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Wiki SpaceX as a Company - General Discussion
- Thread starter JB47394
- Start date
Ars: SpaceX just showed us what every day could be like in spaceflight
I think SpaceX is just getting started. Within five years the company will once again remake itself, launching Starships dozens of times a year to multiple destinations. It may well become the most significant company of this century in terms of its effect on the course of human history.
I wonder how much SpaceX will drop the cost per kilogram to orbit.
They're out to get maximum profits for their R&D, capital projects, and the Mars colony. If they drop the price, they invite more customers to launch stuff, but they also would be leaving money on the table. Like luxury cars, there are only so many customers for rocket launch services, and you can't achieve mass market volume.
If operating a Starship is really cheap, then SpaceX might hedge their bets and drop the cost per kilogram significantly because they'd still be increasing their net profits. The drop in price would also invite new customers, magnifying the effect of that net profit gain. Or they could remain conservative and stick with a price just below that of Falcon Heavy.
What I don't think we should expect is SpaceX announcing that they'll start lofting payloads at $500/kg. That's the sort of aggressive price reduction that only comes with competition.
Doing 3 launches in <24 hrs, with one of them being crewed, is impressive.
Obviously not a common occurrence (yet), but it makes that "144 launches in 2024" goal look pretty attainable....
It would be very interesting to see the cost vs. price comparison for SpaceX launch services over time.
The tradeoff between high-price/low-volume and high-volume/low-price is complicated because, while you don't want to needlessly leave money on the table when you don't have much competition, you also don't know how much additional volume lowering the cost barrier to entry will generate...
The military is trying to figure out how they want to work with aerospace companies like SpaceX. Apart from how the military could use commercial capabilities, there's the question of what happens when those capabilities are attacked. Does the US defend those assets? Does the US compensate the operators for combat losses? And so on.
arstechnica.com
Pentagon calls for tighter integration between military and commercial space
"I would have never written the requirements for Starship."
arstechnica.com
The military is trying to figure out how they want to work with aerospace companies like SpaceX. Apart from how the military could use commercial capabilities, there's the question of what happens when those capabilities are attacked. Does the US defend those assets? Does the US compensate the operators for combat losses? And so on.
Pentagon calls for tighter integration between military and commercial space
"I would have never written the requirements for Starship."
Interesting... it would seem that thus far the services the military has procured as outlined in the article:
- Cyberspace operations
- Satellite communications
- Spacecraft operations,
- Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
- Space domain awareness (tracking of space objects)
- Environmental monitoring
are services that could also be broadly sold elesewhere to non-military customers. The others outlined are much more specific:
- Command and control (including nuclear command, control, and communications)
- Electromagnetic warfare
- Nuclear detonation detection
- Missile warning
- Position, navigation, and timing (GPS)
These would seem to have limited other customers... and the miltary would likely prefer there are none.
It will be interesting to see if the military can outsource some of that to commercial space...
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Only if they pursue technology contracts instead of systems contracts. For example, NASA wants SpaceX to demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer. They'll pay SpaceX for that. Once it's demonstrated, NASA will have information on how it works. They can make that available to other companies. The military could apply a similar tactic, and pay to have companies pursue sensor technologies, or encryption techniques, etc. If they pay to get the building blocks developed then companies will be able to use those building blocks not just for military projects but for commercial ones as well.
Perhaps the poster child here is GPS, though in reverse. It's actually a great commercial product, but it was built for the military. If the military had paid for the technology development, companies could have deployed GPS as a commercial product, saving the taxpayer a lot of money. But no company CEO had that much vision, while the military had a clear need.
I think a big problem to date has been that when there's a military contract, it's a monolith of security. The development of a special fastener for a railgun can't be made available for other uses because it's part of a classified railgun project. Instead, if there was a contract for fasteners capable of meeting certain requirements, then the design of that fastener could be made broadly available without impacting the security of the railgun project.
GPS is an interesting example here... once it's commercial application was proven, it was allowed for civilian use, albeit with deliberate error added so civilian accuracy was not as good as military accuracy (although there were some clever tricks folks came up with to improve that).
Given your fastener example, it would be interesting to allow/design for additional grades of parts/systems from the get-go to allow for it's usage in non-DoD applications...
President Biden wants launch companies like SpaceX to pay the same aviation excise tax that airlines pass through to passengers (7.5% Passenger Ticket Tax). This is to pay for FAA services and such, which they don't currently contribute to.
Here's a quick Business Insider article
www.businessinsider.com
And the usual paywalled New York Times article (which I got to read on my second attempt - shrug)
Here's a quick Business Insider article
Biden wants a space tax on companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin that launch in the US
His budget proposal suggests rewriting the aviation excise tax structure so space companies pay their share, according to The New York Times.
www.businessinsider.com
And the usual paywalled New York Times article (which I got to read on my second attempt - shrug)
Elon's SpaceX company presentation video.
Two launch towers at Starbase and two more at the Cape "by sometime next year".
"We're aiming to have the first Cape launch tower and launch system operation around the middle of next year."
"We do the development launches here, test anything new here, build the rockets, and probably most of the operational launches will be from the Cape"
"This year we're planning to build another roughly six boosters and ships, and that production rate will increase a lot by next year, and that's why we're building the giant factory. Ultimately we'll need to build a lot more ships than boosters, especially for Mars. You'll actually want to use the ship, take apart the ship and use it for raw materials on Mars. Because the ship materials will be so valuable, most of the ships you wouldn't want to bring back, you'd want to just use them for raw materials. Eventually we will want to bring ships back, and I think we'll want to give people the option to of coming back because they're more likely to go if there's some option of coming back. I think most of the people that go to Mars will probably never come back to Earth. We'll need to ramp production to pretty high numbers. Multiple ships per day, basically. Next year we're aiming to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer. [...] You need about five or six refilling missions for every one mission that goes to Mars."
"[At] the Moon there's obviously no Mechazilla, so we need landing legs, and you don't need a heat shield, and you don't need flaps. Ultimately, I think we want to build a Moonbase, "Moonbase Alpha" and have a permanently occupied base on the Moon. That would be super-exciting. So you'd have a bunch of ships that are specialized for going to and from the Moon but they never land back on Earth, they just would dock with propellant tankers to get orbital refilling."
"I think ultimately we'll probably aim to get the booster engines over 330 tons of thrust, which would mean 10,000 tons of total thrust at liftoff. Raptor 3 also will not need a heat shield. We have integral cooling channels in many parts of the engine that don't exist in Raptor 2. So in order to not have a heat shield, it has to be very resilient. [...] It's actually extremely difficult to build Raptor 3, but it will be easy to integrate and we'll have higher performance and lower total mass and be more reliable."
"I think the flame tail is about a thousand feet long, it's like twice the length of the rocket, and as we increase the thrust, that will get longer. And inevitably, the rocket grows in height. Flight 3 would be around 40 or 50 tons to orbit. Starship 2 will be over 100 tons, and then Starship 3 will be over 200 tons. [...] We'll end up ultimately with more than 10,000 tons of thrust, probably 7 or 8,000 tons of liftoff mass. And at least ten meters taller? We'll see."
"I think [...] one of the most profound things is Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1."
"Ultimately we might be able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down around $2 million, or $3 million."
"Roughly every two years, thousands of ships would depart from Earth to Mars."
"For getting to Mars, we would create a kind of propellant depot ship. The propellant depot would look more like a hotdog than a sphere. It's really just a long ship with a lot of insulation. We'd fill that ship up and then as they're going to Mars, the ships would take off with a couple hundred tons of payload from Earth, reach orbit with almost no propellant, then get refilled by the tanker, then go to Mars. [...] On Mars, at the beginning we would simply reuse the ships for materials, so most of the ships wouldn't come back, but then over time you'd wanna bring the ships back so you could reuse them. For that, we would need to create methane (CH4) and oxygen (O2) on Mars, which you can do with H2O and CO2. So the atmosphere is CO2, and there's plenty of water ice (H2O) [...] The reason we have a methane/oxygen system is because you can make methane and oxygen on Mars fairly easily. It's not a total walk in the park, but the ingredients are readily available to create methane and oxygen on Mars. So you build a propellant depot and bring the ships back and build out, as quickly as possible, a self-sustaining civilization on Mars."
"It would be nice to use nuclear. I don't know if you'll get the approval, but nuclear would be very handy on Mars because you can use the heat and you can generate electricity."
"The deeper it is, the more you can use the atmosphere to brake."
"Some of these people asked if we're developing these things, I'm like 'Not yet because this is the cart and we need the horse first.'"
"I think we'll have to do the propellant depot"
He wants a million people and several million tons of cargo to be able to make a city self-sustaining. "We can do this in 20 years."
"That means you can get to a million tons in about eight years."
Comparisons in tonnage of production of 1000 Starships per year to 1.85 million Teslas per year to suggest that making all these Starships is possible.
"Long term, we'll probably have some offshore launch sites."
No real reaction from the employees. I guess they've heard it all before. Plus, Elon is not a motivational speaker.
Two launch towers at Starbase and two more at the Cape "by sometime next year".
"We're aiming to have the first Cape launch tower and launch system operation around the middle of next year."
"We do the development launches here, test anything new here, build the rockets, and probably most of the operational launches will be from the Cape"
"This year we're planning to build another roughly six boosters and ships, and that production rate will increase a lot by next year, and that's why we're building the giant factory. Ultimately we'll need to build a lot more ships than boosters, especially for Mars. You'll actually want to use the ship, take apart the ship and use it for raw materials on Mars. Because the ship materials will be so valuable, most of the ships you wouldn't want to bring back, you'd want to just use them for raw materials. Eventually we will want to bring ships back, and I think we'll want to give people the option to of coming back because they're more likely to go if there's some option of coming back. I think most of the people that go to Mars will probably never come back to Earth. We'll need to ramp production to pretty high numbers. Multiple ships per day, basically. Next year we're aiming to demonstrate ship-to-ship propellant transfer. [...] You need about five or six refilling missions for every one mission that goes to Mars."
"[At] the Moon there's obviously no Mechazilla, so we need landing legs, and you don't need a heat shield, and you don't need flaps. Ultimately, I think we want to build a Moonbase, "Moonbase Alpha" and have a permanently occupied base on the Moon. That would be super-exciting. So you'd have a bunch of ships that are specialized for going to and from the Moon but they never land back on Earth, they just would dock with propellant tankers to get orbital refilling."
"I think ultimately we'll probably aim to get the booster engines over 330 tons of thrust, which would mean 10,000 tons of total thrust at liftoff. Raptor 3 also will not need a heat shield. We have integral cooling channels in many parts of the engine that don't exist in Raptor 2. So in order to not have a heat shield, it has to be very resilient. [...] It's actually extremely difficult to build Raptor 3, but it will be easy to integrate and we'll have higher performance and lower total mass and be more reliable."
"I think the flame tail is about a thousand feet long, it's like twice the length of the rocket, and as we increase the thrust, that will get longer. And inevitably, the rocket grows in height. Flight 3 would be around 40 or 50 tons to orbit. Starship 2 will be over 100 tons, and then Starship 3 will be over 200 tons. [...] We'll end up ultimately with more than 10,000 tons of thrust, probably 7 or 8,000 tons of liftoff mass. And at least ten meters taller? We'll see."
"I think [...] one of the most profound things is Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1."
"Ultimately we might be able to get the cost per flight to Earth orbit down around $2 million, or $3 million."
"Roughly every two years, thousands of ships would depart from Earth to Mars."
"For getting to Mars, we would create a kind of propellant depot ship. The propellant depot would look more like a hotdog than a sphere. It's really just a long ship with a lot of insulation. We'd fill that ship up and then as they're going to Mars, the ships would take off with a couple hundred tons of payload from Earth, reach orbit with almost no propellant, then get refilled by the tanker, then go to Mars. [...] On Mars, at the beginning we would simply reuse the ships for materials, so most of the ships wouldn't come back, but then over time you'd wanna bring the ships back so you could reuse them. For that, we would need to create methane (CH4) and oxygen (O2) on Mars, which you can do with H2O and CO2. So the atmosphere is CO2, and there's plenty of water ice (H2O) [...] The reason we have a methane/oxygen system is because you can make methane and oxygen on Mars fairly easily. It's not a total walk in the park, but the ingredients are readily available to create methane and oxygen on Mars. So you build a propellant depot and bring the ships back and build out, as quickly as possible, a self-sustaining civilization on Mars."
"It would be nice to use nuclear. I don't know if you'll get the approval, but nuclear would be very handy on Mars because you can use the heat and you can generate electricity."
"The deeper it is, the more you can use the atmosphere to brake."
"Some of these people asked if we're developing these things, I'm like 'Not yet because this is the cart and we need the horse first.'"
"I think we'll have to do the propellant depot"
He wants a million people and several million tons of cargo to be able to make a city self-sustaining. "We can do this in 20 years."
"That means you can get to a million tons in about eight years."
Comparisons in tonnage of production of 1000 Starships per year to 1.85 million Teslas per year to suggest that making all these Starships is possible.
"Long term, we'll probably have some offshore launch sites."
No real reaction from the employees. I guess they've heard it all before. Plus, Elon is not a motivational speaker.
I think that’s the Ketamine talking. I say it will take 100 years. And it’s a long shot because it is extremely difficult to keep a massive human enterprise focused and sustained for that long.
Thanks for the excellent summary. I did not even know that presentation was happening.
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