"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)
jryan49 9 hours ago [-]
The rest of the article mentions that starship isn't currently planned to be used for anything other than SpaceX payloads
extraextra 13 minutes 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).
imtringued 33 minutes 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.
__m 8 hours 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 10 minutes 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
class3shock 5 hours 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.
scrubs 8 hours 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.
Rendered at 09:16:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
"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)
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).
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.
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.
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.