During the second quarter of 2022, SpaceX delivered 158.7 metric tons to low Earth orbit which is four times more than second palace China’s space corporation CASC at 38.8 tons.
Roscosmos at 17.2 tons was third, United Launch Alliance fouth at 13.0 tons, and Arianespace at 9.8 tons was fifth.
If SpaceX gets the Super Heavy Starship to orbit six times per year then SpaceX will double its the payload to orbit compared to 60 Falcon 9 launches per year.
SpaceX plans to nearly double its Falcon 9 launch rate in 2023 to 100 launches vs 60 in 2022. If SpaceX reaches one Super Heavy Starship per month (12 per year) then SpaceX could reach four times its 2022 payload to orbit in 2023. SpaceX is already double the combined payload of all other rocket companies. In 2023, SpaceX could launch eight times the payload of all other companies combined.
Still very tiny potatoes compared to what’s needed to make life multiplanetary
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 28, 2022
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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There are not enough customers to buy all the launches SX can provide, so starlink. Once the starlink constellation is finished, some other project will need to absorb SX’s excess capacity. Possible projects, orbital hotel/manufacturing, power satellites, asteroid capture.
Starlink has no plans to be “finished”. The V2 that Starship will launch is about 4X the mass and 10X the capacity of V1.5 current. Starlink Sats only last 5 years or less by design. New generations get bigger and better. There are currently 3000 little V1 to 1.5. Current plan is for 40,000 at least V2. Of course there will be V3, V4 etc. SpaceX has announced that V2 will have the first generation of direct to Mobile device connection tech with much larger sat antennas. This will just grow. Other functions like Mobile device com can be on the same satellites or on very large separate Constellations that just laser link into Starlink.
The other project that SpaceX already announced to absorb more capacity is Starship point to point, moving cargo and eventually passengers around the earth at high speed.
Yeah, and it’s only the beginning.
Also it was laughable to think NASA or any other space agency would make us multiplanetary with a few tens of tons per year of payload launched.
We need caravels and galleons for settling the New World, not rafts.