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Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Today fits into the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which sent men to the Moon. It launched July 16, landed on the Moon July 20, and returned to Earth July 24. It was the first time human beings set foot on another orbital body.
At the time it looked as if Tsiolkovsky's prediction that we would become a spacefaring race was about to become reality. Instead it proved a false start. We retreated back to Low Earth Orbit for the next 54 years after the last Apollo Moon mission, returning only this year.
Yet today we are at the cusp of redeeming Tsiolkovsky's prediction. SpaceX's Starship offers cheap access to space once it becomes operational.
How cheap? Initially it will drop launch costs to under $100 per kilogram. One skeptic ran the numbers, trying to prove this value unrealistic. Instead, her prediction was $63 per kilogram. Musk predicts launch costs will drop to $10 per kilogram once development costs are capitalized.
How much of a drop is that? The Saturn V moon rocket had a cost to LEO of $11,400 to $46,000 per kilogram. The Delta II and Atlas V were around $22,000 per kilogram. The Falcon 9 dropped that to $1500 per kilogram.
Falcon 9 is one reason there has been so much more space activity in the last 20 years. If you cut launch costs by 96%, a lot that was previously uneconomical becomes possible. An earth-based example would be containerization. The shipping container dropped shipping costs 97%, which created the global economy.
It is now economical to harvest fish from the North Sea, freeze the catch, ship it to China for processing and then ship it back to Britain for fish and chips. That costs less than processing the fish in Britain due to differences in labor costs. (You don't have to like what it does to British employment, but everyone loves the cost savings.)
Falcon 9 has made a lot of space activities profitable that were previously unprofitable using expendables developed in the 1960s. Starship offers the same cost savings as Falcon 9. Economics rules human activity, and Elon Musk has changed the game in space — even assuming worst-case launch numbers for Starship. Chip factories in space? Doable. Data centers in space? Doable. And likely really, really profitable.
At $100/kilogram, putting a 200-pound human in orbit costs $9100, which is on par with the cost of a trip on the Concorde SST. At $10/kilogram? It becomes $910. Even adding the weight of life support, it becomes 1930s transoceanic air travel expensive. Where people can afford to travel, they travel. Just look at how many people climb Everest and K2. In two or three decades —possibly less — the number of humans traveling in space will number in the thousands annually.
Unless the socialists take over and wreck everything, we are about to leave humanity's cradle.
Discussion (38)
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Hear hear. As G. Harry Stine said in one of his books, once you reach LEO you are halfway to anywhere.
The Shuttle was supposed to bring us closer to this, but it was like an RV that had to be completely rebuilt after each trip. It took private industry, building on a lot we learned from Apollo and Shuttle, to make these dreams possible. The biggest advantage Elon Musk has is that he can fail. NASA can't. There are wolves ready to rip them apart at anything less than 100% success. The people working with Elon understand that engineering consists of breaking things until you know what works.
It's an exciting time and I'm glad I lived to see it (and fight the socialists for it). I wish it had happened before I was 70 years old, but it is what it be.
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A surprisingly fascinating book:
en.wikipedia.org
Open link
Even if you don't read the whole thing, just the introductory chapters will give you a taste of how containerization has driven the cost of transportation of goods to near-zero, and the impact that has had on society.
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Between radiation, weightlessness, travel times, and isolation, we are nowhere close to "leaving the cradle." Despite what Elon or anybody else tries, we will not have a meaningful presence on Mars for decades, even if no catastrophes set us back. Sure, we might send a few sacrificial Shackletons, but that'll be for show and "inspiration." The ones that make it home will be crippled for the rest of their short lives.
I think a Luna base is something we can do, provided we commit to regular missions for crew swaps. Even that will need us to pre-deliver and set up a lot of gear, especially shelter. The moon will be harder on humans than a space station that orbits inside the planetary magnetic field.
Automation will pave the way, eventually. There won't be a significant human presence in space until we build infrastructure all the way to whatever destination.
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Hurry! They need to become libertarians, declare independence, and be ready to throw rocks at us in just 50 years!
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