může vás zaujmout (nevím jak moc je ten Eli Dourado důvěryhodný): starlink jako money printer, kterej provede značnou akceleraci
Space
The big story in space technology for the next 10 years is Starship, as it will enable just about everything else. Let’s compare some launch costs. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and launched successfully 134 times. Each launch cost an inflation-adjusted $1.8 billion. The payload cost to low-Earth orbit (LEO) was $65,400/kg. Today’s workhorse launch vehicle, the Falcon 9, can send cargo to LEO for $2,600/kg. That is a staggering decrease in launch costs.
Starship promises to take this trend much further. On Falcon 9, only the first stage is reusable, whereas on Starship, the entire system—both the booster and the space vehicle—is reusable. Starship runs on dirt cheap liquid methane instead of expensive rocket fuel. It is made out of stainless steel instead of more expensive traditional aerospace materials. SpaceX is talking about churning out Starships at a rate of one every 72 hours for a cost of $5 million each. Operating costs come down with a high flight rate, so Elon is figuring a $1.5-million fully burdened launch cost for 150 tons to LEO. That is $10/kg, more than 100 times cheaper than a Falcon 9 launch today.
It gets even more insane. Because Starship is designed to be refuelable on orbit, its 150-ton payload capacity to LEO equals its payload capacity to anywhere in the solar system. You will be able to launch 150 tons to LEO, load up on fuel while orbiting Earth, and then fly the same payload the rest of the way to the moons of Jupiter. The whole thing could cost less than one Falcon 9 launch—which is limited to 15 tons to LEO in a reusable configuration or 4 tons to Mars in an expendable configuration.
Let’s apply the gravity model of trade once more, this time to commerce between Earth and LEO. Meta-analyses have found that trade (on Earth) is roughly inverse-linear in transport costs. If that holds for space, a 200x cost reduction in travel between Earth and LEO should increase “trade” between Earth and LEO by 200x. Commerce between the Earth and the moon, or between the Earth and Mars, starting from a base close to zero, would be stimulated even more.
It’s worth noting a second-order effect of cheap launch costs. When launch is expensive, more engineering has to go into the payload to ensure reliability. You don’t want to spend $1.8 billion on launch, and then find out, as NASA did with the Hubble Space Telescope, that your new satellite needs repairs. This dynamic has caused over-engineering of space payloads. With launch for a new low price of $10-20/kg, companies and research agencies will be able to reduce engineering expenses by simply taking on the risk of paying for another (cheap) launch.
Since my guiding star is economically noticeable technological progress, let’s talk about that. SpaceX first landed a rocket booster five years ago. They have been undercutting all other players in the medium-lift launch market ever since. But in the grand scheme of things, launch is still a small market. Aside from getting to watch cool livestreams of boosters landing,
Falcon 9 has probably not made a noticeable impact on your life (unless you work in the space industry).
That is finally beginning to change with Starlink. As of this month, there are 955 Starlink satellites providing Internet access to thousands of users in a “better-than-nothing” beta test. The constellation size could go as high as 42,000 satellites. Internet speeds are already over 100 mbps down—they seem to be only somewhat attenuated by bad weather. For many rural customers, the service is indeed much better than nothing—better than any other available alternative. With more (and more advanced) satellites in operation, speeds could reach a gigabit. With Starship, the cost of launching these thousands of satellites, and the speed at which the company could do so, will improve. Plan on a full buildout of the network this decade.
Starlink could be a cash cow. The service is not a good fit for most customers—urban populations are too dense and have too many alternative service providers for Starlink to be viable. Elon has said Starlink will serve the 3–4 percent hardest-to-reach customers. In addition to rural customers, it will presumably serve other niches like in-flight wifi on airplanes and Internet access for the crew on container ships.
Let’s call global telecommunications revenue $2.4 trillion. Assume Starlink can capture 3 percent of that. That is $72 billion per year in revenue, faaaaar more than SpaceX makes in launch. In 2019, the company had only $2 billion in revenue. Starlink is a money printer. And it makes you wonder, if SpaceX’s success so far has come on a budget of $2B in annual revenue, what would a $72B-per-year SpaceX do?
How about colonize Mars? I have a bet with Robin Hanson that a human will set foot on Mars by end of Q1 2030. I am not totally confident that this will happen (Robin gave me odds), but the scenario I think is most likely is the following: Starlink prints a lot of money, and SpaceX uses the money to pay for Mars colonization on Starship at a breakneck pace. That results in a human launch to Mars no later than January 2029, landing in September 2029. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said
it will be a “major company fail” if humans are not flying on Starship (presumably just to LEO) by 2023. With Starlink revenue, SpaceX will be able to do the work on life support systems and mission planning to enable a human mission by 2029. NASA could be involved as a partner, but SpaceX would tolerate zero government obstacles.
Starship is also still in the running to be the landing vehicle for NASA’s Artemis missions. If it is not selected, that seems like a colossal error. To be sure, choosing Starship would represent a huge change of plans for NASA, which had been assuming a congressionally supported boondoggle relying on the Space Launch System, the Orion capsule, and a moon-orbiting Gateway. While Artemis’s goal is a human mission to the moon’s south pole by 2024, the schedule could easily slip. But by leveraging the new opportunities afforded by Starship, a permanent moon base by the end of the decade seems highly plausible.
With lower launch costs, what else is possible? Varda is a new company working on in-space manufacturing. Microgravity means that structures can be used that would collapse under their own weight on Earth. As a result, certain pharmaceuticals, fiber optics, semiconductor wafers, and nanotube materials can be manufactured in space that can’t be made on our planet. Lots of people want to bring manufacturing back to America, but putting manufacturing in orbit is much more exciting.
How about asteroid mining? I think this is still a ways off. There’s no question that it could be profitable someday. The street value of the materials on 16 Psyche back on Earth is $10 quintillion—even allowing for the inevitable hefty price slippage, space resource extraction could make a few trillionaires. I would love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think serious space mining will happen until the 2030s at the earliest. Again, however, cheap launch costs could be a game changer.
Notes on technology in the 2020s | Eli Dourado
https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/