In the first 18 days of 2023, SpaceX has had its fourth successful orbital launch.
SpaceX is targeting a fifth orbital mission tomorrow. The mission tomorrow is for launching 51 Starlink satellites.
This means SpaceX, in just 18 days, has matched or surpassed the number of successful orbital launches in 2022 for all other countries other than Russia and China.
India and Europe each had four successful orbital launches in 2022. India’s rockets are tiny. The SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2023 put more payload in to orbit than Europe’s Ariane 5 in 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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SpaceX has achieved, and slightly surpassed, the expectations of the Space Shuttle.
Over which dreams like solar power satellites and O’Neill habitats were made.
We are not there yet, because making space hardware is hard and there is no production in series of it, given there never were any reliable and cheap enough launching capabilities.
The contrast when Starship starts flying will be even starker. What will we do with thousands upon thousands of tons of payload per year?
Making the dreams come true, of course. But not since the first year. It will take some time for everyone to wake up and realize we are in another era.
Hopefully we will bootstrap a space-based industry so we don’t have to loft millions of tons up there. We can get an AI-lead swarm of robots to mine the moon and start building O’Neill cylinders and such.
I feel as though that is a ways off, but we are so close.
It won’t be long until defense spending moves beyond sensors and spy sats into orbital kinetic munitions and high energy weapons. Funding for defense is astronomical compared to space exploration and the “high ground” is always irresistible.
Maybe it’s not completely depressing to us space-nerds because it will accelerate the technological development as is always the case with armed conflict. There are a lot more long-term resources in space compared to on-Earth and moving conflicts off-Earth is not all bad. Personally, I think I need to see fast progress before I die and I have been waiting far too long for Star-Trek to become reality already.
The military is, for the most part, logistically practical and they will deploy whatever fulfils requirements for the least amount of resources. With Starship capabilities, they can start replacing ballistic missiles and perhaps even cruise missiles cost efficiently.
Politicians use conflict mainly as a method to control the population. Create an external threat and everyone quickly forgets the domestic problems, corruption and whatnot. This will never end unless homo sapiens is genetically modified. Maybe the best development for us space-nerds would be if there was some kind of first contact scenario that made the entire planet nervous. Then, the politicians will have their external threat without us having to kill each other and space tech will be forever prioritized.
Yep. We better not fool ourselves. Any human growht into space will come with increased military force there.
The basis of all property is the force required to defend it.
We space nerds like to pretend otherwise, but the reason past politicans were so “peace and cooperation” with space resources, was because there was no sensible way to claim anything there.
Soon there will be, and with that all the list of human behaviors related to it.