Cheap access to space

Starship Mk1 at Boca Chica 

From Inverse:

Starship, SpaceX’s ambitious rocket under development, could have an underestimated effect on society’s interactions with space.

The stainless steel rocket is currently in the prototyping phase, but when complete it’s set to unlock some of SpaceX’s most ambitious targets. It offers a fully-reusable design, which could drop launch prices lower than ever to $20,000 per ton. It uses easier-to-harvest rocket fuel, which could create a planet-hopping network to the moon, Mars and beyond. It can also carry over 100 tons or 100 people into orbit at once, meaning humans can send more into space than ever before.

All this adds up to a rocket that could smash current annual launch metrics, CEO Elon Musk explained via Twitter Thursday. Humanity currently sends around 500 tons into space per year. Around half of this is completed by SpaceX’s Falcon family of rockets, which covers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. But the Starship is designed to fly three times per day, or 1,000 times per year.

Assuming SpaceX builds around 100 Starships, matching the number of Falcon rockets, that amounts to a potential capacity of 10 million tons of payload entering space per year. That’s 20,000 times more payload than the whole planet is sending to space annually right now.

That’s a lot of stuff — and it could eventually pave the way for Musk’s big ambition to build a city on Mars.

SpaceX has its own ideas for how it wants to use the added capacity. It plans to develop the Starlink, an internet connectivity constellation that could eventually number 42,000 satellites. Considering the total number of satellites in space is somewhere around 5,000 it could vastly increase the number of crafts in orbit. Using so many satellites at low altitude could enable faster response times and higher speeds, while enabling SpaceX to earn more money through offering internet connection services.

The company isn’t limiting its satellite ambitions to its own endeavors, though. Starship’s first mission is expected to send a telecommunications satellite into space as early as 2021. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX vice president of commercial sales, said in July 2019 that the company will encourage others to get creative with Starship’s capabilities: “You could potentially recapture a satellite and bring it down if you wanted to. It’s very similar to the [space] shuttle bay in that regard. So we have this tool, and we are challenging the industry: what would you do with it?”

Perhaps SpaceX’s most ambitious goal is to build a city on Mars. This could be enabled by a fleet of Starships, all lifting cargo to the planet.

Musk explained that around 1,000 Starships would be necessary to start a city. The fleet would transport around one million tons of cargo to the planet, which Musk estimates would be enough to develop a self-sustaining city. That would take around 20 years, as the Earth and Mars align around once every two years.

SpaceX has big plans to meet these lofty goals. It’s aiming to build one new Raptor engine every day next year, with each Starship vessel and Super Heavy booster using around 40 engines total. It’s aiming to build new Starship prototypes at both its Texas and Florida facilities.

All of this is in service of a ship that could transport 100 humans into space at a time. Space industry venture capitalist Rick Tumlinson previously told Inverse that this could be a major step in humanity’s history.

“Even if he doesn’t go to Mars or the moon, the ability to deliver 100-plus people at a time to orbit, to space itself, is going to be the beginning of the biggest revolution in the history of humanity, if not life itself,” Tumlinson said in February 2019. “Having the ability to climb out of the gravity well of Earth means we have the potential to make life and humanity immortal, unkillable.”

In fact, in a presentation to the Mars Society this month, Paul Wooster of SpaceX said that the payload will be 150 tonnes, not 100.  Before SpaceX, it cost $10,000 to lift one pound into LEO (low Earth orbit).  That's $22,000 per kilo.  With Starship, that cost will fall to $13 per kilo. That is a cut of nearly 3 orders of magnitude (10,000 times).  Even if we never get to Mars—and we will, within a decade—this will open up space.  As Tony Seba says, every time there is a 10-fold fall in costs there is a disruption.  How big will the disruption be with a 10,000-fold fall in costs?  At 100 passengers, it would theoretically cost $2000 to lift a person into LEO.  How many people will want to see the world from orbit?  How many would like a "spacecation"?  Because it will cost only $13,000 to lift a tonne into LEO, there will be lots of commercial space stations.  Hoteliers will charge $5000 for a week in space.  There will be a booming business of holidays in space.

What about the journey to Mars?  Well, the first expeditions will be expensive, because the Starships will be used as habitats on Mars, which means they won't be re-usable.  But at least some of the Starships that go to Mars for the 2027 and subsequent expeditions will be able to leave their cargo and passengers on Mars and return to Earth within the Mars-Earth opposition window, where they will be fully re-usable for ferrying people and cargo up to space stations in LEO, or to the moon, or for point-to-point travel on Earth.  The trip to and from Mars will take 7 or 8 months, including the couple of weeks on Mars for loading and unloading.  So for 2/3rds of the time, those Starships will be re-usable, back here on Earth.  Now, to send a Starship to Mars will require 8 refuelling launches from Earth, each costing $2 mill.  Add in the cost of fuel to get to Mars, and total cost is, say, a conservative $30 million, including the cost of the slightly-less re-usable Starship, which will obviously be higher than a fully re-usable one, though nowhere near as high as one which is used just once to fly to Mars.

Remember that the Super Heavy booster will never go to Mars, and will be 100% re-usable, 3 times a day according to Musk.  Only the Starship part of the Super Heavy/Starship combo on the Mars trip will be partially re-usable and then for just a one third of the time.  At a conservative $30 million, the cost per tonne to Mars will be $200,000.  The cost per person weighing 100 kilos, with 100 days of food (we eat one tonne of food a year), making a total of (let's be conservative and assume 180 days of food) 150 kilos, will be $30,000.  Earlier, I estimated the cost of a trip to Mars in the carbon-fibre composite BFS at an optimistic  $100,000, and added:

remember that it cost £30/US$150 to cross the Atlantic one way by steamer in 1900.  The average weekly wage in 1905 in the US was $10.05, so a one way ticket across the Atlantic cost about 1/3rd of year's wages. In 2014 the average wage in the US was $73,298. 

Assuming a 2% nominal per annum increase in the average wage in the US, the average wage in 2027 will be just under $100,000.   So, with the new stainless steel Starship/Super Heavy combo, a trip to Mars will cost about 1/3rd of  the average annual wage in the US in 2027, just as it cost one third of the average wage for a trip by steamer across the Atlantic a hundred and twenty years ago.  How many immigrants poured into the US in the early years of the 20th C?  In the decade 1900 to 1909, 8.2 million people moved to the US, and in the next decade, despite a world war, 6.3 million.  Does anyone doubt that there will be hundreds of thousands of people willing to emigrate to Mars when costs for a ticket fall to below $30,000 or below?  I say $30K or below, because by 2027, there will be a new, improved version of the Starship which will be cheaper than today's version. Musk is already talking about an 18 metre wide version 2 of the Starship.   This will likely halve launch costs.

At first, it will be just a few people, because the Martian economy will take time to get going.  We'll need jobs on Mars to soak up all the immigrants.  But as Musk pointed out, there will be a shortage of labour on Mars, meaning wages will, relative to Earth, be higher.  So of course, will living costs—Martians will have to pay for life support, because they will not be part of a self-sustaining biosphere.  Immigrants add to demand, creating the need for more labour.  So a feedback process will start, with numbers of Mars rising, requiring more labour, which means more immigrants, which means even more people on Mars which means more demand .......  There will be tourists, visitors to Mars. What would millionaires pay to fly over Valles Marineris, the deepest and longest canyon in the solar system?  To be able to boast back home about their visit to Olympus Mons, the tallest and largest known volcano in the solar system?  To walk on the surface of another planet?

Just as the need for high-density, cheap, rapidly rechargeable batteries is now driving a technological explosion in batteries, so cheap access to space will drive a welter of new technologies, which will be essential in space but also very useful on Earth.  Techniques for extracting CO₂ from the atmosphere, cheaply and efficiently; ways to produce synthetic methane cheaply; food production (vat meat and hydroponics, for example); life support systems; things made in space (fibre-optic cables which contain no flaws because they're made in zero gravity); water purification systems; a huge increase in understanding the human body and its health; genetic modification and gene repair; communications; science .....

We are going through several major technological revolutions—3D printing, access to space, the triumph of renewables, AI (Tesla self-driving), the EV revolution, communications (think Starlink, bringing high-speed broadband to the whole world).  All of these will change the world in ways none of us expect, but be sure: just as the internet and smart phones have revolutionised our society, these new revolutions will alter it beyond recognition.