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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?
At 20k it's still not very consumer facing, so it has low signalling potential and therefore low culture war potential. Maybe some rich people will do some tourism and we'll get a 'White Lotus' season on the moon so the educated class can sneer at the upper class while envying them. The blue tribe is anti-carbon emissions but they'll still fly to see family on the holidays. If there is a ubiquitous consumer use case like that people will use it, but I don't think there will be.
Whatever industrial and communications use case exists will be the most important one and that won't have big culture war implications.
IDK, that's like ten bucks a pound -- I can't get much shipped overseas for that rate.
(obviously there'd have to be somebody aggregating 'space stuff' into more transport friendly packages, who would probably take a big cut -- but if people want their ashes or science experiments sent into orbit, it could happen)
Yeah I guess the price is less why it's not consumer facing and just that most people won't have much reason to send things into space. Science experiments will be mostly institutional. Scattering grandpas ashes in space doesn't seem that different from say, flying to some natural spot to scatter ashes which doesn't have much culture war valence.
I mean, I weigh like 200 pounds, and routinely pay ~$2000 to go places less interesting than space?
This would not be so fun if I were stacked like cordwood in a container with a thousand other people, so I'm sure the price will be more -- but it's indicative that space tourism is moving away from "eccentric hundred-millionaire" towards "early career tech worker", which I think will have CW implications?
I have a feeling the cost to launch and the cost due to demand is going to come into play and push price up quite a bit. I don't think these things are going to be produced at anywhere near the scale that would allow for a $2000 trip up any time soon.
I don't agree. A considerable amount of effort was and very explicitly is being into designing the machine that builds the machines. The engines are being produced at a rate of nearly one a day and the general design and choice of construction methods and materials point to ease of fabrication being a primary design constraint. It is very plausible at this point that these will be constructed in quantities at least equal to that of widebody aircraft, and since they are ordinarily not expended, as with aircraft, that fleet does not rapidly deplete itself.
One problem is that all the current (human-rated) vehicles aren’t designed for affordable trips to space— they’re designed around constraints that will make them prohibitively expensive.
Dragon is for NASA (nuff said), New Shephard is boring (probably the closest to scaling into the vicinity of affordable though), and from my armchair virgin galactic seems like an expensive deathtrap (no in-flight abort? Manual controls?). Realistically, Starship won’t carry humans to orbit for many years (if ever) because of launch abort feasibility issues.
Maybe the next iteration of tourism vehicles will be more promising (for the less-wealthy among us). Something like a V2 of Dragon but built for tourism and cost from the beginning maybe. Flying humans reliably is wicked hard.
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That's why I said "I'm sure the price will be more" -- but if it's 10x more, that is well within the reach of a whole bunch of people. Even if it's 100x, some dude working for Facebook probably has worse things he could blow his bonus on.
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