Ad Astra, Per Ardua

"To the stars, through hard work." We're getting there, and it's the most important thing happening to humanity right now.

While the news is full of politics and war, something bigger is going on.  Writing about today’s successful Starship test launch, my friend, science fiction writer Steve Stirling, writes:

Iterative development in action: Starship flight test #4, just completed.

This time both the booster and Starship itself fulfilled their mission profiles and made soft landing -- the booster in much better shape, granted, but they both did it.

That's what iterative development does; you don't try to make it perfect the first time.

You make it 'good enough for a first try', push it until it breaks, fix what broke, try again, and again and again... until it works all the way.

#5 will probably try to catch the booster at the launch tower with the "mechazilla" arms.

Starship is extremely significant for the future of the human race. It'll make transport to orbit -- which is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System -- cost about what air freight does now.

A system that can put 150-200 tons up to LEO a pop, capable of 3 launches a day, at a cost of 3-5 million dollars all up per launch (*).

The Starships are also -interplanetary- spacecraft, too, capable of refueling in orbit and then going anywhere 'out there'.

The combination will open up things merely dreams now -- orbital solar power collectors, asteroid mining, bases on the moon, expeditions to Mars, you name it.

(*) the abortion of idiocy known as NASA's "SLS" (Space Launch System) would be capable of one non-reusable launch a year, costing about 1 billion a pop.

He’s right about all of this, especially the abortion of idiocy part.

This is a follow-up to something he wrote back in 2020:

Universal note: in only three days, astronauts will launch from American soil in an American spaceship, for the first time since 2011.

And for the first time ever, it will be on a reusable booster.

And down in Boca Chica, TX, work proceeds at an incredible pace on multiple iterations of the

Starship prototype – SN6 is now under construction, while SN5 gets the finishing touches and

SN4 prepares to do its hop test.  That’s the reusable interplanetary transport that will give us the Solar System the way the Iberian caravels of the 1400s gave us the World Ocean and began the modern world.

I suspect that in the long term, that will be what 2020 is remembered for; the pandemic will

be a footnote.

His statement struck a chord with me.  There was a lot going on in the world, most of it depressing, in 1492.  But what do we remember?  We remember Columbus – whose accomplishment was so vast that 50 years of trying to undermine it on the part of our entire educational/academic/media complex hasn’t succeeded.

People say that Columbus didn’t “discover’ America because people already lived there.  But this is puerile.  Columbus did, in fact, bring the Americas into a global system of knowledge.  Before that, even the inhabitants of the Americas didn’t know that they lived there.  They knew the localities in which they lived, but they did not know the continents on which they were located, or how those continents fit into the global scheme.  It was the Age of Discovery that led to that knowledge, and Columbus was at its forefront.

On Columbus Day on my blog I like to quote this passage from Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.  It’s worth quoting here, too:

    At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .

    Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”

    Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.

This is what Stirling is getting at with his comparison of Starship with the Spanish and Portugese caravels.  People had been building boats and ships for years.  Viking longships crossed the North Atlantic, and Polynesian outriggers sailed long routes in the Pacific.

But they weren’t efficient cargo carriers.  They could haul people, to a limited degree, but they couldn’t support trade.  In this they were much like the Apollo-era spacecraft.  (And I’d include the Shuttle, which was built on 1960s and 1970s technology, in the Apollo era.)

Way back in the 1980s and 1990s we knew that it was impossible to do significant things in space without lowering costs a lot, and that the secret to lowering costs was reusability and iterative learning.  But nobody did it, really, until Elon Musk.  (The Shuttle was supposed to be reusable, but most of it was thrown away after each mission, and the main engines didn’t last very long before having to be replaced.  Its cost per pound was actually higher than 1960s expendable rockets.)

SpaceX, with the Falcon, started reusing stuff.  That’s already lowered costs by a factor of 20, and Starship is likely to do take that to the next level.

As Robert Heinlein famously said: “Once you’re in Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.” That statement is not mere hyperbole but physical truth. The change in velocity (and hence energy required) to get from Earth to orbit is approximately the same as that needed to reach even the most distant planet in the solar system from Earth’s orbit. Thus, a change in the cost of getting to orbit is a pretty good first-order measure of how our changes in space capability are going. Here, the news over the past decade has been very good.

To get a kilogram into orbit on the Space Shuttle cost almost $55,000. To do the same thing with SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon 9, costs around $2,700. That’s approximately a twenty-fold reduction.

Many things that are too expensive to do at $55,000 per kilogram become doable at $2,700 per kilogram. And SpaceX is not standing still. Starship is to cost a mere $2 million per launch, and Elon Musk says its cost per kilogram to orbit will be at least ten times lower than the Falcon 9. There are a lot more things that become doable at $270 or so per kilogram. At those prices, things like space tourism, space hotels, lunar mines, and asteroid mining become feasible. At a certain point, prices get low enough to draw in all sorts of new activity – much as when computing power became so affordable that suddenly it started to appear in things like washing machines and kids’ toys. I asked a former NASA official who’s very familiar with the industry about this and got this reply: “We are just now, with reusables, starting to see possible price elasticity due to lower prices. […] The Commercial Space Transportation Study in 1994 predicted launch prices needed to drop below $400 per pound for price elasticity to become significant. That would be about $1,550 per kilogram in today’s dollars. Almost there.”

Faster, please. SpaceX isn’t the only company lowering costs in this area; it’s just the one making the biggest, most public splash. Other companies, ranging from the relatively tiny RocketLab to Sierra Space to Jeff Bezos’s secretive Blue Origin, are doing the same.  (Well, not so much Blue Origin, which appears to be mired in bad management.  But keep hope alive!)

They’re lowering costs because doing so is essential to their business; and because they are commercial rather than political enterprises, they can afford to fail. When a SpaceX test rocket explodes on the stand, that’s not a political scandal or a tragedy, but a learning event for engineers to study in order to find out what went wrong and how to stop it from happening again. Instead of Congressional hearings, the problem fix is examined at the next test launch. There are no rewards for boosting payrolls, adding levels of management, or opening a facility in a key congressional district. Customers want cheap, reliable launches, and the only way to survive is to give them what they want. The only way to flourish is to give those customers more of what they want than the competition can.

We’re already seeing some of the benefits. SpaceX cleverly created its own customer in its Starlink broadband, low-latency satellite network, in which thousands of relatively small, advanced satellites (each weighing approximately 260 kg) orbit the earth simultaneously, allowing people to access the Internet from anywhere.  (Starlink even works with objects in space:  The in-flight video of today’s launch, which lasted through re-entry and splashdown, was done via Starlink and even evaded the usual space-to-ground blackout caused by plasma on reentry.)  It’s doubtful that this could have been profitable at costs of more than $50,000 per kilogram. It’s likely that it can be at one-twentieth the cost, and that cost is going down.

So my point is this:  Whatever’s in the news today, the fact that humanity is getting ready to break out into space is the biggest story around.  And while I worry that our useless political class will find a way to screw thisup too, so far they haven’t showed much progress at that.  And given how invested the Pentagon has become in SpaceX’s capabilities, it will be hard for them to get traction.

So say a prayer for Elon’s health, and give thanks that the most important thing in current human history is actually going well.

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