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With its recent Starship mission, SpaceX is on the verge of reducing launch costs by 10 times, expert said
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The firm flew its flagship mega-rocket into space without exploding on Thursday for the first time.
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Reducing shipping costs is essential to open up space for the industry.
SpaceX’s Starship launch on Thursday didn’t just look amazing. It may have been a major turning point for the space industry.
Elon Musk’s giant mega-rocket, which had no payload or people on board, did not survive Thursday’s landing. But it cruised through space and fell back through Earth’s atmosphere before exploding, a unique moment for SpaceX, 22 years to the day after it was founded.
The rapid progress in development of the Starship-Super Heavy launch system gives high hopes that the 400-foot-tall behemoth will be fully operational — and fully reusable — very soon.
The mega-rocket is key to Elon Musk’s ambition to reduce costs to around $10 million per launch, a vital step for those who want to establish their futuristic industries in space such as asteroid mining, or space factories.
“With Starship, SpaceX is poised to reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude again,” Brendan Rosseau, a Harvard Business School teaching fellow writing a book about the space industry, told Business Insider in an email Thursday.
SpaceX has already reduced launch costs
Starship-Super Heavy is the largest launch system ever developed. The Super Heavy booster that pulls Starship up into space can be twice as powerful as the rockets that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon.
Once fully developed, it should be able to launch up to 150 metric tons into orbit.
That’s a lot of freight. By comparison, SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 carries about 50,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit on each launch.
This offers great economies of scale, as more payload can go on each shipment.
But it also helps businesses spend much less money preparing their payload.
“In the history of spaceflight, the way you get your payload on a rocket is to shrink it. And when you shrink it, you spend a lot of money shrinking your technology,” Abhi Tripathi, director of Mission Operations at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, said BI Friday.
“Starship offers you the ability to reverse that equation. It gives you the ability to use earth technology. Don’t waste time shrinking and miniaturizing your thing, use something off the shelf,” he said.
A great starter that you could use over and over again
SpaceX isn’t just betting on the rocket’s massive ability to cut costs. His main gamble is to make the 400-foot-tall mega-rocket completely reusable.
Think of the cost of air travel if the airline had to build a new plane every time. That’s how most of the rocket launch industry handles it.
Reusability offers huge opportunities to cut the bill. And this is not a stab in the dark – SpaceX has already proven that the business model with Falcon 9 works.
The medium-sized rocket’s booster is never stopped. Instead, after each launch, he lands to fly another day. With this technology, SpaceX was able to offer cheap and fast turnaround launches for about $67 million per flight.
That’s about $1,500 per pound of payload. By comparison, Space charged about $25,000 per pound up until 2011.
Starship’s promise is to fully reuse both stages, indefinitely.
This could change everything.
“They’re showing that they’re on the right track to where they want to be in a remarkably short period of time,” George Nield, former associate administrator for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, told BI.
“This vehicle is so different, and it’s so much more capable than anything anyone’s ever tried to do. I think people don’t necessarily realize that,” Nield said.
Way to go, but the end is near
With this progress, business plans for space industries – such as manufacturing products at scale in the vacuum of space or mining rare minerals on asteroids – could gain more traction among supporters.
“These high costs significantly limited the scope of space activities, limiting who could use space, how they used space, and who could benefit from it, ” said Rousseau Harvard.
“Lowering launch costs was always the first step to unlocking wider and deeper sources of value from space,” he said.
SpaceX is on the verge of a breakthrough after Thursday’s success. Still, there is work to be done before industries can place their payload on Starship at low cost.
As part of Musk’s equation, SpaceX needs Starship and its booster to be fully reusable. No attempt was made on Wednesday, and a booster and ship were lost on re-entry.
Tripathi predicts they are not too far off, however. He thinks SpaceX could try to deliver Starlink satellites on the next Starship test launch.
In terms of reusability, “I think this test showed that they probably have one or two more tests to do,” he said.
“I think the smart people are already planning as if Starship is going to succeed. Sure, maybe the ones on the sidelines started coming off the fence as the test [on Thursday],” said Tripathi.
Read the original article on Business Insider
