Excellent article. I'm sad that SpaceX effectively seem to have given up on Mars, but even their much less ambitious "orbital trucking" business seems unrealistic. From the article:
> Finally, there is the launch cadence SpaceX actually targets in their S-1, a million metric tons a year to Earth orbit. That frankly preposterous figure implies 25-30 Starship launches a day, with the exact number contingent on how much payload the final version of the rocket can carry.
> Launching Starship on the hour would also mean permanent no-fly zones for aircraft and a likely environmental backlash against SpaceX, who would be putting significant amounts of water vapor in the stratosphere. Overnight the company would become one of the country’s biggest consumers of methane, electric power, and liquid oxygen. And since a failure rate of 1/200 at this cadence would have Starships falling out of the sky every week, the rocket would have to improve in reliability by at least two orders of magnitude.
> However much you may love SpaceX, there is no number of bong rips that makes this scenario feel real. It’s in the S-1 is to try to prop up the company’s astronomical valuation, but the sooner we can all move past it, the better.
It's hard to disagree with any of that, but I'm sure someone will, just like with datacenters in space.
Excellent article. I'm sad that SpaceX effectively seem to have given up on Mars, but even their much less ambitious "orbital trucking" business seems unrealistic. From the article:
> Finally, there is the launch cadence SpaceX actually targets in their S-1, a million metric tons a year to Earth orbit. That frankly preposterous figure implies 25-30 Starship launches a day, with the exact number contingent on how much payload the final version of the rocket can carry.
> Launching Starship on the hour would also mean permanent no-fly zones for aircraft and a likely environmental backlash against SpaceX, who would be putting significant amounts of water vapor in the stratosphere. Overnight the company would become one of the country’s biggest consumers of methane, electric power, and liquid oxygen. And since a failure rate of 1/200 at this cadence would have Starships falling out of the sky every week, the rocket would have to improve in reliability by at least two orders of magnitude.
> However much you may love SpaceX, there is no number of bong rips that makes this scenario feel real. It’s in the S-1 is to try to prop up the company’s astronomical valuation, but the sooner we can all move past it, the better.
It's hard to disagree with any of that, but I'm sure someone will, just like with datacenters in space.