Starship goes mainstream

 For a long time, it was just internet dweebs who were excited about Starship.  If you talked to most people, they'd never even heard of Starship, and if they had, they thought it was about creating a bolt-hole for billionaires (hint: no it isn't) There were enthusiasts on YouTube, but the mainstream media mostly ignored the story, or when they did cover it, did shallow and inaccurate reports.  Readers of this blog will know that I have been enthusiastic about Starship since it was first mooted, under the name 'Interplanetary Explorer'.  

But .... The Economist magazine has finally taken the whole thing seriously enough to do a reasonably in-depth and accurate piece, which I summarise below.   Starship is now mainstream enough to get the serious attention of a prestigious news magazine.  

WHEN IT COMES to size and spectacle, the peak of the Space Age passed in 1973, with the final flight of the Saturn V rocket that had carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the Saturn V could lug 140 tonnes into orbit. Its first flight, in 1967, provoked Walter Cronkite, an American news anchor reporting far from the pad, to exclaim: “My God, our building’s shaking here!” as ceiling tiles fell around him. Despite half a century of technological progress, nothing as powerful has reached orbit since.

Not far from Boca Chica, a Texan hamlet a couple of miles from the Mexican border, SpaceX, a rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, is developing a machine that it hopes will change that. Built from gleaming stainless steel, with its nose adorned with fins and ten metres taller than even the Saturn V, “Starship” looks like something from the cover of a 1950s pulp science-fiction magazine. Its planned payload of up to 150 tonnes means that five Starship flights could put more stuff into space than the rest of the world managed with 135 rocket launches in 2021. Its upper stage contains more pressurised volume than the International Space Station, which took a decade, dozens of launches and perhaps $100bn to assemble.

But it is not just the size that matters. When a Saturn V took off to send men to the moon, the only bit of the 2,800 tonnes of hardware which came back was a cramped five-tonne capsule with three men inside. Each new mission meant a new Saturn V. With Starship, the idea is that all the hardware will come back: the massive booster stage almost immediately, the second, orbital stage after fulfilling whatever mission it had been sent on.

At a press event on February 10th to show off an assembled rocket Mr Musk reiterated his reasons for founding SpaceX in the first place: to buy humanity an insurance policy against existential risks by establishing a colony on Mars. Starship is designed to transport the million tonnes of supplies he thinks might be necessary for that job—roughly 100 times more mass than has been launched since the start of the space age. To that end, it is designed to be not only the biggest rocket ever built, but also the cheapest. Existing rockets cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per launch (the Saturn V may have cost over $1bn in today’s money). Despite Starship’s size, SpaceX hopes to cut that to single-digit millions.

 [....]

But first the rocket needs to fly. A series of test flights of Starship’s upper stage (which, in isolation, is rather confusingly also called “Starship”) have ended in crash-landings and explosions. A successful flight came on May 5th last year, when an upper stage flew 10km into the air before landing safely back on its pad. A full-fledged orbital test of the two-stage form of the rocket, with one “Starship” upper stage sitting atop a “Super Heavy” booster, had been due in January.

That orbital flight, though, needs approval from regulators, who were deluged with thousands of public comments. Officials have promised a decision within weeks. But broader environmental issues could yet force the firm to suspend work at Boca Chica entirely. An internal memo leaked last year revealed serious problems with the “Raptor” engines intended to power Starship. In his press conference, Mr Musk left himself a fair amount of wiggle room. An orbital flight, he said, might come in “a couple of months”—though it could also slip to the end of the year.

Something like Starship has been in development at SpaceX for over a decade, under names such as MCT (“Mars Colonial Transporter”), ITS (“Interplanetary Transport System”), and BFR (“Big Fucking Rocket”). Earlier versions were huger still: at one point the ITS was to have a 300-tonne payload. But all versions have had one thing in common: they are designed to be entirely reusable.

SpaceX already flies partially-reusable rockets: the first stages of its Falcon 9 machines fly back to Earth under their own power. Once refuelled and refurbished, they can fly again, spreading their construction cost over many launches. But their second stages, which end up much higher and moving at orbital speeds, remain expendable. (One, first launched in 2015, is due to crash into the Moon in March.)

With Starship, SpaceX plans to recover both parts. Its “Super Heavy” first stage, like the Falcon 9’s, is designed to fly back to the ground shortly after launch. SpaceX plans to catch it in mid-air with a pair of robotic “chopsticks” attached to the launch tower from which it took off.

Recovering the upper stage requires more drama. The plan is for Starship to fall belly-first from space, relying on atmospheric drag—rather than scarce fuel—to shed most of its speed. It will use its stubby fins for control, “rather like how skydivers use their hands and feet,” says Scott Manley, a physicist and programmer who runs a popular rocketry-focused YouTube channel. When it is within a few hundred metres of the ground it will flip itself upright, relight some of its engines and make a rocket-powered landing of its own.

Several test flights have practised this flipping manoeuvre already, though not after a descent from orbit. Mr Musk (whose bold visions sometimes work, and sometimes do not) hopes that each “Super Heavy” booster could be ready to fly again within an hour. Since the rocket’s upper stages would have to complete at least one orbit before returning to Earth, he hopes they might one day manage three flights a day. (The minimum re-use time for a Falcon first stage is about a month.)

Starship’s “Raptor” engines are likewise designed with reusability in mind, says Mr Manley. They use a sophisticated, highly efficient design pioneered—but never flown—in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. That helps reduce wear on components. Somewhat unusually, they run on methane rather than kerosene, a more-commonly used rocket fuel. One reason is that methane produces very little soot, which helps keep the engine’s internals clean—another boon for an engine intended to fly again and again. And both methane and the oxygen necessary to burn it can be made from Mars’s thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere with the help of some fairly straightforward industrial chemistry. SpaceX hopes that could, one day, allow Mars-bound Starships to refuel for a return trip to Earth.

But high-level design decisions are not the only reason Starship is cheap. SpaceX has an iterative, rapid-fire, startup-style culture very different from that of older aerospace firms (hence all the crash-landings and explosions). Mr Musk’s development philosophy is that “if things are not failing, you aren’t innovating enough.” In a speech in November to America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine he spoke of running a dozen test flights in 2022. The firm mixes high-tech, bespoke design in some areas (such as the Raptor engines) with a make-do-and-mend attitude elsewhere (some Super Heavy prototypes have fins controlled by electric motors taken from cars made by Tesla, another of Mr Musk’s businesses).

One good example is the rocket’s stainless-steel construction. Starship was originally going to be built from high-tech carbon-fibre composites, which are both very strong and very light. But in 2019, despite having produced several big components, SpaceX changed its mind and went back to the drawing board. Carbon composites, it turns out, have several disadvantages. They are porous, fiddly to work with, and need to be cured in an autoclave—not easy when making rocket-body segments that are 9 metres across. And, at around $130 per kilogramme, composites are expensive.

Stainless steel, by contrast, is strong but heavy and therefore not an obvious choice for rocket-building. Some steel alloys, though, get significantly stronger as they cool down, meaning less is required for a given strength. And since Starship uses cryogenic propellant, cooling is in abundant supply. Steel is tougher, too, which can save weight elsewhere. SpaceX hopes to get away with applying a heat shield to only the “windward” part of the upper stage, which feels the full force of re-entry heating, leaving the “leeward” side as bare metal and saving mass. Steel does not need painting, which cuts weight a bit more. It is much easier to work with, and can be had for mere dollars per kilogramme. For a company that intends to mass-produce its gigantic rocket, says Mr Potter at BryceTech, a firm of space-industry analysts, that matters.

That may sound like a risky approach when it comes to something as unforgiving as rocket science. But it has served SpaceX well so far. It has pulled off 111 Falcon 9 launches in a row without failure, making it one of the most reliable rockets ever flown. Some individual Falcon-9 first stages have already been launched ten times.

[....]

SpaceX, for its part, knows exactly what it wants to do with Starship, even before it starts thinking about Mars. Its “Starlink” project aims to use swarms of thousands of low-flying satellites to beam high-speed internet to anywhere on the Earth’s surface. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief executive, has noted that the global telecommunications market is worth perhaps $1trn a year. SpaceX thinks it might reasonably aspire to about 3-4% of it.

Because low-flying satellites can see only a small portion of the Earth’s surface, Starlink requires enormous numbers of them. The firm already has about 1,655 in orbit, about a third of the total number of active satellites in space. It has permission from American regulators to fly 12,000, and is trying to obtain a licence for 30,000. And that number will need topping up regularly, as individual satellites in the fleet fail, or as the tiny traces of atmosphere that are present in low orbit eventually pull them from the sky. (The satellites are designed to disintegrate on re-entry.) Starship should be able to launch around 400 at a time, of a bigger and more advanced design, and for much less to boot.

Other challenges will need solving. Satellite internet has a bad record of bankrupting those who try it, as Mr Musk has noted. The cost of the satellite dishes that consumers use to receive the service is another issue. SpaceX presently sells those at a substantial loss. Nonetheless, excitement over Starlink’s potential accounts for almost all of the firm’s $100bn valuation.

But first, SpaceX has to make the rocket work. In his press conference Mr Musk was at pains to play down the probability of the orbital test—when it happens—going smoothly. Even if it did, plenty more testing and development would be needed before the rocket would be ready to fly real cargo.

Regulatory battles may be looming, too. The firm’s Boca Chica facility was built on the understanding that it would be used for the Falcon Heavy, a much smaller rocket than Starship. Explosions from failed flight tests have scattered debris over a wide area, says Mr Manley, while road closures annoy locals. Environmental regulators are reportedly unhappy, and pushing for a full review of the firm’s licence. Mr Musk has said that, in the worst case, SpaceX would have to move Starship development to Cape Canaveral in Florida, which would delay things for months.

Even then, Starship’s capabilities could go unused. The true size of the market for Starlink remains unknown, even if SpaceX can drive costs down. As for his grandest ambition of all, it is not at all clear how many people would volunteer to live on Mars. The sales pitch, said Mr Musk, is that “it’s going to be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work [and] you might die.”

But the only way to know for sure is to get the rocket working. Here, at least, it would take a bold person to bet against SpaceX. In 2008, after the first three launches of its tiny Falcon 1 rocket had failed, the firm almost went under. But the fourth launch worked. Later, it took its engineers more than a dozen attempts to master landing the first stage of the Falcon 9. These days, it is among the most reliable rockets ever built. Mr Musk, for his part, is confident. “[Starship] will work,” he said. “There’ll be a few bumps along the road, but it’ll work”.

[Read more here]

Musk's comments on in-orbit refuelling of Starship

Starship continues to develop, and its design just keeps on being tweaked.  For flights to the Moon or to Mars, Starship will have to be refuelled in orbit.  When Starship (then the BFR) was first mooted by SpaceX decades ago, refuelling was going to be "belly-to-belly" as it were, with the tanker lying adjacent to the Starship to refuel.  Actually, that "decades ago" is just a dig at SLS, NASA's incredibly expensive and horribly delayed rocket which is supposed to get us to the Moon.  In fact, SpaceX started development of Starship, then called BFR, just 5 years ago, in 2016.  After the initial plans, SpaceX then switched to what is inelegantly described as "butt-to-butt" fuel transfers.  But experience has shown that this is too dangerous, with extraneous fuel lines next to rocket engines just too unsafe.  So we're back to "belly-to-belly" refuelling.

This all came out when Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's pet project, chucked a wobbly about SpaceX being awarded  part of the Artemis Moon landing project.   This report is from Teslarati.

After a much-anticipated GAO denial of Blue Origin and Dynetics protests over NASA’s decision to solely award SpaceX a contract to turn Starship into a crewed Moon lander, an in-depth (but heavily redacted) document explaining that decision was released on August 10th.

Aside from ruthlessly tearing both companies’ protests limb from limb, the US Government Accountability Office’s decision also offered a surprising amount of insight into SpaceX’s HLS Starship proposal. One of those details in particular seemed to strike an irrational nerve in the online spaceflight community. Specifically, in its decision, GAO happened to reveal that SpaceX had proposed a mission profile that would require as many as 16 launches to fully fuel a Starship Lander and stage the spacecraft in an unusual lunar orbit.

After around 24 hours of chaos, confusion, and misplaced panic, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finally weighed in on the GAO document’s moderately surprising indication that each Starship Moon landing would require sixteen SpaceX launches.

Confirming many expectations, SpaceX’s solution to sending an entire single-stage Starship to the Moon, landing it on the lunar surface, and returning it to a lunar orbit (and maybe even Earth) goes as follows.

First, SpaceX will launch a custom variant of Starship that was redacted in the GAO decision document but confirmed by NASA to be a propellant storage (or depot) ship last year. Second, after the depot Starship is in a stable orbit, SpaceX’s NASA HLS proposal reportedly states that the company would begin a series of 14 tanker launches spread over almost six months – each of which would dock with the depot and gradually fill its tanks.

Third, once the depot ship is topped off, the actual Starship Moon lander would launch, dock with the depot, and be fully fueled. Finally, the fueled lander would fire up its Raptor engines and head to the Moon, where it would enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) – a weird high-altitude, elliptical orbit only necessary because NASA’s Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket are too underpowered to reach a more normal, functional orbit around the Moon.

After reaching NRHO, Starship would dock with Orion (or vice versa), receive its Artemis astronauts, land on the Moon for several days, and launch back to NRHO to return those astronauts to Orion. After its main mission is complete, it remains to be seen if Starship will have enough propellant left over to return to some kind of Earth orbit, where it could potentially be refueled and reused on future missions to the lunar surface.

In response to GAO revealing that SpaceX proposed as many as 16 launches – including 14 refuelings – spaced ~12 days apart for every Starship Moon lander mission, Musk says that a need for “16 flights is extremely unlikely.” Instead, assuming each Starship tanker is able to deliver a full 150 tons of payload (propellant) into orbit after a few years of design maturation, Musk believes that it’s unlikely to take more than eight tanker launches to refuel the depot ship – or a total of ten launches including the depot and lander. 

[Musk added, in a tweet (how else): 

"Without flaps & heat shield, Starship is much lighter. Lunar landing legs don’t add much (1/6 gravity). May only need 1/2 full, ie 4 tanker flights.  However, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem. SpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our own ship) over 20 times."]

But, as Musk notes, so long as Starship gets anywhere close to its design objectives, it would be a non-issue even if each Starship Moon lander mission somehow required 16 launches. A step further, assuming that SpaceX proposed 16 launches per mission out of an abundance of conservatism, it’s fair to assume that a 12-day gap between tanker launches is also an extremely conservative worst-case scenario. Per Musk and SpaceX, Starship’s design goals call for multiple reuses of ships and boosters per day. Even if SpaceX falls a full magnitude short of those ambitious goals, Starship tankers should feasibly be able to launch every few days or maybe every week.

But thanks to SpaceX’s relatively conservative proposal, the company now knows that NASA is more than happy with Starship even if it falls something like 50% short of its payload performance goals and two magnitudes short of its reusability goals.

 

Starship refuelling in orbit.
Render by Erc X

As an aide-mémoire, here is my Mars timetable.

SpaceX assembling orbital Starship

 From Teslarati

SpaceX has begun rapidly assembling the first orbital Starship prototype and the Super Heavy booster set to launch it isn’t far behind.

SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas rocket factory seemingly turned a corner in early July as sections of Starship 20 (S20) began to pop up around the site. Though parts labeled Starship “SN20” first appeared as far back as March 2021, the only unequivocal work on SpaceX’s first purportedly orbital-class Starship began in mid-June with the integration of the first engine section with mounts for six – not three – Raptors.

However, in line with SpaceX’s strict focus on maximizing the speed of Starship development and shortening the path to orbit, the company has frequently built Starship hardware before firmly assigning that hardware to any given ship, booster, or tank. In other words, until SpaceX actually begins stacking multiple completed rocket sections, there’s always a degree of uncertainty about the fate of any given ring, dome, or tank barrel. With Starship S20, that process began earlier this month and Super Heavy Booster 4 is likely to follow suit within the next few days – if it hasn’t already.

Since SpaceX unceremoniously rolled Starship prototype SN16 to an empty lot in mid-May, the company didn’t stack a single Starship part until the first week of July – unusual after a frenetic seven months spent building, qualifying, and launching Starships SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, and SN15 and testing test tanks SN7.2 a nd BN2.1. Around the same time as Starship SN15 became the first prototype to successfully complete a high-altitude test flight and land in one piece, news broke that SpaceX was striving to perform Starship’s first orbital test flight with Ship 20 (S20) and Booster 3 (B3) as early as July.

Eventually, Booster 3’s orbital launch assignment shifted to Booster 4 as it became clear that the former prototype wasn’t meant to fly, but Starship S20 remained. More likely than not, the almost two-month gap between Starship SN16’s instant retirement and the start of the next flightworthy prototype’s assembly can be explained by the significant changes, upgrades, and undecided design decisions required to jump to S20.

Two weeks after the first stack, Starship S20 is already approximately half-assembled and the last section of the vehicle’s tanks is almost ready for installation. What could be Starship S20’s nosecone is also in the late stages of assembly, though SpaceX has yet to even attempt to fully cover a nose in heat shield tiles and getting that process right could take an attempt or two.

Musk has emphasised that there will probably be several mishaps along the way before Starship orbital flights work.  In the first attempt to get Starship orbital, the booster will try to make a soft landing in the sea off Boca Chica,  and Starship will splashdown off Hawaii.  We're so used to SpaceX reusing its rockets that the apparent waste is actually quite shocking, but I expect SpaceX thinks that things could go wrong, possibly badly wrong, and doesn't want to completely destroy its Boca Chica base.   The Super Heavy booster and Starship itself are far too large to land on the drone ships that SpaceX currently uses for its Falcon 9 boosters, so that option is out.  It says a lot about how SpaceX has changed space paradigms that we should be surprised that the spaceships  from the first orbital Starship launch should be dropped into the sea, but of course that's exactly how all other rocket manufacturers still operate.

If the development of orbital Starship seems unbearably slow, that's because we are watching it happen in front of us, day by day.  Musk only announced the stainless steel Starship in January 2019, two and a half years ago.  By contrast, NASA's SLS was announced in 2011, uses old technology, and hasn't flown yet.  Oh, and when it does, the booster will be dumped in the ocean.  Plus each Starship launch will cost roughly $2 million while each SLS launch will cost roughly $1.5 BILLION.

Different iterations of Starship

Renders by Kimi Talvitie, via HumanMars.

Musk's 2019 Starship presentation

At Boca Chica Texas, right next to the silvery finished (almost—that'll take another month) Starship Mark 1, lit by searchlights, Musk shared his ideas about the future with us as well as providing us with new renderings of Starship.

The new look stainless steel Starship.  Big fins at the back are (mostly) not for lift but to slow down the descent,
like a skydiver.  The aim will be to slow re-entry enough to reduce heat, so some small lift in the upper atmosphere.
Small nubs are landing leg housings.
Steel costs 2% of carbon fibre composite, is much better at cryogenic temps and also at high temps.
Is also re-usable in an emergency and can be re-welded on Mars/the Moon if needed.
The reason they're being built outdoors is that putting up buildings would have taken too long.

The three sea-level engines (with the smaller bows) are in the centre.  They can
gimbel by up to 15%.  The outer three are for deep space travel, and don't gimbel. 
Musk said in a tweet that there were 6 landing legs. 
Presumably the two not shown are buried in the fins right next to the body.

Starship entering Mars's atmosphere.
Heat shield made of small ceramic tiles (material looking like spaghetti under the microscope???)

Use of steel which has melting point of 1500 degrees C permits thinner and lighter
heat shield.  Carbon fibre composite and aluminium melt at 400 degrees.

Super heavy also of stainless steel.  Little fins at the base serve little aerodynamic purpose.
They're housings for the landing legs.

Height of Starship 50 m, of Super Heavy 68 m.

Super Heavy returning to launch pad.
Musk says aim is to re-use both Starship and Super Heavy within 6 hours of landing.

Starship at Moon Base Alpha.
Musk thinks settlement on the Moon will be unlikely,
but permanent scientific bases as with Antarctica will exist.

Not just our moon, but also the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

But colonisation of Mars remains primary goal.  We may be the only places with sentience in our galaxy.
There's no evidence of alien civilisations (The Fermi paradox). And it took 4.5 billion years for sentience to emerge here.
If it had taken just 10% longer, it would have been incinerated as the sun heated up over the next
500 million years.  Implication:  we have duty to spread life and sentience through the universe.
 

I'm doing this from memory, as the livestream video won't play, now that the presentation is over.  No doubt, SpaceX will upload the video in the next few days.  His timetable is as usual tight:

• Starship Mk1 flying to 20 km (65 K feet) within a month or two
• Starship Mk 3 and 4 built within 6 months.  These will be full sized.  Can't reach orbit by themselves, so Super Heavy must be built first.  Expects that to happen within 6 months, so first orbital tests next year.
• Is only devoting less than 5% of SpaceX's resources to Starship.  However, cost of testing and iterative development much more expensive than building the prototypes.  Still focused on getting Crew Dragon working ASAP.  
• Expects that they will build at least 10 Starships.  Total annual launch capacity (because they'll be rapidly re-usable) will be 50 times larger than total existing launch capacity, including SpaceX's existing fleet.  (I see capacity is back up to 150 tonnes from 100 in the previous version)  Unstated implication is that launches with Starship/Super Heavy will be super cheap, else where will demand come from? 
• Will use both Boca Chica and Florida for launches.  Was cagey about what Boca Chica would look like in 10 years, but it's obvious: a massive spaceport.
• Because both Super Heavy and Starship will be rapidly re-usable, testing will be able to proceed much more rapidly and much more rigorously.  With expendable rockets you'll need 10 rockets to test the design 10 times.  With Starship, you'll only need one.
• Will test uncrewed first.  So first Mars and Moon missions will be automated and uncrewed.
• The biggest difficulty he sees in the design and construction of the spaceships.  Life support, for example, he sees as a much easier.
• Will ultimately make methane on Earth as well as Mars using the Sabatier method.  Needs 3.5 tonnes of oxygen for each tonne of methane and will extract the oxygen near the spaceport, rather than shipping the huge volumes needed in.
• Rapid technological and manufacturing progress.  For example, will no longer cut the steel into squares, but will just unroll it from the rolled steel coil and shape it to the circumference of Starship with a single cut and weld.  Hence even more rapid timetable than we have seen to date. Will have to step up pace of Raptor engine manufacture from one every 8 to 10 days to one a day by or before Q2 next year.

My conclusions?  SpaceX is very much on track to achieve its timetable.  

Starhopper completes 150 metres "hop"

Starhopper, the cutback version of SpaceX's Starship (BFS) lifted off at Boca Chica, Texas, slowly rose to 150 metres, then moved sideways to the landing pad.  If you watch the video closely, you can see the single Raptor engine gimballing and the cold-air thrusters at the top of the aircraft firing to keep the rocket vertical and to push it sideways over the landing pad.  Extraordinary.

This successful test means that Starship Mk1 and Mk2, one of which is being built at Boca Chica and another at Cocoa, Florida, will be able to do the next tests, which will take each prototype to much higher altitudes.  They will each be fitted with 3 Raptor engines.  If those tests are successful, SpaceX will then test suborbital launches and then orbit.  The next really big hurdle is re-entry, when the spacecraft will have to face temperatures in the thousands of degrees.  If that works, SpaceX plans to make its first commercial launches in 2021.   This rapid progress means an uncrewed mission to Mars in 2022, a circumlunar expedition in 2023 and a crewed mission to Mars in 2024 are all on track. 

Musk will be updating us all in a few weeks about the latest design for the Starship and Super Heavy, and perhaps the timetable too. 

An extraordinary and magnificent achievement.

Starship progress 4x faster than re-usable F9

Starship Mk 1 under construction at Boca Chica, Texas.  Note two segments, one in foreground, one in background.
Construction of a second Starship prototype is also proceeding apace at Cocoa, Florida.
Source: Next Big Future

From Next Big Future:

If Elon Musk and SpaceX hit the targets for the Starhopper and the SpaceX Starship then SpaceX will have accelerated rocket development by about four times. This would be accelerating the rate of technological progress to ten to twenty times faster than most of their competition. This is the scary thing for competitors to SpaceX. SpaceX continues to get more ambitious with its rockets and is accelerating its rate of progress. Technology and Space enthusiasts can celebrate that this faster rate of development will mean that the world will get the space program that we have always wanted.

SpaceX reusable first stage rocket program was publicly announced in 2011. SpaceX first achieved a successful landing and recovery of a first stage in December 2015. SpaceX started Grasshopper tests on September 2012 and completed the Grasshopper tests on October, 2013. The SpaceX Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle, or F9R Dev, was announced in October 2012. Tests were performed from April to August 2014. The first landing test of a first stage Falcon 9 was September 2013 on the sixth flight of a Falcon 9 and maiden launch of the v1.1 rocket version. From 2013 to 2016, sixteen test flights were conducted, six of which achieved a soft landing and recovery of the booster: 

•  Flight 20 (Orbcomm OG2 M2) safely touching down on the LZ-1 ground pad upon first attempt in December 2015; 

•  Flight 23 (CRS-8) finally achieving a stable landing at sea in the Atlantic on the drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You in April 2016 after four previous attempts ended in destruction of the booster upon impact; 

•  Flights 24 (JCSAT-14) and 25 (Thaicom 8) returning at higher speed from GTO missions at sea on a drone ship in May 2016; 

•  Flight 27 (CRS-9) returning to LZ-1 in July 2016; 

•  Flight 28 (JCSAT-16) landing on a drone ship in August 2016; 

• Since the January 2017 return to flight, SpaceX has stopped referring to landing attempts as experimental. 

Elon Musk and SpaceX mentioned the Falcon Heavy in 2005. The Falcon Heavy had a successful first flight in February 2017. There was significant work, redesign and ground testing from 2008 through 2016.

The SpaceX Starhopper prototype should begin tests this week. The orbital Starship prototype already has begun major pieces of the body. The choice of stainless steel construction has increased the speed of construction and testing. The orbital Starship prototype should have its first test in the second half of 2019. 

Getting a new rocket to orbit and back within 9 months of the beginning of testing would be four times faster than starting with the Grasshopper and reaching an unsuccessful orbital launch and landing attempt. If SpaceX could get from the start of development to a fully successful orbital rocket and reusable landing in two years would be about six times faster than the Falcon Heavy and twice as fast as that start of the reuse of the Falcon 9 first stage. If SpaceX could reach this rate of progress, they could go through two or even three major iterations of the Super Heavy Starship by 2030. There will likely be minor design upgrades every year.

It's logical—SpaceX has learned a lot, and it's a larger company these days than it was in 2011.  Apart from Crew Dragon, SpaceX is now devoting all of its much larger resources to Starship.  So progress should be rapid.

Of course, some things will go wrong.  For example, I'm still not convinced that a monocoque construction will be strong enough, although it will be lighter than having a frame (internal girders) as well.  Starship and Super Heavy may yet require internal girders for strengthening, at what cost to load I know not.  The girders need not be made of steel, though—they won't be exposed to the heat of re-entry.

The timetable will probly slip.  As it stands, though, the timetable looks something like this:

1. Late 2019/early 2020:   First orbital flights of the Starship (BFS, i.e., the spaceship upper stage)
2. End 2020: Full stack (i.e., Super Heavy booster plus Starship) operational
3. Early 2021: First commercial customers (for satellites), launches of Starlink constellation
4. Late 2022: Uncrewed mission to Mars (Mars is in opposition in December)
5. 2023??: First commercial space station.  Launched on Starship, built by non-SpaceX companies—or maybe even by SpaceX
6. 2023: 'Dear Moon' circumlunar expedition
7. 2024??: Moon Base Alpha
8. Late 2024: Crewed mission to Mars
9. Early 2027: Second expedition to Mars.  Return of at least one Starship.
10. 2029: Third expedition to Mars.  Martian population reaches 300.  (If Starship works, SpaceX will start designing even bigger rockets, capable of carrying more than 100 passengers, so Mars's population in 2029 could be more.)  Return of some Starships.

A Martian township in 10 years?  Looks plausible.  But even if the timetable slips 2 years, that still means boots on Mars by 2026.  

How many Starships and Super Heavys will  SpaceX need to build?  Six Starships (BFSs) for the first two Mars expeditions—and some might not be coming back, though later Starships will.  Perhaps two for Moon shuttles.  Two for satellite launches/space station construction.  10 Starships altogether.  Plus two or three Super Heavys to service them.  Musk has said that the Starships and Super Heavys could cost less than a Falcon 9 ($62 million).  Let's say $100 million each.  That's a total of $1.3 billion.  For 13 re-usable spaceships.   SLS will cost $1.5 to $2.5 billion for a single launch.  Just saying.   And SpaceX could fund it all itself, with the profits from  Starlink.

If Starship is truly re-usable, even just ten times, the cost of a journey to Mars will be  $100,000; if twenty times, $50,000 plus fuel costs (low, because using methane not RPG).  And if the Starships can get to Mars and leave again within that narrow window when Mars and Earth are in opposition, say by having a complete turnaround in 2 weeks on the surface of Mars, apart from the first few they will be re-usable as many as 100 times.  Which means that a ticket to Mars will cost $20K for you plus roughly 1 tonne of baggage.  The advent of truly cheap space travel.

Starship passes a huge test

SpaceX's Starship, which is designed to become SpaceX's workhorse, lifting cargoes and people into LEO (low earth orbit), and with in-orbit refuelling, journeying to the Moon and Mars, needs to solve two key problems.

First, for journey back from Mars, it needs a methane engine, because RPG (the kind of kerosene most rockets now use) would be tricky to manufacture on Mars, whereas methane will be a lot simpler.  Also, if rockets become re-usable, the major cost in launches will be the fuel.  Methane is much cheaper than RPG, here on Earth.  So SpaceX had to build a methane engine.

Second, SpaceX had to find a material which would withstand the 1700 degrees C of re-entry.  The first designs for Starship used carbon-fibre composite materials, with a heat shield on the windward side of the Starship's body to absorb the heat, or more accurately to burn off and produce a layer between the highly compressed air in front of the spaceship and the spaceship itself.  If the Starship is to be re-usable, the kind of ceramic tiles used by the Space Shuttle would be useless, because they had to be individually inspected at prodigious cost after every landing.   SpaceX decided to solve this problem by using a special kind of stainless steel.  Above 300-400 degrees C carbon-fibre starts to disintegrate, while the melting point of stainless steel is around 1500 C. 

So the first key hurdle for SpaceX was to build a methane engine, and then to test it.  They've just done so, successfully, spectacularly.

Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a billowing cloud of orange-coloured smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed.

Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle was the first true flight of SpaceX's Starhopper rocket ship. It represents a key step in company founder Elon Musk's quest to send people to the Moon and Mars.

Starhopper, which resembles a three-legged water tower, was hardly visible through the smoke and darkness, but Musk said on Twitter that the test worked.

"Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!" Musk tweeted after the test launch, later sharing the footage of the flight.

Starhopper isn't designed to fly into space. Instead, it's a test bed for technologies that could eventually power a much larger and more powerful launch system known as Starship.

Musk envisions Starship as a nearly 400-foot-tall, fully reusable, and stainless-steel vehicle that can ferry about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo at a time to Mars.

Starhopper stands about 60 feet tall, 30 feet wide, and uses one Raptor rocket engine; meanwhile, a full-scale Starship headed for deep space could use more than 41 such engines, according to Musk.

The rocket engines are essential yet expensive, which is why SpaceX is testing limited numbers of them on crude vehicles like Starhopper – to discover any issues early on, save money, and develop the Raptor into safe and reliable spaceflight hardware.

Musk's eventual goal is for Starship to be capable of launching and landing many times with little to no refurbishment required. This, he says, may reduce launch costs by 100- to 1,000-fold compared to traditional, single-use rockets.

"Full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it, without which we cannot become a multi-planet species," Musk recently told Time's Jeffrey Kluger in an interview for CBS Sunday Morning.

"We cannot have a base on the Moon, we cannot have a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability."

But getting to that stage will likely require years of testing, and Wednesday's launch was a crucial first step.

With a successful untethered flight under its belt, the company is now aiming to launch Starhopper on a flight to more than 650 feet (200 meters) "in a week or two," Musk said early Friday morning.

SpaceX's current government licence permits the company to launch experimental vehicles like Starhopper on flights lasting no more than six minutes and up to a maximum altitude of 3.1 miles (5 kilometers).

But SpaceX isn't stopping there: It's now building much bigger 180-foot-tall (55-meter-tall) rocket ships, called Starship Mark 1, which Musk says could fly from Texas or Florida in two to three months and reach orbit by the end of the year.

Musk tweeted in March that SpaceX is "working on regulatory approval" for orbital flights of those prototypes, which will have three Raptor engines each instead of one.

SpaceX plans to launch a full-scale Starship before the end of 2020. Then sometime in 2021, Musk says, the company may trying landing a full-scale, uncrewed Starship on the Moon (perhaps as a bold demonstration to NASA).

Around 2023, SpaceX plans to launch Starship's first human passengers, a Japanese billionaire and his hand-picked crew of artists, on a voyage around the Moon.

SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell has reportedly said the company hopes to send its first uncrewed payloads to Mars by 2024. Following that, perhaps in 2026, SpaceX may try to put boots on the red planet.

[Read more—a lot more—here]

Source: ScienceAlert.

The next tests will be larger hops and then suborbital flights and then orbit.  I was going to say it could be ages before we get to orbital flights,  but given how rapidly SpaceX has got this far, I think their forecast of a mid-2021 first commercial launch looks very likely. So does the uncrewed mission to Mars in 2022, the Dear Moon circumlunar expedition in 2023 and the first steps by humans on Mars in 2024. 

With luck I shall live to see it: the culmination of a lifetime's fascination with space.  I was inspired by the Apollo 11 mission, by '2001 A Space Odyssey', and of course by the first three Star Wars films.  And now, 50 or so years later, we'll be there.  What a TV newsreel that will be.

Starship news

It's going to be giant.

According to tweets published by CEO Elon Musk on July 21st, SpaceX’s combined Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle (BFR) could have as many as 41 Raptor engines at liftoff. 

As with all other aspects of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, this is a sign that things remain in flux as the company nears the point at which a specific design will need to be settled on for the first flight-ready prototype(s). With 6 Raptors on the upper stage (Starship) and 35 Raptors on the first stage/booster (Super Heavy), the rocket will – without a doubt – be the most powerful launch vehicle ever developed when it attempts its inaugural launch.

Now expected to feature 35 Raptors in its final iteration, SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster can now be expected to produce a minimum of ~70,000 kN (15.7M lbf) of thrust at full throttle, assuming that all 35 Raptors are the throttleable ~2000 kN variant. According to Musk, SpaceX may also develop a simplified Raptor with minimal throttling that would produce upwards of ~2500 kN (550,000 lbf) of thrust.

If, say, 5 throttleable Raptors were kept as the center cluster of engines used for landing and critical recovery-related burns, a Super Heavy booster with 30 uprated Raptors could produce upwards of 85,000 kN (19.1M lbf) of thrust at launch. In no uncertain terms, a Super Heavy booster anywhere inside those rough bounds (70 MN to 85 MN) would be packing double the thrust of NASA’s Saturn V rocket and double the thrust of NASA’s in-development SLS rocket in its higher-thrust variants.

[Read more here]

Also, SpaceX has released new official renderings of the Starship and Super Heavy.  Notice how thick the walls  (and the glass) are.  This is much thicker than the test versions being built at Boca Chica (Texas) and Cocoa (Florida), which have always looked too fimbly to me to withstand the pressures and heat of re-entry.

Weightless inside Starship on Dear Moon expedition.

Starship on 'Dear Moon' expedition circumnavigating the Moon

Starship and Super Heavy separating, with Super Heavy returning to base.

Inherit the legend

Nearly 50 years ago, on July 21st, 1969, the first man ever to do so set foot on the Moon.  In perhaps another 3 years, there will once again be humans on the Moon, this time to stay.  SpaceX plans commercial launches of its BFR to LEO (low Earth orbit) starting two years from now, and 'Dear Moon' is scheduled for 2023.  What an achievement the first Moon landing was.  We are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Here is a image from HumanMars by Gravitation Innovation of the Saturn V rocket next to SpaceX's Starship (BFS) and Super Heavy (BFR).   BTW, I think Gravitation Innovation is too pessimistic.  Unless something goes very wrong we'll be on the Moon before 2025, and on Mars in 2025.  Could something go very wrong?  Alas, yes.  The stainless steel Starship might not be viable.  It might disintegrate on re-entry, for example.  There will be other failures like the 'unscheduled disassembly' of Crew Dragon, which will delay the whole process.  Since we can, realistically, only get to Mars whenever it is is opposition to the Earth (i.e., when it is closest) a 3 month delay would postpone the Mars expedition by 2 years.   That doesn't apply to the Moon, though.  A 3 month delay will be just that for expeditions to the Moon.

SpaceX targets 2021 Starship launch

SpaceX Super Heavy plus cargo Starship by Mack Crawford (brickmack)

From Space News:

The first commercial mission for SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy launch system will likely take place in 2021, a company executive said June 26. 

Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s vice president of commercial sales, said the company is in talks with prospective customers for the first commercial launch of that system roughly two years from now. 

“We are in discussions with three different customers as we speak right now to be that first mission,” Hofeller said at the APSAT conference here. “Those are all telecom companies.”

SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage are being designed to launch up to 20 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit[GTO], Hofeller said, or more than 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit [LEO]. Equipped with a nine-meter payload fairing, the launch system is designed to carry crew and resources to the moon and Mars, but is also SpaceX’s next vehicle to send satellites into orbit around the Earth and elsewhere. 

Hofeller said SpaceX plans to do several test flights before using the next-generation launch system for satellites. Those test flights — a number he did not quantify — are to demonstrate the launch system for customers and to assuage any concerns by insurers about the reliability of a new vehicle. 

SpaceX performed a “hop” with a prototype of Starship in April, propelling the vehicle just centimeters off the ground, Hofeller said. Future tests will reach higher altitudes, he said. 

“We have future hops coming up later this year,” he said. “The goal is to get orbital as quickly as possible, potentially even this year, with the full stack operational by the end of next year and then customers in early 2021.”

SpaceX ultimately intends to supersede its current partly reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launchers with the fully reusable Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. The company won’t rush customers from one generation of vehicles to another, however. 

“Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are going to be around as long as our customers want them,” Hofeller said. “If we make them obsolete by having a better product and a lower price, great.”

Hofeller said the discounted pricing SpaceX gave to early customers of Falcon 9 missions with pre-flown first-stage boosters is now the company’s normal pricing. SpaceX Founder Elon Musk said last year that previously flown booster missions were priced “around $50 million,” down from $62 million. Musk said SpaceX’s prices would continue to decline, too. 

Hofeller reiterated that prices would keep dropping through the introduction of Super Heavy and Starship. The fully reusable nature of the launch system enables those lower prices, he said. 

Being fully reusable also opens up new mission possibilities, he said. 

“You could potentially recapture a satellite and bring it down if you wanted to,” Hofeller said. “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?”

SpaceX explored making the Falcon 9 fully reusable, but struggled with decelerating the upper stage, Hofeller said. Efforts to slow the upper stage would have drained energy otherwise used to carry a payload, he said. 

SpaceX has reused a single Falcon 9 first-stage booster up to three times to date. The block 5 version of the rocket, which debuted last year, is designed for up to 10 launches without major refurbishment. 

Hofeller said SpaceX plans to use a single Falcon 9 booster five times by the end of this year. 

A tight timetable.  The first unmanned cargo-only expedition to Mars is planned for 2022, the manned expedition in late 2024/early 2025, while the manned Moon flyby is scheduled for 2023.  The next oppositions with Mars (i.e., when Earth is closest to Mars) will occur in October 2020, December 2022 and January 2025.  So if Starship is working by early 2021, there'll be a year to 18 months to build four Starships for Mars and to launch them (journey time likely to be between 3 and 6 months), and a further two years to build the next six starships for the manned expedition.

Once again SpaceX and Musk demonstrate their incredible capacity for innovation and rapid development of new technologies.   Will SpaceX meet these timetables?

 I don't know.  I don't know whether an all-steel spaceship will work, whether SpaceX's point-to-point suborbital plans will work (Musk has said that the suborbital flights won't use two stages, just the upper stage, the spaceship proper), and whether the journey over the vast emptiness of space (50 to 100 million kilometres between Earth and Mars) will work.  But let's face it, Musk has tended to achieve the supposedly impossible, despite the critics and naysayers, even if it's sometimes taken him longer than he at first said. 

Meanwhile, the declining costs of Falcon 9 mean the SpaceX will continue to produce the profits it needs to fund the Mars expeditions.  And remember, even if Starship never gets to Mars, it will cut the cost of launching stuff into LEO  10 fold.  It's meant to be SpaceX's new workhorse, just as the Falcon 9 is now.  And that's before we consider Starlink, SpaceX's ultra-fast global broadband network, which is likely to be hugely profitable.

Starship construction has begun

Starship preparing for a rainy launch;
Source: HumanMars

Teslarati reports that construction of the first Starship has begun:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that the company’s South Texas workforce has already begun to fabricate the first orbital-class Starship prototype, while Hawthorne engineers and technicians are in the midst of performing small-scale testing of the vehicle’s unprecedented stainless steel heat shield. 

To be assembled out of hexagonal tiles of (presumably) stainless steel, Starship’s metallic heat shield will be one of the most crucial aspects of the orbital spacecraft, particularly with respect to ensuring that it’s extraordinarily easy to reuse. To survive extreme interplanetary-velocity reentry conditions at Mars, Earth, and beyond and remain in a functional, flight-ready condition after landing, SpaceX will need to implement the world’s first orbital-class, large-scale metallic heat shield with an immature technology known as transpirational cooling.

By quite literally drilling tiny holes (pores) into heat shield plates at the hottest parts of Starship’s hull, transpirational cooling effectively allows a large portion of the heat of reentry to be wicked away by the flash evaporation of a liquid, typically water. For SpaceX’s Starship, it’s likely that the coolant of choice would be either liquid water or liquid methane, the former of which offers better cooling per unit of mass at the cost of added plumbing complexity and spaceship mass, while the latter would make use of the same propellant fueling the ship at the cost of worse cooling per unit of mass. Either way, SpaceX will be heading into unproven territory, demanding extensive ground and flight testing to first ensure that the concept is truly viable and then to verify that it can be made as reliable and reusable as it simply has to be. 

Tests like those shown on March 17th by Musk indicate that SpaceX is indeed deep into the process of extensive and often destructive testing, something the company has proven to be exceptionally good at. It’s unclear if the above test of Starship’s hexagonal heat shield tiles – likely made out of a variant of 300-series stainless steel – involved tiles with active or passive cooling, but Musk suggested that the hot-spots created with spin-forming torches reached temperatures as high as 1650 Kelvin (2500ºF/1400ºC. Unlike the ablative heat shields SpaceX is familiar with building and operating through its Crew and Cargo Dragon spacecraft, a stainless steel heat shield would be expected to almost entirely resist erosion (i.e. ablation) during extremely high-velocity reentries of at least 12-14 km/s (~31,000 mph, Mach 40+).

Meanwhile, Musk also confirmed that SpaceX has decided to skip constructing a replacement nosecone/fairing for Starhopper, a functional Starship prototype that will be used to conduct extremely short hop tests like Falcon 9’s development-era Grasshopper and F9R test articles. Over the last several weeks, SpaceX technicians have been rapidly assembling what was initially assumed to be the replacement fairing Musk had previously suggested would be built. Instead, the duo of stainless steel barrel sections – relying on steel much thinner [he means thicker, which is why the new cylindrical sections are unwrinkled compared with the Starhopper ] than the heavy[light]-duty stuff used to build Starhopper – are apparently the beginnings of the first orbital-class Starship prototype, said by Musk [2 months ago] to be aiming for flight-readiness as early as June 2019.

If stacked atop each other, the two new steel sections in work would likely stretch a solid 20-30 meters (65-100 ft) tall. Meanwhile, the first orbital-grade tank domes and/or conical nose section is also in the process of being welded together out of smaller segments, already fast approaching something ready to be installed inside the steel barrel sections.

On Twitter, Musk was asked whether the Starship heatshield hex tiles passed the test.  He said, "Yes.  Full duration".  He commented that "Transpiration cooling will be added wherever we see erosion of the shield. Starship needs to be ready to fly again immediately after landing.  Zero refurbishment."

A fully re-usable spaceship?  How cool is that?  And how cheap!  It means that the cost of construction and development can be spread over hundreds or thousands of launches, instead of just one.

One aside: if SpaceX is using transpiration cooling with the test, they must be using water—the risk of using liquid methane indoors in an oxygen-rich atmosphere would seem to be too great.  Water has the disadvantage that it would freeze in space, methane the disadvantage that it would coat the heatshield with carbon.  It'll be interesting to see which they will go with.

Second aside:  the current Mars/Moon timetable is 2022—first uncrewed missions to Mars; 2023—flight around the Moon; early 2025—first crewed mission to Mars.  If  tests on the real Starship can start in June, then that timetable might even be achieved.  Note that the Starship can get into orbit even without the 'Super Heavy' booster, if it carries no payload.  So orbital tests will be theoretically possible from June onwards.  That'll be a sight to see.

Third aside: compare how long it has taken SpaceX to pivot from a carbon-fibre composite model to the stainless steel one with how long NASA's SLS (Space Launch System) has taken, and how very expensive the latter has been so far.

The Space Shuttle vs BFS (Starship)

I can't give credit for this, unfortunately, because I don't know who rendered it. 
If you know, let me know in the comments.

The BFS--or Starship--will be a big beast.  And unlike the Space Shuttle, because it is re-usable and therefore much cheaper per launch, it will be a true space shuttle. Regarding costs, Musk recently said:

“This will sound implausible, but I think there’s a path to build Starship / Super Heavy for less than Falcon 9,” Musk said.

Wow.  My cost estimates were 4 to 6 times as high as that.  Currently SpaceX charges $62 million for a (non re-usable) launch of the Falcon 9, which lifts 25 tonnes into LEO (low earth orbit).  The Super Heavy/Starship will lift something like 100 tonnes of cargo plus 100 people, so that's at least a four-fold cost reduction.  But it will be 100% re-usable, again, and again, and again.  100s of times. 

So re-usable in fact, that fuel could be a bigger part of the cost per launch than depreciation and maintenance!  Fuel costs for a Falcon 9 are $300-$400K per launch.  Using the combined rocket engine tally as a guess for how much BFR/BFS's fuel will cost give us $1.5 million per launch (38/10*400K).  Assume 100 launches (it could be 1000!) and that gives us a capital/depreciation cost per launch of $620K.  Maintenance, interest charges, development costs?  Let's assume they're the same as the depreciation cost.  Means total cost per launch to LEO  of $3-$4 million.  That is insane!

The cost to Mars will be 7 or 8 times the cost per launch to LEO, because the BFS (Starship) will have to be refuelled by tanker while it is in orbit round the Earth (that won't be necessary to return from Mars because of the lower gravity).  So that means something like $320K per person (including 1 tonne of cargo per person).  The BFS might only be used 10 times, given that Mars is in opposition to Earth only every 2 years, meaning that it will only be usable 10 times each way on the Mars trip before it becomes obsolete. On the other hand, there will no doubt be plenty of opportunities to use the BFS here on Earth between each opposition, if the journey to Mars takes 3 months. With costs this low, we are surely going to have several space stations orbiting Earth and perhaps Mars, and the Starship/Super Heavy combo will be in big demand, here and there.

The cost for a point-to-point Starship ticket will depend on how many passengers can be fitted in.  Say, 500.  That makes the point-to-point ticket $8000.  SpaceX could charge $15,000 and get away with it.  Business people would find such quick trips irresistible.  And no one else is doing it, so there won't exactly be any competition.  As for space tourism ...  A trip to LEO with cargo and 100 passengers could cost $20,000 if cargo (being taken up to the ISS or other space stations, for example) bore half the cost.  Again, wow.  A week in space on the Starship!  Watch the sun rise over Earth!  See the star-sprinkled void of space!  And so on.  Would people pay $20,000?  Yep.  Tens of thousands of them.  And you wondered how SpaceX would pay for the Starship ......

Well, Musk may be too optimistic, or wrong.  The Starship might fail.  The evaporative cooling system might be a no-go.  But really, would you bet against him?  I wouldn't.