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extraextra 1 days ago [-]
The article seems written in bad faith
"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)
consumer451 19 hours ago [-]
The author is Eric Berger. He gets a ton of leeway in my view, which is that of a somewhat-informed industry outsider.
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.
extraextra 17 hours ago [-]
Ah the much-awaited "appeal to authority"
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
consumer451 16 hours ago [-]
Wait, are you telling me that chatter on the website owned by the company and extremely sensitive person (who should not be so sensitive, given all that he has genuinely accomplished) - all of which is barely questioned in TFA - has issues with this?
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
> Yeah, that's the year when the ISS will be deorbited into the freaking Pacific Ocean
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.
jryan49 1 days ago [-]
The rest of the article mentions that starship isn't currently planned to be used for anything other than SpaceX payloads
extraextra 1 days ago [-]
Couldn't find any sources for this claim, could it be made up?
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).
The article talks about how starship currently only had adapters to launch their sats and no one else's and is not designed currently to launch crew. Which I guess is speculation to be honest but the article also mentions they currently have no contracts with anyone but themselves.
extraextra 19 hours ago [-]
That's just baseless speculation on part of the author of the article
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
inemesitaffia 21 hours ago [-]
There's contracts with the Italian government, starlab and a ridiculously large satellite telescope that's custom made for starship.
Zigurd 21 hours ago [-]
They also put down a deposit for a roadster.
inemesitaffia 14 hours ago [-]
Superbird-9
Zigurd 21 hours ago [-]
Putting a crew on starship means either developing a crew escape mechanism, or demonstrating it is safe without one, and convincing regulators that's true because Elon would never exaggerate safety claims.
extraextra 19 hours ago [-]
First of all, SpaceX never had any fatalities on any of their flights
Second of all, the discussion was about flying payloads to space for third parties (including NASA), not about flying people specifically
Zigurd 16 hours ago [-]
Crew Dragon has a launch escape system. Starship can't, at least not without some fundamental changes.
spikels 18 hours ago [-]
Besides the 3 big NASA missions there are 5+ non-SpaceX missions (Superbird-9, Astrolab, Starlab, ASI Mars and lunar cargo trips). Article ignores this and lots of other info that goes against its doomer narrative.
jryan49 14 hours ago [-]
I thought the article was doomer for NASA not SpaceX? I thought its main thesis was SpaceX doesn't need NASA anymore...
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
That's correct, NASA would prefer Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon to remain available, among other things.
testing22321 11 hours ago [-]
That is incorrect.
Spacex have already sold Starship launches to others, and they will require some kind of “payload doors”.
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
Are you sure the sales are final? That SpaceX can't renege on them and just pay for the deal breaking?
testing22321 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, isn’t that true of all sales of literally everything?
imtringued 1 days ago [-]
Correct, the problem isn't that SpaceX no longer needs NASA, it's that SpaceX has failed to achieve any meaningful development milestones with Starship so far and the competition has either had some setbacks or isn't delivering either.
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.
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? The problem is that for SpaceX it's more profitable to focus on its own internal projects. The development milestones of SpaceX are fine, in particular Falcon-9 and Crew Dragon is a pretty good way to launch people to space, and the problem is that it is becoming for SpaceX not interesting to keep launching them, because other things are better.
> 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.
inemesitaffia 21 hours ago [-]
The alternate to Crew Dragon is Starliner. Not whatever you're on about.
There's New Glenn too
extraextra 19 hours ago [-]
The more competition in this space (pun intended), the better
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
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
> I'm confident Starship will be used to fly human crews at some point as well
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.
__m 1 days ago [-]
The same starship that was supposed to land on mars in 2022? I can see why they are hesitant to rely on that
extraextra 1 days ago [-]
Contrary to your belief, I don't think anyone is worried
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
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
You have quite a biased view here, extraextra.
class3shock 1 days ago [-]
The author interprets this:
“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.
avmich 10 hours ago [-]
> 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?
billm9000 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
scrubs 1 days ago [-]
Excuse me? The long history of success for nasa with and without the esa is staggering to the good.
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.
"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
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.
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).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv5l24mrjmo
https://youtu.be/VvjV0gzi5Zg?si=7BOMtno7UN98aRly&t=752
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
Spacex have already sold Starship launches to others, and they will require some kind of “payload doors”.
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.
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
“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?
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.