This is a really interesting blog post (I don’t know much about the author, other than he has a PHd in Physics and works at JPL)
It is long so I’ll try and summarize.
While I am 100% certain that the Starship design will continue to evolve in noticeable ways, the progress in two years cannot be understated. Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.
Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.
What does this mean? Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission.
He then talks about how fucked up SLS and Artemis are.
Starship will change the way we do business in space, and now is the time to start preparing. Pretending that it doesn’t exist isn’t an adequate strategic hedge, whether Starship flies in 2022, 2025, or never.
What do I mean by strategic hedge? There is a steadily increasing chance that Starship will succeed and total certainty that if it succeeds it will change the industry, therefore the appropriate hedge is to take actions somewhere between total panic that it is already flying, and complete inaction. …
Let me explain the fundamental issue. NASA centers and their contractors build exquisitely complex and expensive robots to launch on conventional rockets and explore the universe. To take JPL as an example, divide the total budget by the mass of spacecraft shipped to the cape and it works out to about $1,000,000/kg. I’m not certain how much mass NASA launches to space per year but, even including ISS, it cannot be much more than about 50 T. This works out to between $100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo and >$1,000,000/kg for deep space exploration.
Enter Starship. Annual capacity to LEO climbs from its current average of 500 T for the whole of our civilization to perhaps 500 T per week. Eventually, it could exceed 1,000,000 T/year. At the same time, launch costs drop as low as $50/kg, roughly 100x lower than the present. For the same budget in launch, supply will have increased by roughly 100x. How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?
I doubt Congress is going to increase NASA’s budget to a trillion dollars, so NASA and industry will have to find a way to produce 100x as much stuff for 1/10th the price. Rovers will have to be $1000/kg and we will need 100 T of them every year. This is comparable in terms of costs and volumes to Ferrari manufacturing,
He gives further examples how unprepared the legacy space industry and NASA are to deal with changes that Starship will bring.
In the comment section, one of the readers says that with hundreds of Starship operating it should be possible to build Solar collectors in Geostationary orbits and beam the energy down to earth for about $.04/KWH this is baseline power and very reliable. It’s much cheaper than current nuclear, or any type of renewable plus storage. Even if is 3-5x times more expensive, with an appropriate Carbon tax it still would be competitive.
