The Fall of SpaceX?

I’ve been a big supporter of space for as long as I can remember.  In 2009 I was thrilled when SpaceX became the first private company to put a satellite into orbit with a private rocket.  It seemed like we were on the verge of the real Space Age.  But in the last few years, it just seems like we’ve lost our way. 

After some thought, I figured out part of the problem.  If you went back twenty years to 2004 and found the 28-year-old me and told him, “There’s this company, SpaceX, I don’t know if you’ve heard anything of them yet, but in a few years they’ll build a small rocket that will be the first private rocket to put a satellite into orbit.  They’ll build a bigger rocket, which by 2024 will be a workhorse, launching over 100 times in 2024 alone.  Part of the reason for the high launch cadence is the first stage is reusable, as in it lands and can be reflown at least twenty some times.  And they have a capsule capable of putting humans into orbit, either as a taxi for NASA astronauts, or just private astronauts.  From all of that, what do you think they’re doing in 2024?”

2004 me would think for a bit, and then would probably answer, “Space stations.  Maybe just two or three module ones.  Some would be hotels, while others would be labs, either general or dedicated to biological research or materials testing.  And there might even be … garages that would send out robotic or crewed craft to bring back damaged satellites for repair.  I mean, that’s what I’d be doing.  What’s this SpaceX doing?”

“They’ve launched thousands upon thousands of satellites to give internet service to people.”

2004 me.  “That’s … cool, I guess.  Do they have any plans?”

“Oh, they’re working on an even larger rocket that will not only have a reuseable first stage, but a reuseable second stage.”

2004 me.  “Oh, will they use that to launch space stations, sort of a Skylab thing?”

“No, they’re mainly focused on starting a Mars Colony.”

2004 me, slightly confused.  “But, if you had a space station, you could test the life support systems needed for the months long voyage to Mars.  Not to mention, it would be a good idea to have plenty of private astronauts with some space experience to be the command crew on a colony ship.  Especially to do spacewalks in case something needs repaired.”

“No, I think the plan is to just fling them to Mars and hope for the best.”

2004 me, really confused.  “That’s … all they’re doing?”

“Well, they’re contracted with NASA for a lunar lander version to land crew on the moon, but who knows if anything will come of it.  Like, in the original timeline by 2024 they should have had an uncrewed test flight, which would involve putting the lander in orbit, and then launching like fifteen refueling missions to refuel it to fly to the moon.  But so far, they’ve had six test flights, and while they have recovered one first stage, none of the second stages – that are to be rapidly reuseable – have survived reentry in any shape to be reused.  But the owner recently said they’d fly a couple cargo missions to Mars in 2026, although you’d think such missions would also have rovers but I’ve not heard anything about them, even though they’d take a few years to build.”

2004 me.  “What?”

I think this is why 2024 me is starting to worry that SpaceX will … crash and burn.  A few years ago, I wrote a post about how if you were serious about building a Mars Colony, you’d probably want some orbiters to map out certain resources or look for hazards to plan where to put this colony, or to put a bunch of weather, or communications satellites around Mars, or maybe do some reentry tests to get some information before going all out.  But that would require money, and knowledge of building satellites, and rockets powerful enough to send them to Mars.  I mean, it’s not like Elon Musk and SpaceX have had all these things for years.

I fully support the scientific exploration of Mars, but I maintain that the challenges of a Mars Colony far exceed the benefits.  We can mine metals from the asteroids and build rotating colonies that we can fill with life from Earth without worrying about destroying any alien life on Mars.  We could even put rockets on these stations and send them outside the solar system.  If we go to Mars, we get a planet.  If we go to the asteroids, we get the galaxy.

It seems like SpaceX is passing up on what 2004 me would consider as the “next logical steps” to making humanity a spacefaring civilization, for an all or nothing Mars Colony that, almost certainly, will not happen as quickly or glamorously as Musk and his cheerleaders say it will.  It almost reminds me of some observations I heard about a year ago about this car company.  A decade ago, Tesla was The Electric Car Company.  But over the last decade or so, they haven’t done much.  Instead of expanding their market with more affordable cars, they seem to be just doing crazier and crazier publicity stunts.  And while they’re doing that, other car companies have started making their own electric cars, maybe not as exciting as Teslas, but actually available to the average car buyer.  A decade ago, Tesla was King, but no more.  Right now, SpaceX is King.  But by focusing on some grand vision, will their competitors be able to move into the “next logical steps?” A decade from now, will other rocket companies be taking us to the moon, while SpaceX is left doing stunts to stay in the news?

Thoughts on Starship

I typed this up and scheduled it to post just before Starship’s second test flight.

My thoughts on Starship?  Meh.

I was extremely excited in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to put a payload into orbit on their Falcon 1 rocket.  As a big space supporter, I saw this as the first step on the road to the space future I’d been dreaming about.  I figured it was just a matter of maybe a decade or so before we’d see private rockets launching private astronauts to private space stations.  I was super excited for the future.

I was a bit bummed when the Falcon 1 was retired, but the Falcon 9 would be a better rocket to launch people on.  And the first fights were of the cargo Dragon capsules which would lead the way to crewed Dragons.  So I was still super excited.

Now, I know that the space business isn’t known for speed.  That it takes years to design, and build, and test craft long before they even launch.  But even knowing that, there were some unnerving things with SpaceX.  At some point, I read that they had contracts to launch 60 satellites in the next five years, which works out to a launch a month.  At the time, that was a pretty tough launch cadence.  But at the time, they had launched only five or six times in a year.  And sometime in this “They need to speed things up” thinking, they started making changes to the booster and the fueling.  Which is great, but for awhile it seemed about every mission was delayed because they had issues with the densified fuel.  As an armchair rocket person, I wondered why they didn’t just build five or six of the boosters they knew worked to keep launching satellites to get through their backlog, and to give them some time to work on their new boosters on the side.  And I’m sure there are a hundred reasons not to have done it that way, but from the outside looking in it seemed like a missed opportunity to keep the launch cadence up while still experimenting.

Still, these experiments lead to boosters being recovered and launched again, and again.  Reusable rockets are fantastic.  They are a clear necessity to the space future I want.  And yes, now it’s a slow week if only one Falcon 9 launches, but most of the flights are for Starlink.  Don’t get me wrong, space internet is a great idea, but far from the private space stations and moon bases and stuff I’ve been waiting for for … over a decade now. 

And yes, the cargo Dragon got upgraded to a Crew Dragon, and they are flying astronauts to the ISS and to orbit, but I read they stopped building Crew Dragons.  Which I don’t understand.  There are people who will pay to orbit the Earth, and I’m sure there are friendly nations who would love to have missions with their astronauts, and someday there will be private space stations needing craft to carry crew to.  And again, as someone from the outside looking in, it’s like, “You have something that’s working, why aren’t you continuing with it?”

To step back a bit, there’s the Falcon Heavy.  Which, when it was announced, I was thrilled by.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, and surely the Falcon Heavy could land rovers or cargo to start building up a moon base.  But then, it will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  And it finally launched, but then we only had like four launches in five years.  Now, I understand it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse of why build a satellite needing this much lift if a rocket capable of that lift isn’t flying yet.  But we’re coming up on six years since Elon’s car was launched.  And yes, we’ve had four flights this year, with one more scheduled.  But it almost feels like they spent all this time to build this big rocket, and then found it hard to find things to launch with it.  Which seems like a bit of a misstep. 

And now to Starship.  After years of waiting for the Falcon Heavy, I knew not to get too excited for this even bigger, more complex rocket.  And after all this time, I don’t really care.  Like, either it will be like the Falcon Heavy and start to hit its stride four or five years from now, in which case I might be more excited, or it will hit its stride in a year or two by launching Starlinks.  What would get me excited is if they announced a plan to launch Starship with an expendable upper stage so they could put this Skylab type space station up.  That I would like.  But nothing else about Starship seems that exciting.  Yes, there’s the Human Landing System for Artemis 3 and 4, but what happens beyond that?  Will it just be for those missions, or will there be more to build up a private moon base?  You’d think, if they had the systems to land people on the moon, why not continue to do that?  But I’ll point out, they apparently stopped building Crew Dragons.

What is the future of Starship, and of SpaceX?  They’ve pretty much stopped talking about Mars, which I always found annoying.  (I mean, I am the author of The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.) But is their future just … Starlink?  It’s tough to get excited for this big rocket if I don’t really care what it will be used for.  It’s like, even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I don’t really care for the SLS.  Because I want a continual, sustained presence on the moon, and a billion-dollar rocket that launches once a year, maybe, isn’t how you do that.  And I don’t know if Starship will do that.  Honestly, at this point I’m more excited for New Glenn, only because, while I don’t know what they’ll do with it, it doesn’t have as much baggage as Starship or SLS. 

I think all of this comes down to me being tired of waiting.  I think there are to be fourteen missions that will go to or flyby the moon in 2024.  Seven of these will launch on Falcon 9s, two on Falcon Heavies, and one on Starship.  And even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I’m not overly excited.  Probably because for decades I’ve heard plans on moon bases, but all have fallen through.  When the next humans land on the moon, I will be happy, but there will a bit of dread in the back of my mind that it will be another Apollo Program where we stop going after a couple of missions.  I don’t think I’ll feel like the future is finally here until there is a permanently crewed Lunar base.  Will Starship play a role in that?  Who knows.

Some thoughts on Elon Musk

I’ll start by saying that I’m a SpaceX fan.  I watched their first successful Falcon 1 flight and I probably jumped for joy at the thought at the beginning of a new era in spaceflight.  And at first, I was a Musk fan.  I think my biggest complaint was his focus on Mars.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, who thinks the best way to make humanity a spacefaring civilization is to go mine the asteroids and build the rotating space stations and ships we see so often in fiction.  In that type of world, Mars is more of a dead end.  I do support the scientific exploration of Mars, I just don’t see much future in colonizing it.

So I was never one of those who thought of Musk as the perfect sage.  But over the last few years, whenever I see him trending on Twitter, I groan and wonder, “What asshole thing did he do now?” My … respect, I guess you’d call it, for Musk has nosedived over the years, but the final straw came when I realized something.

There are multiple spacecraft in orbit of Mars right now.  The reason we have so many is that we don’t have tricorders, or sensors, that we can just point at an object and get 80,000 pieces of data about.  We have cameras that can only take pictures in a dozen or so wavelengths at only certain resolutions.  If we want super detailed images, that’s another camera.  If we want a look at subsurface stuff, that’s an entirely different instrument like ground penetrating radar.  Is there any radiation?  Well that’s another instrument.  And since these spacecraft were all paid for by governments, they try to get the broadest amount of science for their buck.  Meaning if someone really wanted to build a Mars Colony, they’d probably need a dedicated spacecraft with specific instruments to look for needed resources or potential hazards to help narrow down a site.  The Mars Orbiter Mission apparently cost less than $100 million, which is about what Musk makes when he sneezes.  So why hasn’t Musk paid to have the first privately funded interplanetary mission?  Some might say that it’s better to wait until the Starship is flying so they can send a big spacecraft to Mars.  But we can learn a lot with a small spacecraft that could be launched on a Falcon Heavy, which could lead to better choices on what to allocate on a future Starship. 

I’m starting to wonder, is Musk’s talk about Mars just a politician’s campaign promises?

A long awaited day

With the successful launch of SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission, we’ve finally gotten to a day I’ve long waited for.  Several years ago, I came up with a list of four things I was waiting for SpaceX to do.  I wrote a blog about them a couple of years ago when they achieved two of them.  And today, they’ve completed all four.  You can read about them in that blog if you want, but the basic point of my list wasn’t some grand stunt of flying to Mars which seems to be what most SpaceX fans talk about.  These were simple, basic steps needed to get my dream of making humanity a spacefaring civilization a reality. 

Anyway, this started as a simple “Congratulations to everyone at SpaceX,” but then I kept going into how this could build up a space society.  I went off the rails a bit.  But if I can get my derailed train of thought going again, you should see a long post about my thoughts on how today’s event could lead to orbital tourism, which would lead to Zero-g Football stadiums in orbit, and how that might be necessary for us to be a spacefaring civilization.  As I said, I went a bit off the rails.

But for now, congratulations to everyone at SpaceX.

That’s two off my SpaceX list

A lot of people love SpaceX for the dream of Mars.  I’m not big on the “future of humanity is on Mars” thing, but I love SpaceX because my dreams of lunar colonies and asteroid mining will only remain dreams if we can’t get things off Earth.  And SpaceX is a less-expensive way to get things off Earth.  However, I do have a bit of a problem with SpaceX in that they seem to bite off more than they can chew.  For a while it was like, “I don’t care about your grand plans for Mars, I’m waiting for you to do this thing that you said you would do three years ago.” To that end, about a year ago I came up with a list of the things I was waiting for SpaceX to do.  There were four items, but as of today there are now only two.

Number Four, reuse a rocket

When the Falcon 9 first stage landed at Cape Canaveral on December 22, 2015, becoming the first rocket to put a payload into orbit and then land, I like most people was overjoyed at the engineering marvel.  However, once the dust settled I was like, “Okay, when are you going to relaunch it?” Because while landing a rocket is a fantastic feat, the real test would be if you could reuse it.  I mean, a reusable rocket is one that you can launch and land several times, not one you launch, land, then throw in the scrap heap.  So when a different landed booster took off for the second time on March 30, 2017, I was thrilled.  Having a rocket you can launch, land, refuel, and relaunch in days – maybe even hours – will truly open up space for … everything.  And that was a beautiful first step towards that.

Number Three, launch twelve times in a year

This may sound like an odd goal to have, but a few years ago I read somewhere that there were sixty satellites waiting to be launched by SpaceX over the next five years.  That’s great, but in 2013 they only had three launches, and in 2014 they had six.  To launch sixty satellites in five years, you need to average one a month, but if you’re only doing one every two or three months, the math doesn’t work out.  They seemed on track to meet this goal in 2015, but then they had a launch failure on June 28, which set them back.  So in 2015 they again only had six successful launches.  In 2016 they had eight successful launches in eight months, but then a rocket blew up on the pad on September 1, setting them back again.  But today, with the successful launch of FORMOSAT-5, SpaceX has launched twelve times this year.  And they still have four months to go. 

As I said, this is a little odd to have as a goal, but for my dreams of making humanity a spacefaring civilization, we need not overly expensive, reliable, and frequent launches to get us out into space.  SpaceX has done a lot with those first two, and it’s fantastic to see them make progress with the last.

Number Two, fly the Falcon Heavy

There are those who think the only way to open up space is to have super big rockets.  I don’t fall into that group.  My thoughts have been that if you had two rockets, let’s call them A and B where B can lift three times as much as A, I’d rather split a payload into thirds and launch them on three As and have them dock in orbit.  In large part because if there’s an accident, then you only lose a third of the payload instead of all of it.  Also, bigger rockets tend to be more expensive, take longer to design and test, and don’t fly as often.  If we were going to put up some space station that would take one SLS or ten Falcon 9s, I’d go with the Falcon 9s because you could probably fit an additional ten Falcon 9s into the launch manifest in the time before the SLS finally flies.  It’s the philosophy of “Let’s do what we can now with what we have, instead of waiting ten years to maybe do something bigger.”

Having said all of that, I do like the Falcon Heavy because it seemed like a pretty simple – in rocket science terms – idea.  As such, instead of waiting decades for a new big rocket, we’d only have to wait a couple of years.  And then a couple more.  And a couple more.  Given what I know now, I might not have been that big of fan of the Falcon Heavy when I first heard of it.  But it’s finally just a few months from flying.  Hopefully.  And if it’s actually successful, it will be a wonderful addition to the rocket family.  And while people will still clamor for something bigger, I’ll be “Let’s do what we can now with what we have, instead of waiting ten years to maybe do something bigger.” As far as I’m concerned, the Falcon Heavy is big enough to start working towards new space stations and lunar bases.

Number One, fly humans

While launching communication satellites and science probes are great, the only way to colonize space is to send people.  While SpaceX doesn’t have the only commercial crew launcher in development, it does seem like it’s the furthest ahead.  It also may be the most open to stuff beyond the International Space Station.  Taking crews to the ISS is important, but I think the whole point is to open up new places to take people.  SpaceX has already announced a joyride around the moon, and with the Falcon Heavy they can launch modules for commercial laboratories and hotels and then launch crews and guests to them. 

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My dream of SpaceX has nothing to do with Mars.  It’s all about regular people – after going through a medical check and some training – booking a seat on the Tuesday launch up to Gagarin Hotel, or maybe to catch a connecting flight to land at the Armstrong Hotel.  And these four things have – and will – pave the way to that dream.

Thoughts on SpaceX’s moon plan

When I saw that Elon Musk was going to make an announcement yesterday afternoon, I – like everyone – wondered what it could be.  I figured the best I could hope for was that he would announce that SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace had signed a contract to launch an expandable module to be either a private space station or a space hotel in 2019, or so.  But I figured it was more likely some Mars-based project they were working on since, while I love SpaceX, they do seem to be – in my opinion – overly focused on Mars.

I had to go to work, so it wasn’t until late last night that I got home and remembered to look up what the big announcement was.  In case you don’t know (then why are you reading this?) SpaceX plans to launch one of their Dragon 2 capsules on one of their Falcon Heavy rockets next year.  Onboard will be two people who will spend about a week in space.  Instead of just flying around the Earth, they will fly out to the moon, go around the back – letting them look down on the Farside of the Moon – before returning to Earth.

I was happily surprised by that announcement.  As the author of “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makesmore sense than rushing off to Mars” I support all endeavors that refocus attention on the moon.  That’s why I love the Google Lunar X Prize and Unite Launch Alliance’s CisLunar-1000 idea.  For decades it seems that all the public has heard is “Mars Mars Mars,” so this is a great way to remind people that the moon exists and we can go there now.

However, while I hope everything about this works out as planned, I do have some cynical thoughts on the matter.  First off, SpaceX and deadlines don’t always go together.  Hell, even the announcement of this was half-an-hour late.  So while they’re saying this will go off in late 2018, I’d say that mid-2019 is a far more likely earliest time this could happen.

More serious is I have to wonder if this is a new service SpaceX will offer – flying two or three groups around the moon every year – or if it’s just a one-time stunt.  Possible reasons for such a stunt would be that just a couple weeks ago they announced a delay in the Red Dragon mission, which was to land an uncrewed Dragon capsule on Mars.  It was supposed to go in 2018, but they wouldn’t be ready so the first launch has slipped to 2020.  (Due to their orbits, there’s a best case launch window between Earth and Mars about every twenty-six months.) Could this sudden announcement to fly by the moon be a way to say, “Don’t worry, we’re still planning amazing things!”? 

Another possible reason for a stunt is the rise of suborbital space tourism.  Last year Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic made progress in their plans on sending tourists into space to experience a few minutes of microgravity.  If their testing continues to go well, they might begin test flights this year and start carrying passengers next.  Could SpaceX’s plan be a … dickish way of saying, “Yeah, they can get you into space for five minutes, but we can get you into space for a week and send you around the moon”?

In the end, what really matters is what actually happens.  For every space venture that actually lifts off, there have been a few thousand that never got passed the planning stage.  Hell, the Russians have been talking about a similar mission of sending people around the moon for like a decade now, but nothing seems to have come of it.  But I wish SpaceX, as well as United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Bigelow Aerospace, and the hundreds of other space businesses all the success.  To be frank, I’m starting to get tired waiting for the world they will build.