C-SPAN:
“Buzz Aldrin Reveals Existence of…..”
https://youtu.be/bDIXvpjnRws
1:00

David M. Cook: I will be blunt. There are no “alien artifacts” on the Moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hy8iWu11io (10 minutes)

Apparently, we have different bar heights for what is stunning.

“Even if a lot of their tech is “borrowed”, given how few test missions they have launched, the speed of advance in the Chinese space program is both stunning and worrying.”

Shouldn’t they be doing better if they are borrowing technology? The U.S. and the Soviet Union were more impressive in the 1960s, and they had to invent their own technologies.

I suppose if we compared the Chinese to Japan, India, or Europe, they may seem impressive, but those countries have their own priorities, so I’m going to keep considering the bar for “stunning” as somewhat higher. When a private company does or surpasses what once or now takes the resources of an entire nation, that is impressive.

Setting up the X-Prize without having the prize money or an idea as to how to achieve it: bold. Competing for the X-Prize by purring someone into space: impressive. Using the same spacecraft to do the same flight twice within two weeks: surpasses what then took the resources of an entire nation. That is stunning.

I keep hearing this, but it is the same technology that the U.S., Soviet Union, and Russia have been practicing for decades. Europe and Japan have even performed automated docking. Last winter, a private U.S. company docked its own satellite to another satellite that hadn’t even been designed for docking, allowing the receiving satellite to extend its life 30% longer than the design life. Somehow, that wasn’t impressive but the Chinese doing something that others have done is stunning.

It is an excellent use of technology, and it appears to have been done efficiently as well as effectively. We should soon have new data points from yet another location on the Moon.

In the early days, the rockets were relatively small, compared to today, so there is generally more mass going to space these days than in the 1960s. Robert mentioned that some satellites had short lifetimes, while these days our largest satellites tend to last more than a decade. Perhaps the best measure of productivity is the amount of data returned from exploration or the amount of communication traffic.

As commercial companies become more dominant, we should be able to measure the actual value of the productivity of our space assets by the amount of money that they make for their owners, as this is the value that customers have given for the use of these assets.

In the meantime, launch is an exciting time in the life of any space asset.

I looked in Wikipedia under Minotaur and it references Spaceflight Now for 3 Minotaurs in 2021. Happy New Year.

Your analysis that commercial launch companies are changing the launch industry is correct. For 2020, SpaceX has almost 1/4 of the world’s orbital launches, and including Rocket Lab makes it almost 1/3 of the launches. Although there are six additional commercial companies that expect to launch in 2021, your other posts have noted other commercial companies that are working to get into the launch business in the coming years — some of them even in the United States. In December, you noted a company in Germany and another in India that are working on their own launch vehicles.

I like the point that some of the reduction of the total annual launches was due to better efficiencies. Rather than launch short-term spy satellites, longer term satellites needed far fewer launches. Similarly, the Ariane V launch vehicle would often launch a pair of satellites rather than a single satellite, reducing the number of launches needed to put the same hardware into space. Starship may have a similar result on launches, since its capability will be greater than current launch vehicles. Likewise, Rocket Lab typically takes multiple satellites to orbit, resulting in multiple missions with each launch.

Something you did not mention is that the nature of commercial space is going to take a radical departure from the past. So far, all manned flights have been for government agencies. In the coming year, 2021, SpaceX is expected to take non-government astronauts on their own flight, independent of any government interests. We have had tourists go up before, such as to the Space Station or a Senator on a Space Shuttle, but SpaceX is now in a position to move into a pure non-governmental tourist industry. I believe that Yusaku Maezawa is still scheduled for a trip around the Moon in a few years (outside the scope of your annual evaluation, but a trend nonetheless). This change in the use of space is currently scheduled to begin in the coming year.

This coming decade should be an exciting time in space, as commercialization moves into the realm of exploration in addition to the traditional communications industry and the new commercial launch industry. Commercial space stations should introduce products that can only be made in space, a long-promised benefit of going to space that governments did not do for us. In a couple of years you may even start a second report that covers the commercialization of space, not just the launch industry.

Rodney: I just checked again, and on both sites only one Minotaur launch is listed.

What is your source?

Rodney: I am sure you are correct. In counting the launches listed at both SpaceflightNow and RocketLaunch.live I must have missed two of the Minotaur launches.