February 6, 2026 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- Isaacman: NASA astronauts can now use their smartphones on ISS and Orion
It appears Isaacman is slashing some old hidebound NASA rules about using commercial store-bought equipment.
- Boeing is shifting 787 Dreamliner work from Washington state to South Carolina
This accelerated this shift, which began five years ago. The flight from Democratic Party strongholds continues.
- EU’s European Commission awards consortium led by French rocket startup HyPrSpace the contract to develop a fast launch capability
At present this appears to just be an initial design study, not an actual launch contract.
- Starlink now available in the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan
Everyone’s getting it but Russia. It seems invading your neighbors is bad for business in all ways.
- Senate committee delays consideration of bill to streamline FCC satellite licensing
More shenanigans by stupid members of the swamp. In this case the delay is caused by senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), who appears to want to flex her muscles.
- On this day in 1974 Mariner 10 reached Venus and returned the first close-up photo of the planet
The image, using an ultraviolet filter, revealed the dark absorption streaks caused by some material in Venus’ atmosphere that still remains unknown. The spacecraft also discovered the super-rotation of that atmosphere, 60 times faster than the planet’s rotation.
- Documentary describing the maiden flight of the space shuttle Challenger in 1983
I haven’t watched it so I cannot vouch for it. It does appear to be assembled from historic footage.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- Isaacman: NASA astronauts can now use their smartphones on ISS and Orion
It appears Isaacman is slashing some old hidebound NASA rules about using commercial store-bought equipment.
- Boeing is shifting 787 Dreamliner work from Washington state to South Carolina
This accelerated this shift, which began five years ago. The flight from Democratic Party strongholds continues.
- EU’s European Commission awards consortium led by French rocket startup HyPrSpace the contract to develop a fast launch capability
At present this appears to just be an initial design study, not an actual launch contract.
- Starlink now available in the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan
Everyone’s getting it but Russia. It seems invading your neighbors is bad for business in all ways.
- Senate committee delays consideration of bill to streamline FCC satellite licensing
More shenanigans by stupid members of the swamp. In this case the delay is caused by senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), who appears to want to flex her muscles.
- On this day in 1974 Mariner 10 reached Venus and returned the first close-up photo of the planet
The image, using an ultraviolet filter, revealed the dark absorption streaks caused by some material in Venus’ atmosphere that still remains unknown. The spacecraft also discovered the super-rotation of that atmosphere, 60 times faster than the planet’s rotation.
- Documentary describing the maiden flight of the space shuttle Challenger in 1983
I haven’t watched it so I cannot vouch for it. It does appear to be assembled from historic footage.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“It appears Isaacman is slashing some old hidebound NASA rules about using commercial store-bought equipment”
It’s depressing but not very surprising that all of the official cameras installed on the Artemis II Orion and SLS are over ten years old.
So, these iPhones give NASA a chance to get footage that wasn’t taken by hardware built during the Obama Administration.
SpaceX is shifting focus to get to the Moon faster, per WSJ: https://www.reuters.com/science/spacex-delays-mars-plans-focus-moon-wsj-reports-2026-02-06/
Nate P wrote: “SpaceX is shifting focus to get to the Moon faster, per WSJ”
I’m not sure that requires much change in plans. It is beginning to sound like SpaceX is going to miss this year’s window to Mars anyway, and it is contractually bound to land an unmanned lander on the Moon before a manned version can be used for Artemis III. Much of the technologies that SpaceX still needs to develop for Mars is similar or the same as needed to build a base on the Moon, so there is quite a bit of overlapping and parallel development.
I’m not sure that a SpaceX project to build a base and various facilities on the Moon needs to delay a manned landing on Mars. By the time SpaceX can send a manned mission to Mars, it should be launching a whole lot of Starships per month.
“I’m not sure that requires much change in plans. It is beginning to sound like SpaceX is going to miss this year’s window to Mars anyway, and it is contractually bound to land an unmanned lander on the Moon before a manned version can be used for Artemis III.”
Yeah. And this has been my expectation for a while now.
Disappointing, but that’s where the Starship program is right now.
This was pretty much expected….the AA has just authorized SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 launches.
https://x.com/i/status/2019899027630756234
Of course, the statement doesn’t actually tell us anything about WHY the second stage failed to relight.
Anyway, I assume this means we will see that Starlink launch today, if all goes well.
Sorry, “AA” was supposed to be “FAA.” Typing on an Android here.
9Cr-ODS alloy and CLAM steel have been combined by Professor Huang Qunying at the Chinese Academy of Sciences for fusion reactors…and Hiroshima University has developed tungsten carbide-cobalt that can now be 3D printed.
These two advances in metallurgy could help aerospace as well.
Interesting: On Thursday, Blue Origin posted a job listing for a director of “Reusable Upper Stage Development.”
So the debate at BO over upper stage reuse has taken a new turn. An interesting potential revelation: “Although Ars does not have access to Blue Origin’s internal costs, sources have reliably indicated that it costs in excess of $100 million to manufacture a first stage and more than $50 million to build an upper stage.”
Pricey, if true. No wonder they’re still interested in reusing the upper stage, if it’s feasible.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/to-reuse-or-not-reuse-the-eternal-debate-of-new-glenns-second-stage-reignites/
Getting back to Nate’s post about that WSJ story, it’s been pointed out to me that Elon had already mentioned during his podcast with Peter Diamandis in January that the 2026 Mars mission was no longer a possibility. I guess that makes this old news, but it’s just reaching a bigger audience now.
Edward and Richard M: yes, there’s a lot of overlap necessary, from launch, to rendezvous, docking, refueling, etc., and being able to launch numerous Starships means we don’t have to pick and choose between the Moon and Mars. The downside is that Marsbound Starships won’t be available, but with factories in both Florida and Texas, and launch sites at both, there should be plenty of Starships available anyway.
Richard M: Bezos has been talking about upper stage reuse for a while now; he’d mentioned in an interview with Lex Fridman that Blue was looking both at reused upper stages and expendable ones, to see where the trades fell on what was more economical. Seems they’ve finally reached the conclusion that reuse will win, but I’m curious what form that will take. They’ve got at least one patent filed, and it looks similar to Stoke’s Nova upper stage, but will they pursue that? Something else? I don’t know.
Jeff Wright: aerospace needs affordability and mass-manufacturability. Without that, any metallurgy is a non-starter.
Eventually, at any rate!
It was becoming obvious that the math just didn’t add up for an attempt at Mars in this Hohmann window. We don’t know just how many tanker flights are needed at this point for a Mars mission, but whether it’s 6, 8, 10, 12, whatever, it’s just hard to see how they could have managed it, even if LC-39A is fully operational this summer. Anything they launch there this year has to be shipped from Boca Chica, and they only have one barge, and as far as I know, no processing infrastructure to receive it at the Cape or move it to Roberts Road or wherever they plan to process it. And beyond that, the manufacturing and launch cadence just ain’t there *yet*.
Now, 2028/29, on the other hand…
Richard M & Edward,
Agree that the SpaceX Mars timeline is not going to be affected, except favorably, by increased efforts it chooses to make anent the Moon.
Nate P,
A renewed push for NG 2nd-stage reusability was inevitable. Because of its embrace of fundamentally slower and more expensive ways of constructing spacecraft than SpaceX employs, Blue has already aced itself out of any possibility of finding any “production economics” basis for sticking with expendability above the booster. NG is going to have a serious production cadence and cost deficit anent Starship for each of its stages during NG’s entire tenure in service. The only way to even keep SpaceX’s tail lights in sight is going to be to go to reusability for stage 2 and, additionally, to get a lot of reuses out of each.
Jeff W. is not wrong to keep pointing to new materials science advances. But you are correct that affordability and mass-manufacturability must also follow. A classic example would be the PICA-X materials SpaceX has long used as Dragon TPS. NASA developed the stuff, but it was, initially, an artisanal product and a real bear to machine. SpaceX’s contribution was to make PICA radically easier to both make and form. The Starship TPS tiles have a directly analogous development history.
Richard M,
Well, a reusable New Glenn upper stage is a real twist. Or it would have been if we hadn’t thought for years that it was a necessary thing to compete in the New World of outer space. Reuse could save boatloads of costs, and the increase in available upper stages could reduce the turnaround between launches.
Either way, SpaceX’s choice to take the fairings all the way to orbit as a nosecone makes a certain amount of sense, as a nosecone provides good protection during reentry. Protecting its front was a problem SpaceX had with reusing the Falcon upper stage. It reduces the payload capacity by the weight of the nosecone. Is that a tradeoff that Blue would be willing to make in order to reuse Glenn’s upper stage?
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice if Blue Origin is already thinking of a completely reusable New Armstrong launch vehicle, a booster and an upper stage, similar to Starship? Could Blue have ideas that improve on the compromises that SpaceX made in order to develop Starship?
_____________
Nate P,
I have long held (almost a decade) that we don’t have to choose between the Moon and Mars, as we had been arguing for decades, back when NASA was our sole source, because one commercial company could focus on the Moon (e.g. Blue Origin) and another could concentrate on Mars (e.g. SpaceX). That is the beauty of having entrepreneurs outside of government, innovating our expansion into space. Government is limited in resources and willpower, but We the People are not.
What has surprised me on this news is that one company may be eager to do both the Moon as well as Mars. It seems like it needs a lot of resources, but SpaceX is increasing its revenue so fast that maybe will be able to budget both. It may soon surpass NASA’s budget.
Or has it already?
_____________
Dick Eagleson wrote: “Jeff W. is not wrong to keep pointing to new materials science advances.”
Materials selection is vitally important. However, it could take a couple of years for the engineers to become familiar and comfortable with new materials that they choose. SpaceX spent some time testing out their new materials and their construction methods for their early Starship test vehicles. They hoped and expected a new steel would provide advantages, and it seems that they were right. Their method for constructing the rocket body (fuselage) is different than other rocket manufacturers, and it seems to work to quickly and inexpensively produce flight hardware.
New materials could provide for better efficiencies in weight or manufacturability. These are only two of the important considerations when choosing the materials to use in new designs. Complicating the design process, price and availability become important if the material seems like the right thing to use in our design. To paraphrase: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to design,’
Hello Edward,
Well . . . I think we’ve seen how it is *possible* to be competitive — at least for the time being — with even only first stage reuse, if you can keep booster refurb to a real minimum and your second stage production cost is low enough. Falcon 9 costs $15 million per flight because the second stage cost is $10 million, it’s said, and that is very bearable for SpaceX right now. Rocket Lab is pushing even harder on this equation with its minimalistic second stage for Neutron, though we’ll have to see just exactly how that works out once they start launching.
But $50 million for each second stage? Not even ULA’s Centaur V stage costs that much, I believe. That’s a big hit, no matter how cheap they can get their booster refurb down to. But I am a little skeptical that they can come up with an economical reusable second stage. I guess we’ll see. And remember, SpaceX has tremendous margin to reduce its Falcon 9 price point if it actually faces serious price competition . . . and that’s before we even get to see Starship’s market impact.
All: We mustn’t forget Stoke Space in this discussion of re-usability. If all goes as expected, Stoke will make the maiden flight of Nova this year, designed to eventually be completely reusable.
In terms of materials selection.
Demonstrability needs to be first. Say a new material is grown in orbit, which allows a test article to potentially re-enter Earth’s atmosphere much faster…is spotless on return.
Now, it may take a long time for mass production or affordability to take root—but you have this new stuff that can’t be made on Earth…it is real….you can see it.
That alone will spark investment into orbital manufacturing.
But if you keep trying to foist Earthbound workarounds, Earthmade steels, etc….it won’t matter even if Varda returned a vial of fountain-of-youth formula….if all Starship ever does is land on the ocean surface and fall over.
Investors are a strange bunch….lighting a fire under them tough.
I used to watch SHARK TANK pretty regularly. One guy had an idea very like Neuralink….but he came off weird.
Mark Cuban all but threw money at some wine-cooler guys, because they were “marketing fun.”
Tech billionaires are not what will save private space—it is when everyone else invests…then only can one say NewSpace works.
Elon was willing to launch at a loss to get noticed. The same may be true of space metallurgy. Beat that—build a true RLV—then the world will beat a path to your door.
Robert Zimmerman,
“We mustn’t forget Stoke Space in this discussion of re-usability.”
Good call. I had forgotten about Stoke Space. They, too, realize that complete reusability is important to this second Space Age. (Can an age be an age if it only lasted 2/3 of a century?) If their launch is successful, they have a chance of being the first company to have an operational fully reusable launch vehicle. That would be yet another first that didn’t come from SpaceX.
Rocket Lab launched from the first private launch pad. Blue Origin landed their booster stage first. BUT: SpaceX was the first to demolish their launch pad by merely launching their Integrated Flight Test 1 rocket. That last may not be what I would write home to mom. I wouldn’t write home if I launched a car into solar orbit, because mom would yell at me for being wasteful, and I’d never write home if I caught a fly with chopsticks, because who would ever believe me, so those are two SpaceX firsts that don’t really count.
Edward observed: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to design,’
Suggest ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to conceive’. Can apply to more than one situation.
And asked: “(Can an age be an age if it only lasted 2/3 of a century?)”
Sourced from Google AI; but seems about right.
Golden Age of Rail 1910 – 1950
Golden Age of Film 1927 – 1967
Golden Age of Television 1947 – 1959 [Second Golden Age, or Peak TV, given as 1999 – 2024]
Golden Age of Radio 1920’s – 1950’s
Golden Age of Music Classical 1730 – 1820 Non-Classical Era (NCE) 1960 – 1990
So, I would say, yes.
Dick Eagleson: I agree. Expending transport is generally done only in niche fields or extreme circumstances, and I believe Bezos ultimately intends for Blue to be profitable without relying on him, so they cannot afford niche operations forever. I also agree about materials, we should keep developing new technologies. Jeff does not consider whether something is affordable or even usable, only if it exists or might exist, which is what I’m commenting against.
Edward: yes. Any effort large enough for one lends itself to doing quite a bit more besides. We only have to choose between them when we run low-productivity programs whose returns are more ethereal than anything else. SpaceX’s budget hasn’t surpassed NASA’s yet, but I think it will within a year or two, and the industry as a whole is rapidly outstripping NASA.
Robert Zimmerman: Stoke is an exciting company-if they can pull off reuse and do so at a competitive price, there’s a lot of economic and scientific value they can unlock. SpaceX needs multiple good competitors, in no small part because competition will make them lower their prices.
Edward again: lots of firsts to be had, but I care less about firsts than I do consistency, affordability, and sustainability (ugh. How that word has been abused). If Stoke can sustain their business and make a profit both with current and upcoming businesses, that’s great. AstroForge has already signed agreements for at least three deep-space launches with them, so there’s definitely interest in their services. Perhaps future markets for them could be supplying space stations or lunar bases on regular cargo runs. Blue and Rocket Lab are/appear to be following SpaceX with running a constellation to fund their dreams and provide scalable demand. Nova seems too small to do that, but there are still good niches apparent to me.
In other news, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee had its markup session on the NASA Authorization Act, and they fired amendments at it like a shotgun with rock salt. And one of them is a request to take another look at whether NASA should deorbit the International Space Station. The amendment would direct NASA to “carry out an engineering analysis to evaluate the technical, operational, and logistical viability of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital harbor and storing the ISS in such harbor after the end of the operational low-Earth orbit lifetime of the ISS to preserve the ISS for potential reuse and satisfy the objectives of NASA.”
The amendment author, by the way, is Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA), who used to work as NASA’s Chief of Staff.
Stephen Clark, “Lawmakers ask what it would take to “store” the International Space Station,” Ars Technica | https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/congress-advances-bill-requiring-nasa-to-reconsider-deorbiting-space-station/
Amendment link: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://republicans-science.house.gov/_cache/files/8/1/8149e59e-9e8b-48f3-9427-c43da6dd4535/D362ADF350B64AF6650631A3E8DEB8908082F43D12D0F3E29DCBB751E37CF666.whites-036-xml.pdf
Michael Nicholls, SpaceX VP of Starlink Engineering, flogged new job openings at SpaceX this weekend:
https://x.com/michaelnicollsx/status/2019800069537448434
Eric Berger commented: “This is the moment that, if you still harbored any doubts, you realize SpaceX is super serious about orbital data centers.”
Indeed.
One more thing to clog Bob’s poor Quick Links thread — but I think it is important to note, and there is not a Starship thread to stick it on. Booster 19 has just completed its cryo-proofing campaign this afternoon, and it is worth noting just how much more grueling it was than we’ve seen with previous booster proofing campaigns. Booster 19 has had *four* days of cryo-proof testing.
Clearly, they really, really want to be sure Booster 19 is going to be robust out there.
https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/2020595533224763482
And to drive the point home, someone made a similar observation on X with a confident conclusion that surely the V3 boosters are going to *work*, and Elon made a point of replying: “Of course. Just a matter of time.”
What I am noticing is there is little reporting and questioning of why the delay in the next Starship test flight. From October of last year to no sooner than March. Should/could the block 3 engines be tested in the meantime with some hop flights? Launch the booster itself, bring it up to Starship hot staging height and then back to a chop stick landing.
Elon awesome and all that. Done the impossible over and over. But with Tesla we are seeing arbitrary decisions of a not completely rational nature. Now, Mars is being downgraded in favor of somehow flinging constructed data centers from the Moon into heliocentric orbit. Is thinking this level of big even possible when the stock price of Tesla and SpaceX are being bid up to multiple of $trillions? After all, investors are in it for the money.
Haven’t we all been booster 19 at some point:)
So, who is the welder Elon strapped near the assumed failure point?
Steve Richter: it is possible to throw a pretty large satellite from the lunar surface into orbit. There are still limits, of course, and they’ll be smaller for earlier mass-drivers, but the idea isn’t far-fetched. Just challenging. SpaceX also isn’t solely aiming at using the Moon as a factory, but also as a colony-though I do wonder if that will be more akin to a much bigger Antarctica (in terms of SpaceX shipping more people there more often than Antarctica gets) versus permanent living. If only NASA had been focused on getting useful data about gestation and childrearing at <1g.
As for Raptor engine tests, SpaceX has fired single engines, partial sets, and full clusters of them, with both the ship and the booster. There's no good reason to just do a hop, that won't give them any information that they don't already have from previous flights.
Steve Richter: Your suggestion that SpaceX do a hop test of Superheavy, combined with Nate P’s explanation why not, made me realize why you made the suggestion in the first place.
Essentially, you still do not recognize that Starship/Superheavy is not an operational spacecraft/rocket, and thus you appear to be afraid of failure during the next launch. This lack of recognition also explains why you wonder about there being a long delay between test flights. An operational vehicle should launch more frequently.
As I and others have said here on BtB over and over, this is a test program, a development program. We are watching the launch of prototypes, not the final vehicle. As such things are expected to go wrong, and when they do, it is not a failure, but an important data point for improving the final design.
SpaceX had two blown Superheavy boosters in recent tests. Those became two examples of those data point failures, but they also required the company’s engineers to analyze why they happened and institute corrections. They have been testing those corrections recently.
And should the 12th test flight coming in March fail, that won’t be a failure either, but another important data point. And every single time SpaceX has been faced with such data points, they move to fix them, and the ensuing vehicle functions better and more reliably.
In the case of Starship/Superheavy, this development is still in the relatively early stages, so more things will go wrong. Give it time, and all will be well, and I base that assertion on the long track of SpaceX.
Nate P observed “If only NASA had been focused on getting useful data about gestation and childrearing at <1g."
The entire Human spaceflight experience to date has been one ongoing test-flight. We simply are not comfortable enough in that harshest of environments to send whomever out there, to do normal Human things. We are getting there, but it's going to be some time before we, as a species, are going to have any kind of reliable data. Without resort to prurience, I would lay money that the precursor to gestation has been done.
Mice have been sent aloft, but primarily to study physiological changes in microgravity. You let mice start breeding, and you know that at least one will get loose,
Blair Ivey: what I’m getting at is that NASA has never taken gravity research seriously-there have been a handful of very small experiments with rodents, but nothing sustained and aimed at seeing what it takes for humans to really live in space. Do we need Earth-normal gravity? Can we get away with lunar gravity? Despite the hundreds of billions we’ve spent on spaceflight, we have no idea. We aren’t comfortable because of misplaced priorities, not because it couldn’t have been done before.
Blair Ivey,
Those were actually Golden Ages, but your point is well taken. Just because the Stone Age lasted tens of thousands of years (hundreds of thousands?) and the Bronze Age lasted five thousand-ish, doesn’t mean all ages have to be longer than a lifetime.
Come to think of it, during the Bronze Age, most of humanity was still in the Stone Age.
_________
Nate P,
“… and the industry as a whole is rapidly outstripping NASA.”
And how! But this is what we get when we have a multitude of investors convinced that there is money to be made in the black void. NASA has one investor, and that investor has different goals and different priorities.
‘There is far more capital available outside of NASA [for use by commercial space marketplace] than there is inside of NASA.’ — paraphrased from an interview with NASA Administrator Bridenstine on the Ben Shapiro radio show on Monday 3 August 2020.
“SpaceX needs multiple good competitors, in no small part because competition will make them lower their prices.”
I agree here, too. However, SpaceX has already reduced the cost to access low Earth orbit and beyond, causing a new space economy far beyond the usual communication satellite industry, as many more ideas can be made profitable than could be done before.
At this time, it looks like demand for launches is still a little higher than supply, so there is not yet a reason for SpaceX to reduce the price of launch. SpaceX’s Starship could conceivably do that by itself, if it starts to launch as often as SpaceX expects, but competition is good for technological innovation as well as the supply/demand economic curve. I know that sounds silly, considering that SpaceX is currently leading the field in putting major innovations into operation, but let’s make sure they don’t rest on their laurels once they reach their current goals. Build a better mouse trap and the mice will flock to it.
“lots of firsts to be had, but I care less about firsts than I do consistency, affordability, and sustainability”
That was kind of my point, but my flippant attitude probably masked it, sort of like my previous sentence about the mice. SpaceX has missed a few firsts, but it has more than made up for it through its advancements and by launching so insanely often. I suspect that if someone had suggested in 2015 that Falcon 9 would launch more than 150 times in a single year, that person would have been laughed off the stage. Not only is that a whole lot of upper stages to make, but turnaround time on a launch pad was too long, and the range safety systems were unable to keep up with such a pace. Oh, and they hadn’t even landed one, yet, and even if they did, many doubted that they could reuse it economically.
And, yes, SpaceX has left open plenty of niches and has made design compromises that other companies can take advantage of to swoop into SpaceX’s current operations. It may be that most NewSpace companies need to become stronger before they feel comfortable taking SpaceX head on. So, one has to wonder why the stalwart OldSpace companies are reluctant to do so, unless they think Boeing’s Starliner experience would be typical for them, too.
“We aren’t comfortable because of misplaced priorities, not because it couldn’t have been done before.”
Colonization has not been a priority for those who have been in charge of space. Government priorities are not the same as the priorities of We the People. We keep insisting that representative government works, but are we really being represented as well as we say we are? Many of us work hard to pay high taxes so that government can pay people to not work at all. And we keep electing these guys.
____________
Blair Ivey wrote: “I would lay money that the precursor to gestation has been done.”
I don’t bet, but I will take that one. I think we would have heard about it, by now, if it had already happened. I think that would be a tough secret to keep.