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With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.
If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.
According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.
My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.
I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?
Cheap space access creates unavoidable security implications.
Looking forward to rods from God becoming a reality. I believe it is merely a matter of launch cost holding back this obvious weapons system.
It's not as simple as you think.
Consider that looking out of the plasma of re-entry isn't easy, neither is beaming radio signals in. Maybe some sort of powerful laser or microwave link could work. If not.. precisely computing where an object falling through differentially dense layers of atmosphere is going to end up isn't easy at all.
And I doubt any major government would let someone test this extensively.
Most of the plasma interference is to the front and sides of a reentry vehicle, isn't it? Signals relayed through whichever part of a LEO constellation is currently behind the vehicle might be an option. They wouldn't have to be continuous, just frequent enough to cap inertial navigation drift.
I think finding a good use case is an even harder question. These would be perfect aircraft carrier killers, but the country with Starship is also the one with all the aircraft carriers. For easier targets there are already cheaper options at much higher TRL.
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In some ways Brilliant Pebbles is even more exciting. In principle, space-based BMD is actually viable even for mass launches of ICBMs. In fact, because (i) MIRVs are only deployed on re-entry, (ii) objects moving in a vacuum are relatively predictable, and (iii) any kind of collision in space is likely to be terminal due to the insane velocities involved, the economics and physics might even favour the defender: 10,000 or so baseball-sized micro-missiles could take out huge numbers of ICBMs reliably (again, in principle - so much of this stuff is untested).
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