…and thought it might be worth relaying on the grounds that fairly similar arguments apply to many aspects of the Spaceflight Initiative. Specifically, with regard to how said Initiative and its children looked very differently at how to do things in space given their choice to opt for a basic platform more or less ideal for reusably launching bulk cargo into orbit at a relatively low cost per ton. Especially this one:
The mass constraint is, and mostly has always been, a lot looser.
Think chonky space stations with all the spare parts they need. More off-the-shelf technologies. Geostats suddenly have really obvious advantages over geostationary satellites. And more.
Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign.
Now extend that thought to the early-as-in-Apollo days of your space program where you can park a 150-ton payload module on the moon instead of a 5-ton module, and watch your mission planners light up.
As much as I have been a supporter of SpaceX and the entire NewSpace movement, going back to the days when Constellation’s specs started rolling out… I have to inject mild critique of the meme “Starship changes everything and anyone not embracing the potential is a dinosaur dweeb.”
Because I also remember being told how revolutionary the Falcon series would be, with reusable TSTO and tail landings and new engineering from the engine up. And it is!.. but not to the extent hoped for in the 2000’s. It’s a paradigm shift!.. but only some of the dreams have yet been enabled. Thousand-fold satellite constellations? Check. American-grown assured access and supply to Station? Check. Routine on-orbit travel to commercial stations?..… not yet.
I’m not arguing that Starship won’t be another game changer; it will! But it may not be an abruptly disruptive game changer. You can’t point to a single innovation in the history of airplane development that says “this single-handedly made air travel routine.” But the paradigm did shift, nonetheless.
Like Cordelia points out in Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced, we’ll never stop optimizing mass in space equipment. It just… won’t be so critical.
As for Orion heavy-lift… just how did the Empire price in externalities on THAT? Because I do imagine the launch site’s still glowing, if dimly.
Considering that their version of radiation sickness is called “blue-blotch fever”, we can probably assume not much. Besides, depending on the launch pad material used you can get away with quite a minimal amount of fallout, and perhaps the ire of radioarcheologists everywhere.
Regarding Falcon not panning out, I have to question where those rosy assumptions even came from. Routine on-orbit travel to commercial stations isn’t even something that SpaceX can affect, seeing as if there’s no one clamoring to build a station you’re not going to find a station to routinely ship passengers to.
Starship strikes me as a fundamentally different beast. Even if the only thing Starship has on Falcon 9 is flight-rate and payload capacity, you’re still talking about a fundamental change in the way that people even go about the business of space. How much of a satellite’s design time today is spent just on making sure? Making sure it survives launch, making sure it survives its mission duration, making sure it can be autonomous and operate unsupervised - they all drive up man-hours to the point where anything you put into space sort of has to go through this wringing of the hands and searching of the conscience (and purse) before the go-ahead can be given. It turns any space pursuit, even at the smallest scale, into this departmental, slow, tottering affair, and stretches timelines into years, and costs into the millions. Cubesats were supposed to be the answer to that, but even those ostensibly “throwaway” satellites have become hyperoptimised since the launches are far and few in between, and the launch prices approach that spent constructing the damn thing in the first place.
Well, come Starship, how will space efforts change when people realise that you can literally yeet a PC case into orbit crammed full of the stuff you need, or when single departments suddenly find themselves with enough surplus budget to organise a mission, and oh by the way if this one doesn’t make it you can scrounge together another PC case and yeet it onto the same Starship next week? There’s a minimum scale and maximum cost where the average company suddenly finds the idea of space access within the realm of possibility and not just something good for a PR stunt or the reserve of universities and governments, and Starship may be what finally allows us to approach that point.
The persistent radioactivity of Orion is greatly overstated, if you have an celestime architect who’s even half awake, and that’s using the less than favorable numbers based on the Ivy Mike test here, and an older style of fission devices.
With a nice graphite launchpad, hot shaft, good spraydown facilities, and moving rapidly towards pure fusion devices, even the local activation is fairly low, and the total radiation contribution is lost in the natural background - Earth’s natural background. Eliéra’s is of course higher.
The EMP footprint (which is still only a few hundred miles wide) would have been a bigger problem, but one conveniently bypassed by putting the Imperial Orbital Launch Reservation in the Bright Desert, an alkaline desert wasteland that absolutely no-one wanted to live anywhere near, most wildlife included.
As Alistair mentioned, Orions don’t produce that much radiation if you’re smart about it. But even if they did, it’s hard to overstate how significant it is that chronic radiation exposure is consistently non-fatal to eldrae unless aggravated, and there are clear warning signs. Cancer is one hell of a boogeyman, and they never face it.
I agree with all of what you’ve said, but I also find Starship just bizarre in a way. Here we have a billion dollar industry, centered around strapping extremely expensive objects to extremely large bombs and putting in a extremely large amount of effort to make sure they usually don’t extremely explode…
And the solution to this is a better rocket. Half a century later. Where the heck are all the alternative launch methods? Are lofstrom loops truly impractical with current tech? Can we not build a big cannon into a conveniently tall mountain? Why a better rocket?
They require more eminent domain and infrastructure than the wildest dreams of high-speed rail, currently priced in the G$/mi, and should the power fail, risks spraying rotor fragments across hundreds of districts full of registered voters.
The reanimated corpse of George Washington wouldn’t be able to get this thing built on Earth.
One of the required properties of a rocket fuel mix is that it passes the card-gap test. ie that it is actually quite bad at being a bomb, because it’s just too darn stable.
Of course, when it comes to energetics chemistry, “stable” is a somewhat relative term and they can still cause a lot of damage on the occasions that they DO go kaboom, mostly by sheer quantity of fuel. But so can a car, a plane, or anything else using a combustion engine.
Well, yes. It’s not really literally a bomb, because in addition to what you’ve mentioned, the fuel and oxidizer are normally separated, whereas most bombs are a fuel-oxidizer mix or a single molecule with a lot of innate energy.
But in essence, a rocket is a large and expensive and precise machine, which is necessarily filled with volatile substances, and it must ignite those substances in a consistent way, while under extreme forces, and with a relatively lightweight structure. Lots of failure points, very destructive failure modes, extreme conditions, pushing the limits of multiple fields of engineering, etc.
So it surprises me that there haven’t been any major efforts to create a alternative launch scheme. Some of them have to be viable with current tech, if nothing else the concepts that boil down to “big gun” are pretty plausible.
Edit: It’s a bomb like a Pinto, not a bomb like a bomb. That’s what I mean.
Rockets come with the virtue of being absolutely dirt cheap from a cap-ex perspective. You need to build a factory to build the rockets, and you need to build the launch-pad. At the risk of drastically over-simplifying, that’s about it. In comparison, building any of the structure-borne orbital access methods requires immense capital expenditure just to get started. The political willpower needed to get such a project off the ground is something even autocracies can’t pull together at the current time.
Furthermore, non-rocket launch methods do not scale DOWN very well, with the exception of perhaps laser-launch (which still uses a rocket). A fully developed rocket-borne pipeline to space may be more cost/energy/time-inefficient than a fully-developed non-rocket pipeline, but most non-rocket space pipelines sit there collecting absolutely zero return on investment until the entire structure is complete. Rockets on the other hand, scale with your operations. Barring granularity at the single-launch scale, you can start with a hundred tons a year and continuously collect revenue all the way up as you scale up to annual megatons to orbit. That makes them a much easier sell to investors or governments.
If you can find a way to make a non-rocket launcher that can sling payloads to orbit at a very small scale, and gradually grow larger, then perhaps there might be interest. Otherwise, funding a multi-thousand-kilometer venture when we don’t even have a mature orbital industry for said launcher to access yet, is the realm of wishful thinking.