"SpaceX has told NASA it will stop flying Crew Dragon, the space agency’s only reliable astronaut transportation to the International Space Station, by or before 2030"
Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean
"Ars reported in October that SpaceX had stopped selling commercial launches on the Falcon 9 rocket for missions after the year 2028"
Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)
Well if he wrote some books about Elon, then for sure he must be right in all his speculations. By the same logic, Walter Isaacson is basically a rocket engineer at this point because his book about Elon sold even more copies.
P.S.: Even Eric's followers on X disagree with his take in this article
Wait, are you telling me that chatter on the website owned by the company and extremely sensitive person (who should not be so sensitive, given all that he has genuinely accomplished) - all of which is barely questioned in TFA - has issues with this?
> Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean
So what about the other stations, supposed to replace the ISS?
> Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)
So what about launch customers? That's essentially the main point of the article, the leading company is leaving the market, which grew dependent on its services. The consequence is that many are looking for replacements, which are hard to get.
Couldn't find any sources for this claim, could it be made up?
Back of the envelope math: SpaceX plans up to 30 Starship launches per day by 2030, each has a payload of 100 metric tons, that's 10,000 launches per year. Comes out to 1,000,000 metric tons of payload to orbit per year. A Starlink V3 satellite weighs 2 metric tons. They certainly don't need to launch 500,000 Starlink satellites per year. Currently there are around 11,000 Starlink satellites and it already covers the Earth quite well. They might go to 100,000 Starlink satellites, but people worry even that's unnecessary.
So, if they really built Starship just for internal use, after they launch, let's say (maximum) 20,000 satellites in a year (400 launches), will they just chill? Or start launching empty rockets for fun?
Refusing to work with NASA or the military in an industry that's dependent on so many approvals is so easy to fix by law. A law can be easily put in place to force rocket companies to reserve payload capacity for the Government (as an example).
The article talks about how starship currently only had adapters to launch their sats and no one else's and is not designed currently to launch crew. Which I guess is speculation to be honest but the article also mentions they currently have no contracts with anyone but themselves.
Putting a crew on starship means either developing a crew escape mechanism, or demonstrating it is safe without one, and convincing regulators that's true because Elon would never exaggerate safety claims.
Besides the 3 big NASA missions there are 5+ non-SpaceX missions (Superbird-9, Astrolab, Starlab, ASI Mars and lunar cargo trips). Article ignores this and lots of other info that goes against its doomer narrative.
Correct, the problem isn't that SpaceX no longer needs NASA, it's that SpaceX has failed to achieve any meaningful development milestones with Starship so far and the competition has either had some setbacks or isn't delivering either.
Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready. It's really strange to somehow spin "SpaceX is doing something stupid that hurts customers" into "SpaceX is too competent for its customers".
As far as we know, Starship should fix the limited payload issues of Falcon 9 so why would anyone ever have to worry about Starship only launching Starlink satellites?
It's also weird how shutting down Falcon 9 and crew dragon means that SLS and Orion cannot be canceled anymore even if congress (the boogeyman) agreed.
What do you mean? The problem is that for SpaceX it's more profitable to focus on its own internal projects. The development milestones of SpaceX are fine, in particular Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon is a pretty good way to launch people to space, and the problem is that it is becoming for SpaceX not interesting to keep launching them, because other things are better.
> Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready.
Starship is not going to fly people next quite a few years. And NASA wouldn't like to have a gap with human spaceflight. And not only NASA.
“What we’ve done at SpaceX is we’ve taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90 percent,” - Now, he said, SpaceX was applying that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute.
As, "The question is whether Musk would devote his Falcon engineering team solely to Starship. Perhaps not."
This is not really the right conclusion IMO. It does not take the same kind or size of engineering team that Falcon took to develop or support to build cooling systems for data centers. The data center work is going to be a small side project for a small number of engineers in a small number of disciplines.
The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.
> The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.
You remember that at the time there were fully American alternative - Delta-IV, with a heavy modification, and it stopped flying only when other alternatives became available too?
The article seems written in bad faith
"SpaceX has told NASA it will stop flying Crew Dragon, the space agency’s only reliable astronaut transportation to the International Space Station, by or before 2030"
Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean
"Ars reported in October that SpaceX had stopped selling commercial launches on the Falcon 9 rocket for missions after the year 2028"
Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)
The author is Eric Berger. He gets a ton of leeway in my view, which is that of a somewhat-informed industry outsider.
He has written what are widely considered the best books on SpaceX, and has contacts throughout industry and government.
He is critical of everyone when appropriate. He is probably the most trusted name in space journalism.
Ah the much-awaited "appeal to authority"
Well if he wrote some books about Elon, then for sure he must be right in all his speculations. By the same logic, Walter Isaacson is basically a rocket engineer at this point because his book about Elon sold even more copies.
P.S.: Even Eric's followers on X disagree with his take in this article
Wait, are you telling me that chatter on the website owned by the company and extremely sensitive person (who should not be so sensitive, given all that he has genuinely accomplished) - all of which is barely questioned in TFA - has issues with this?
So far you presented 0 real arguments
You're just speedrunning fallacies: appeal to authority, poisoning the well, kettle logic
Are you here just to have an emotional conversation?
> Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean
So what about the other stations, supposed to replace the ISS?
> Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)
So what about launch customers? That's essentially the main point of the article, the leading company is leaving the market, which grew dependent on its services. The consequence is that many are looking for replacements, which are hard to get.
The rest of the article mentions that starship isn't currently planned to be used for anything other than SpaceX payloads
Couldn't find any sources for this claim, could it be made up?
Back of the envelope math: SpaceX plans up to 30 Starship launches per day by 2030, each has a payload of 100 metric tons, that's 10,000 launches per year. Comes out to 1,000,000 metric tons of payload to orbit per year. A Starlink V3 satellite weighs 2 metric tons. They certainly don't need to launch 500,000 Starlink satellites per year. Currently there are around 11,000 Starlink satellites and it already covers the Earth quite well. They might go to 100,000 Starlink satellites, but people worry even that's unnecessary.
So, if they really built Starship just for internal use, after they launch, let's say (maximum) 20,000 satellites in a year (400 launches), will they just chill? Or start launching empty rockets for fun?
Refusing to work with NASA or the military in an industry that's dependent on so many approvals is so easy to fix by law. A law can be easily put in place to force rocket companies to reserve payload capacity for the Government (as an example).
https://spacenews.com/spacex-files-plans-for-million-satelli...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv5l24mrjmo
https://youtu.be/VvjV0gzi5Zg?si=7BOMtno7UN98aRly&t=752
The article talks about how starship currently only had adapters to launch their sats and no one else's and is not designed currently to launch crew. Which I guess is speculation to be honest but the article also mentions they currently have no contracts with anyone but themselves.
That's just baseless speculation on part of the author of the article
Starship just recently had it's first flight with some cargo on-board, it's still early to make claims that it's not ready enough for NASA
Let them get it working properly first, then they'll work out the rest of the details
As said, article written in bad faith
There's contracts with the Italian government, starlab and a ridiculously large satellite telescope that's custom made for starship.
They also put down a deposit for a roadster.
Superbird-9
Putting a crew on starship means either developing a crew escape mechanism, or demonstrating it is safe without one, and convincing regulators that's true because Elon would never exaggerate safety claims.
First of all, SpaceX never had any fatalities on any of their flights
Second of all, the discussion was about flying payloads to space for third parties (including NASA), not about flying people specifically
Crew Dragon has a launch escape system. Starship can't, at least not without some fundamental changes.
Besides the 3 big NASA missions there are 5+ non-SpaceX missions (Superbird-9, Astrolab, Starlab, ASI Mars and lunar cargo trips). Article ignores this and lots of other info that goes against its doomer narrative.
I thought the article was doomer for NASA not SpaceX? I thought its main thesis was SpaceX doesn't need NASA anymore...
That's correct, NASA would prefer Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon to remain available, among other things.
That is incorrect.
Spacex have already sold Starship launches to others, and they will require some kind of “payload doors”.
Are you sure the sales are final? That SpaceX can't renege on them and just pay for the deal breaking?
I mean, isn’t that true of all sales of literally everything?
Correct, the problem isn't that SpaceX no longer needs NASA, it's that SpaceX has failed to achieve any meaningful development milestones with Starship so far and the competition has either had some setbacks or isn't delivering either.
Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready. It's really strange to somehow spin "SpaceX is doing something stupid that hurts customers" into "SpaceX is too competent for its customers".
As far as we know, Starship should fix the limited payload issues of Falcon 9 so why would anyone ever have to worry about Starship only launching Starlink satellites?
It's also weird how shutting down Falcon 9 and crew dragon means that SLS and Orion cannot be canceled anymore even if congress (the boogeyman) agreed.
Make this make sense.
What do you mean? The problem is that for SpaceX it's more profitable to focus on its own internal projects. The development milestones of SpaceX are fine, in particular Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon is a pretty good way to launch people to space, and the problem is that it is becoming for SpaceX not interesting to keep launching them, because other things are better.
> Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready.
Starship is not going to fly people next quite a few years. And NASA wouldn't like to have a gap with human spaceflight. And not only NASA.
The alternate to Crew Dragon is Starliner. Not whatever you're on about.
There's New Glenn too
The more competition in this space (pun intended), the better
I'm sure everyone agrees with that
I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well
If others come up with similar or even better rockets, everyone wins
> I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well
Problem is this time is far away, and in the meantime we need something. And the best currently available system is Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon.
The same starship that was supposed to land on mars in 2022? I can see why they are hesitant to rely on that
Contrary to your belief, I don't think anyone is worried
Perhaps the person that wrote the article is worried, but even that seems unlikely to me
They wrote an article with made up facts to smear the reputation of the most successful space company in history
You have quite a biased view here, extraextra.
The author interprets this:
“What we’ve done at SpaceX is we’ve taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90 percent,” - Now, he said, SpaceX was applying that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute.
As, "The question is whether Musk would devote his Falcon engineering team solely to Starship. Perhaps not."
This is not really the right conclusion IMO. It does not take the same kind or size of engineering team that Falcon took to develop or support to build cooling systems for data centers. The data center work is going to be a small side project for a small number of engineers in a small number of disciplines.
The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.
> The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.
You remember that at the time there were fully American alternative - Delta-IV, with a heavy modification, and it stopped flying only when other alternatives became available too?
[dead]
Excuse me? The long history of success for nasa with and without the esa is staggering to the good.
I got more stories that jd salinger I (nasa) hold the title, and you're (spacex) just the challenger (paraphrase of beastie boy song shadrach et al)
More seriously, nasa has purposely focused on satellites and robots for scientific research on purpose for a multitude of reasons including cost.