SpaceX

👉 Read on to hear about:

• Where humanity lost its spark

• The future of space exploration

• A kidnapped seal

• The future of human consciousness

The Space Industry

Following the ecstasy of the Apollo missions, global interest swiftly shifted elsewhere as the goal had been reached and there didn’t seem a lot else to achieve. As support waned, so too did the financial and policy support from policy-makers.

The next 40 years were filled with lacklustre projects and wavering ambition. There were even some catastrophic events in the failures of the Columbia and Challenger Space Shuttles that further dampened public support for space exploration.

The future for humanity in space looked very dim.

The only organizations that could get to space were governments. No one else had the technical or financial resources to even consider attempting a space launch. To put into perspective the investment required of a space project: NASA utilised the work of over 400,000 people and spent $270 billion landing the Apollo 11 mission on the moon.

No company could even come close to being able to spend anything near an equivalent amount on their own projects. Governments, also, have the fortune of never aiming to make a profit, or even create revenue. Private companies aren’t so lucky.

To attempt to compete at this most exceptional of games, for a non-governmental body, not only requires an enormous appetite for risk but also a desire to completely rethink how we can explore whatever lies beyond our planet. 

This change came in 2002 when SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk and a team of truly remarkable people - see image of their launch day below. This team is the definition of changemakers and there are no better examples of what this newsletter will be about than them.

22 years later

Two decades worth of work were shown off last Friday at the Starship launch - we encouraged readers to watch the live stream in the last edition. It was the third launch of the Starship and Super Heavy Booster, the most powerful man-made aerospace system in history, and hopefully, the rocket that will get us back to the moon, to Mars and beyond.

It hasn’t been an easy road. Among other hurdles, their first 3 launches failed in the late 2000s, the company ran out of money and Elon sunk in his last chunk of capital from his previous start-up which just got them to avoid bankruptcy.

A slightly funnier example of how the road has been anything but plain sailing is that to get permission to launch Starship near the ocean, they had to prove to the Animal and Wildlife Agency that the sonic boom caused by the engines wouldn’t distress the local seals. To prove this they “kidnapped a seal…strapped it to a board, put headphones on it,” and played the sound of rocket engines to prove it was totally fine (watch Elon tell the story below).

Despite the seemingly insurmountable hurdles, SpaceX has turned the space industry on its head and has opened up a host of new opportunities for humanity.

One problem they have attacked with exceptional ingenuity is the cost of mass to orbit.

Every kilogram the Saturn 5 (rocket for Apollo missions) got to orbit cost $5,400. Some basic maths tells us that just to get a human into orbit would cost almost $500,000 - then take into account the spacecraft itself and all the equipment you can see how extremely quickly it becomes cost prohibitive even for most governments. 

The Falcon Heavy, which is Starship’s little (but still very big!) brother, has a cost of orbit of around $1,500 -  3.6 times reduction. This was a big deal enabling companies to send larger, more advanced equipment to orbit. SpaceX even sent a Tesla Roadster to space as a PR stunt showing off its capabilities.

For Starship the estimated kilogram to orbit cost is around $500. Truly game-changing. Sending a human would cost around $40,000. This brings access to space comfortably within reach of a huge number of companies and even individuals (A Japanese billionaire bought a ride for him and 5 applicants on a mission called Dear Moon).

An analogy here would be that the mass adoption of railways reduced the cost of travelling across the United States from $1,000 to $150 causing a period of exceptional economic growth. In fact, the speed at which people crossed the country resulted in the introduction of an entirely new time zone - as they were passing through too many too quickly creating mass confusion. Reducing costs = radical changes.

How have they done this?

The trick is in designing the rockets to be fully and rapidly reusable. One of the significant challenges the Apollo teams faced in getting costs down was that every rocket was disposable. If the mission was 100% successful the only part that would return to earth was the ‘command module’ - a tiny bit I’ve circled in orange in the picture. Everything else either was left on the moon, burnt up in the atmosphere or left on a trajectory for another planet. 

Starship is designed to be fully reusable. The initial part of the flight is powered by the super-heavy booster and then once it’s done its job they separate (in a pretty sexy manoeuvre called ‘hot-staging’ seen in cover photo for this post). The booster then returns to Earth to be caught out of the air by Mechazilla and two giant chopsticks, ready to boost another rocket to space. The starship meanwhile continues its flight into orbit.

This video here is from the first Falcon Heavy launch in 2018, and to this day in my mind stands as one of the most remarkable feats of engineering in history. Worth a watch and shows how these rockets land ready to be used again.

So where are we now?

I believe we are on the precipice of one of the most exciting times in human history - I wonder what they will call this period in hundreds of years to come. Humanities golden age? The Second Renaissance? 

Space travel is one of the key innovations driving this. 

The way I think about it and I know many other people do is that we can imagine Earth as a tiny flicker of consciousness in an incomprehensibly vast expanse of darkness - perhaps the only flicker? Space exploration does not only fulfil mankind’s impervious quest of curiosity but I believe demands our work and attention.

If we are truly the only form of sentience in the Universe we must become a multi-planetary species capable of surviving single planets going extinct. Humanity must remain.

Being able to explore outside our planet is our first step to exploring our place in the universe, and fundamentally answering the question why are we here? Maybe it is just a stroke of immeasurable biological fortune, or maybe it’s not…but the only way we will ever know is to go and find the answer.

The team at SpaceX and Starship are being the change required to find that answer.