[World Building] A Future History of Space Force

[Verjigorm]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Eh, probably too optimistic. It would involve SpaceX launching nearly as many "Starships" per year as they did Falcon-9s in 2022. It took them 16 years to reach that point with Falcon-9 and Starship hasn't had a full orbital launch yet. They might not ever reach that point as Starship is just so much bigger.

What's the signifigance of the 16 year date?

Space-X began developing rockets roughly 18 years ago, starting with Falcon 1(62 ton vehicle, .2 ton payload to orbit, expendable), while the current Falcon 9 FT is around 630 tons, reusable, delivering 17 tons. It's about an order of a magnitude in capability growth since falcon 1(though Falcon 1 did not have a very long life cycle), which doesn't put Starship's 1 or 2 order of magnitude growth in capability that far out of reach. Falcon 9 began flying in 2010(two flights), didn't launch again until 2012(2 flights), 3 flights in 13, 6 flights in 14, then seven and 8 a year until 2017 when they put up 18. Two years later, they're flying almost twice as many missions, and two years after than, they're doing between 60-50 a year. If we simply assume Starship's mission trajectories exactly mirror those of Falcon, a weekly cadence doesn't look particularly pie-in-the-sky.

If we simply assume that Starship follows the same sort of trajectory, then it's quite likely space-x, on it's own, can put roughly 3,000 tons into orbit by 2030. That's almost 7 ISSs. Compare this to the Apollo program: 18 years for 1,820 tons into orbit. We're talking about the equivalent of two whole Apollo programs, and that's not even hitting my conservative estimate of 52 launches a year.

Building the infrastructure on earth for this sort of massive increase is going to be harder than getting the rocket to fly.