep its heat shield facing the correct direction, and it was not surprising to hear that it broke up during peak heating.
Despite the fact that there is obvious work to do, it is worth noting that all the issues remaining with Starship and Superheavy are in phases of flight exclusive to its reuse. As an expendable vehicle, it would have had a successful flight.
There were 212 days between IFT-1 and IFT-2. Between IFT-2 and IFT-3 there was a gap of 116 days. Much of the delay between the first two flights was due to damage to the launch site, which does not appear to have occurred this time. The FAA will need to be satisfied with an investigation and corrective action once again, and if that means a comparable delay to that between the last two flights, we can expect to see IFT-4 in early July.
Elon Musk has stated he wants to see 6 more test flights this year - that would require increasing the pace somewhat. It will be interesting to see if the corrective actions can be done quicker this time around.
The Starship Age
When full reuse is achieved, Starship promises radical reductions in the cost of sending materials to space. The finished vehicle will take between 100-150 tonnes of payload to LEO, and will cost somewhere between $2 million per launch (Elon Musk’s aspirational target) and perhaps $20 million at the top end - on the basis it that being fully reusable it is unlikely to be more expensive than a Falcon 9. This gives a price per kg to LEO of between $13 and $200. The latter figure is remarkable, the former scarcely believable.
This is important because mass limitation is the core problem of spaceflight. As I have stressed here many times before, all the serious challenges faced in the human settlement of space can be overcome with a sufficient amount of mass. Deep space radiation a worry? Send more shielding mass. Haven’t full closed your regenerative life support system? Send more food supplies. Critical machinery breaking down? Send more spare parts. Or more whole machines.
Previously, in the era of cargo to LEO costing over $10,000/kg, engineering to reduce mass requirements was hugely important, and is one of the drivers of cost beyond the price of launch itself. Early Soviet successes in the space race can be traced in part to them having superior lift capability until the mid 1960s, and thus being able to get away with less sophisticated engineering than their American counterparts.
But a dramatic fall in the cost to orbit shifts the logic considerably. I have written at more length about this paradigm shift, and while researching this article found a more recent study done at NASA Ames that argues a broadly the same point for case studies of near term NASA missions - should missions seek to economise on mass by making what they need in-situ, or take everything with them? Even with Falcon Heavy costs rather than Starship costs, the study finds that it is only worthwhile for long duration missions. Elsewhere Casey Handmer paints the picture of future Mars missions that will more resemble the Berlin Airlift than the voyages of Columbus, with sheer quantity of deliverable cargo being the guiding principle. This is the world in which future space technology has to find a place in.
Going back to the space cheesemakers from the beginning - every clever technology for supporting human settlement of space is going to have to figure out if it can save money versus paying SpaceX to crank the payload handle one extra time. Especially if the cost of Starship is at the lower end, this might be tough - there is fairly ordinary cheese that costs $13/kg here on Earth. Something that might save the day for them though is how costs change going beyond Earth orbit. Flying to the Moon or Mars, or another comparable destination, will likely add a factor of 10 or so to the cost of Starship cargo. This is also why it seems unlikely that the Starship revolution will displace, for instance, in-situ utilisation or Martian resources to make propellant for return journeys.
In the very long term, materials will have to come mostly from space to support an expanding civilisation. But for the near term, brute force could be the order of the day for most things.
What To Do About It
There are so many current and planned space projects that assume continued mass constraint - look at NASAs Lunar Gateway for instance, a smaller space station than the Russian Mir. When a Starship HLS docks to this it will considerably exceed its mass and habitable volume, which is a bizarre situation. But the Gateway program simply proceeds on as if nothing is amiss, with at least no public discussion of “We can probably make this a lot bigger…”
Identifying which government projects and commercial plans are contingent on mass limits is probably a good way to identify which will fail in the next decade or so. I am forced to be bearish on the small satellite industry for this reason - why not overengineer a bit, build larger and cheaper if launch costs come crashing down?
It is also why I’ve start this petition - to try and get the UK on to the Starship bandwagon before it leaves is well and truly behind.
This is not to say SpaceX will simply obsolete all competitors. But it should be clear to everyone at this point that they have a commanding lead even with Falcon 9, and that lead will only expand when Starship becomes available. The future is going to be very interesting.
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