SpaceX Starship will have its sixth launch tomorrow. This will hopefully be the second successful catch of the booster.
SpaceX COO Gwynn Shotwell describes how SpaceX Starship will be even more valuable than Starlink.
Starlink could capture 30% of the global communication industry.
SpaceX Starship can take over long range global air cargo and generate entirely new capabilities.
It will transport 30 times faster for ten times lower cost than jumbo get airplanes.
SpaceX is close to serving 5 million Starlink customers and now has 7000 satellites in orbit and there have been 114 SpaceX launches year to date in 2024.
Starlink is a great solution for maritime and aviation communication.
SpaceX will head to 2 Gbps speed in future Starlink generations.
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 whole business is extremely vulnerable to a near-inevitable Kessler syndrome turning LEO into an endless destructive dust storm.
And if Russia, Iran and North Korea or even China are feeling threatened by US space hegemony then they could deliberately set it off.
And because orbital mechanics are unknowable, we have no way to clear up debris in orbit.
Instead of delivering Temu orders a bit faster, they could deploy space based solar power.
That’ll take a bunch of launches. With SpaceX economics, SBSP would be the cheapest form energy in much of the world.
“…could deploy space based solar power…”
never work. orbit is an unstable, off-safety, free-fire zone — utterly unpredictable and insecurable to Russia and China and other such killer-satellite interests. Power, critical minerals, and localized central communicate-command-control can never be free and exposed in earth’s orbit, in isolation. Redundancy in numbers and political sanction has limited effect.
Russia and China are Why we can’t Have Nice Things.
Any scenario with Starship launching thousands of times per year and used in long range cargo transport also implies that the U.S. has global military dominance because of it. Starship can drop smart weapons in large quantities anywhere in an hour. StarShield can provide command and control for them anywhere. There would be no “killer satellite interests” in operation. The military implications of these Starship capability projections are often ignored because the tech did not originate with the military and its civilian uses have been emphasized.
Starshield is probably why China is increasing their nuclear missile count.
If only the US has space defence, mutual destruction can only be assured by hoping to overwhelm the defenses with lots of missiles.
SBSP can further unbalance this. With 10s of GWs available in space for energy or defense, ICBMs become useless.
SpaceX could be on the cusp of permanently winning all wars.
They can also blow up USA’s power plants on the ground. Their positions are well known and fixed. Sitting ducks.
But in that case, we’d be in the preliminaries of a full blown nuclear engagement.
So, their business model is getting my Temu order here a little faster?
Where are the international launch pads and facilities going to be?
Good point. This will never be economical or as safe as freight planes, or as high capacity as ships.
Also, Sabine Hossenfelder warns a new calculation shows we are getting closer to the Kessler Sydrome, which could take years to clear using present technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi9EW9xhqAU&t=380s
Maybe Musk should be developing space garbage scows. After all, his starlink satellites will be a big contributor towards space junk, as well as the victims of it.
Brian’s projections are for Starship to be much lower cost than cargo aircraft and have comparable safety. That starts with them costing a fraction as much to build. There is no claim of competing in costs with ships.
Low earth orbits are self clearing. It makes sense that SpaceX and USSpaceForce would have an interest in mitigating and clearing space junk.
This is a good point.
When it’s in the military’s interest, the price is factored differently.
I mean, if pre-positioning the tools for mitigating orbital debris included, say, building laser stations to push junk down, but the cost was in the multiple tens of billions, no commercial entity could go it on their own.
But if it gives the military shiny new toys…
As far as cargo goes, I think the fact that China is opening massive ports in South America to do a run around American ports –and tariffs, opening the whole of Central and South America to intense resource extraction, should be more of a front burner issue.
Those same ports automatically become security choke-points for China, and thus a justification for a military presence.
No more Monroe, you know.
There is no indication that SpaceX plans for scaling up Starship launch/landing rates have changed. They plan on building ocean platforms to be located near population centers. They need to iteratively refine the “stage zero” design and work flow in Texas and Florida before trying to build them.
But, but, but, the FAA is biased against SpaceX and wants Starship to be kept on the ground?