SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that's a problem for America's space agency
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"SpaceX has told NASA it will stop flying Crew Dragon, the space agency’s only reliable astronaut transportation to the International Space Station, by or before 2030"
Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean
"Ars reported in October that SpaceX had stopped selling commercial launches on the Falcon 9 rocket for missions after the year 2028"
Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)
He has written what are widely considered the best books on SpaceX, and has contacts throughout industry and government.
He is critical of everyone when appropriate. He is probably the most trusted name in space journalism.
Well if he wrote some books about Elon, then for sure he must be right in all his speculations. By the same logic, Walter Isaacson is basically a rocket engineer at this point because his book about Elon sold even more copies.
P.S.: Even Eric's followers on X disagree with his take in this article
You're just speedrunning fallacies: appeal to authority, poisoning the well, kettle logic
Are you here just to have an emotional conversation?
Back of the envelope math: SpaceX plans up to 30 Starship launches per day by 2030, each has a payload of 100 metric tons, that's 10,000 launches per year. Comes out to 1,000,000 metric tons of payload to orbit per year. A Starlink V3 satellite weighs 2 metric tons. They certainly don't need to launch 500,000 Starlink satellites per year. Currently there are around 11,000 Starlink satellites and it already covers the Earth quite well. They might go to 100,000 Starlink satellites, but people worry even that's unnecessary.
So, if they really built Starship just for internal use, after they launch, let's say (maximum) 20,000 satellites in a year (400 launches), will they just chill? Or start launching empty rockets for fun?
Refusing to work with NASA or the military in an industry that's dependent on so many approvals is so easy to fix by law. A law can be easily put in place to force rocket companies to reserve payload capacity for the Government (as an example).
Starship just recently had it's first flight with some cargo on-board, it's still early to make claims that it's not ready enough for NASA
Let them get it working properly first, then they'll work out the rest of the details
As said, article written in bad faith
Second of all, the discussion was about flying payloads to space for third parties (including NASA), not about flying people specifically
Which part of this did you miss?
> at least not without some fundamental changes
When did design iterations become illegal?
Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready. It's really strange to somehow spin "SpaceX is doing something stupid that hurts customers" into "SpaceX is too competent for its customers".
As far as we know, Starship should fix the limited payload issues of Falcon 9 so why would anyone ever have to worry about Starship only launching Starlink satellites?
It's also weird how shutting down Falcon 9 and crew dragon means that SLS and Orion cannot be canceled anymore even if congress (the boogeyman) agreed.
Make this make sense.
> Crew dragon being retired is only a problem in so far that Starship isn't ready.
Starship is not going to fly people next quite a few years. And NASA wouldn't like to have a gap with human spaceflight. And not only NASA.
There's New Glenn too
I'm sure everyone agrees with that
I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well
If others come up with similar or even better rockets, everyone wins
Problem is this time is far away, and in the meantime we need something. And the best currently available system is Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon.
ISS will be decommissioned in 2030 anyway
Lots of things will change
To make a manned capsule one needs about $3B and 6-7 years. It's good some are working on it - but maybe these numbers, especially time, are a bit optimistic. I would certainly prefer more activity here.
Do you have a source for those numbers?
> I would certainly prefer more activity here.
Well Dems are recently calling the Govt to cancel all contracts with SpaceX, some lunatics go as far as to call for Elon to be executed; I doubt the attitude of the new Government will motivate Elon to invest billions into projects for the Govt
We'll see I guess
Spacex have already sold Starship launches to others, and they will require some kind of “payload doors”.
So what about the other stations, supposed to replace the ISS?
> Yeah, because they will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)
So what about launch customers? That's essentially the main point of the article, the leading company is leaving the market, which grew dependent on its services. The consequence is that many are looking for replacements, which are hard to get.
Which ones, emotional commenter? There are only 2 functional right now: the ISS and a Chinese one
> So what about launch customers? That's essentially the main point of the article, the leading company is leaving the market, which grew dependent on its services.
As I said, SpaceX "will start flying the freaking Starship, which will be fully reusable (Falcon 9 is not fully reusable)". Which part of that did you miss?
Perhaps the person that wrote the article is worried, but even that seems unlikely to me
They wrote an article with made up facts to smear the reputation of the most successful space company in history
P.S.: I noticed the previous commenter edited his comment to remove the word "worried" after I replied saying "no one is worried", what a cheap trick
“What we’ve done at SpaceX is we’ve taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90 percent,” - Now, he said, SpaceX was applying that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute.
As, "The question is whether Musk would devote his Falcon engineering team solely to Starship. Perhaps not."
This is not really the right conclusion IMO. It does not take the same kind or size of engineering team that Falcon took to develop or support to build cooling systems for data centers. The data center work is going to be a small side project for a small number of engineers in a small number of disciplines.
The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.
You remember that at the time there were fully American alternative - Delta-IV, with a heavy modification, and it stopped flying only when other alternatives became available too?
Now we have a next generation rocket but we just get to sit by and watch as it is sunset because it's owner wants to focus on his shiny new toy which we will hopefully get to use for things in the national interest in between launches of ai datacenters.
I got more stories that jd salinger I (nasa) hold the title, and you're (spacex) just the challenger (paraphrase of beastie boy song shadrach et al)
More seriously, nasa has purposely focused on satellites and robots for scientific research on purpose for a multitude of reasons including cost.