The rest of the article mentions that starship isn't currently planned to be used for anything other than SpaceX payloads
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”.