July 10, 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.
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- A picture of the factory floor where Thales-Alenia is building the hulls of two of Axiom’s space station modules.
A lot of stuff for sure, all of which still needs to be assembled.
- Eight NATO allies launch HALO satellite constellation initiative
The nations are Denmark, Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey. No U.S. The constellation will supposedly provide “high-speed communications, intelligence and missile tracking,” though these are usually done by completely different satellite constellations.
- Astra shows off video of an engine static fire test
Jay: “An X commenter asked what fuel they are using for that dark exhaust. One guy answered best: ‘Investor’s money’.” Still, the company has been surviving on its engine sales, even if no one believes its new rocket is real.
- On July 10, 1962 AT&T’s Telstar-1 was launched on a Thor-Delta rocket purchased from NASA for $3 million
The satellite successfully relayed TV broadcasts from Europe to the U.S. AT&T hoped to build a constellation of satellites then to provide this service, but was blocked by Congress and President Kennedy, who passed a law creating the quasi-private company Comsat and requiring all American communciations satellites to be launched by it. That law squelched the American satellite industry — and the American launch industry — for more than a decade.
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
“Eight NATO allies launch HALO satellite constellation initiative”
Yeah, right. Initiatives are the only thing they can afford to launch. Since Trump turned off the spigot of American taxpayers subsidizing these Marxist EU countries they don’t have enough money to even fund their bloated bureaucracies.
Canada’s military has a total of 4 submarines (all diesel-electric) and only one of them is currently operational.
By the time this “initiative” could get anywhere at “European Speed” its notional target – Russia – will long since have been ground into powder by Ukraine.
The Canadian subs you referred to were leftovers from the Royal Navy and, as it turned out, they became financial sinkholes. One caught fire and was out of commission, with one sailor dying. The rest spent much of their time in dry dock.
The German firm ThyssenKrupp was awarded the contract to build new ones for the Navy, but there are questions about that arrangement.
SpaceX will be ‘worth more than the rest of Earth,’ Musk says. How he gets there.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/spacex-will-be-worth-more-than-the-rest-of-earth-musk-says-how-he-gets-there/ar-AA27DMxN?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=6a51534f8bdf425bb1da40b6fd49424d&ei=48
‘Historic step’ as SpaceX launches first ever nuclear-powered commercial satellite
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/historic-step-spacex-launches-first-134819176.html
Too few people know about how Kennedy hampered the private sector, and I bet many still wouldn’t care even if they did. So many lost years.
I say the Comsat law squelched the U.S. satellite industry for a decade, but that’s only how long about the law was in effect. When Nixon canceled it in the early 70s it still took another decade before it recovered, and even then not very well.
At the same time Nixon freed the satellite industry, he killed the launch industry, by requiring everything to be launched on the shuttle. Even when the satellite industry showed some signs of life, it didn’t have any choice of launch providers. All it had was the shuttle, and the shuttle couldn’t meet the demand. Companies died.
It was after the shuttle was retired in 2011, four decades later, that free enterprise, capitalism, and competition finally took the forefront again in America, a nation founded on these ideas.
As you say, so many lost years.
Yes. But at least that part of JFK’s legacy is now behind us. Would that the same was true of government employee labor unions – which were made legal on his watch.
Telstar is considered to be the first commercial communications satellite. Most people today have no idea of how much of a revolution it was back then. It inspired the pop song Telstar by the British group The Tornados.
Consider the historical context. Less than 5 years before, Sputnik was launched. The previous year, Yuri Gagarin flew in space, followed by Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Gherman Titov.
However, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the first communications satellite. Echo 1 was an inflatable spacecraft made of aluminized mylar and signals transmitted to it were reflected to a ground station. (I think it was from California to New Jersey.) It demonstrated the feasibility of what Arthur C. Clarke had proposed about 15 years earlier. (One of the antennas built for the project was later used by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson for what turned out to be their Nobel Prize winning observations.)
Another well-known communications satellite preceded Telstar. OSCAR (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) was launched on December 12, 1961, remaining in orbit for several weeks. Since then, more than 120 OSCARs have flown in space and the oldest operational satellite is AO-7 (AMSAT OSCAR 7), launched on November 15, 1974.
ATa&T;s Big Ear at Holmdel, NJ I can remember being in the backyard with my parents to see Echo pass overhead. It was visible to the naked eye. Once we saw it, we had the family’s 7X50 binoculars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna
I can well-remember lying on my back in our backyard and watching the Echos – both of them – go over when I was in elementary school.
My mother once told me a story about the early days of satellites, back when they were still a novelty, and drive-in movie theatres were much more common. We were watching a film at one of them when, apparently, the projector was stopped and the announcement was made that there was a satellite passing overhead. People responded by looking up.
That would have been in the late 1950s, but I don’t know which spacecraft it might have been. Maybe it was an Echo, though I don’t know if the orbit would have allowed it to be visible from central Alberta.
BMJ: In the late 50s it would have almost certainly been Sputnik. Echo came later, in the very early 60s.
Thanks for the correction.
Somehow, the year 1959 got stuck in my memory. I re-read the Wikipedia entry and was reminded that ’59 was when the project got started and Echo 1 was initially scheduled to be launched later that year.
Echo 1’s inclination was only 47 degrees and a bit of change. I don’t think it would have been visible very far into Alberta – maybe on the horizon. Echo 2’s inclination was over 80 degrees, though, so that would have been visible from pretty much anywhere in Canada. But, as Robert says, that was the early 60s, not 1959.
BMJ wrote: “However, [Telstar] wasn’t, strictly speaking, the first communications satellite. Echo 1 was an inflatable spacecraft made of aluminized mylar and signals transmitted to it were reflected to a ground station. (I think it was from California to New Jersey.) It demonstrated the feasibility of what Arthur C. Clarke had proposed about 15 years earlier. (One of the antennas built for the project was later used by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson for what turned out to be their Nobel Prize winning observations.)”
The ‘Penzias-Wilson’ antenna was the one in New Jersey, and the one in California was at the Goldstone station.
Strictly speaking, the Echo satellites (artificial satellites, back then) were test satellites rather than operational communication satellites. Their purpose was to verify the feasibility of Arthur C. Clark’s proposed geostationary relay satellites (similar to the relay stations across the U.S.), to verify the frequencies that can be used, and to test or demonstrate several technologies. Some frequencies are absorbed in the atmosphere., and Echostar helped to verify which frequencies pass through all the various atmospheric layers that tend to affect radio waves.* Some frequencies bounce off the ionosphere, which amateur radio operators take advantage of to talk to other operators thousands of miles away, sometimes on other continents.
To be fair, the Echo project did test a real two-way telephone conversation and relayed a television broadcast. One of the reasons it was not good as a true relay was the spherical shape, which tends to reflect poorly, as it significantly spreads out the signal. A strong signal sent to it becomes a very weak signal returned.
Telstar and modern communication satellites amplify their incoming signals for return to Earth.
Clark was not the first to think of communication satellites, but he did figure out that there was an orbit slower than low Earth orbit (90 minutes) but faster than lunar orbit (1 month) that rotates at the same speed as the Earth rotates. He published this in a magazine or science journal, or something, so he gets credit for the invention (but I don’t think he got royalties for its use).
My understanding is that both Echo 1 and Echo 2 have long ago reentered the atmosphere.
____________
* When I told my dad that I was working a bit on a satellite project called Advanced Extremely High Frequency, he instantly knew that it was for satellite to satellite transmission, because the extremely high frequency range tends to be absorbed by the atmosphere (some frequencies more than others).
He even wanted to work with the Soviets on a joint landing. The battleship Orion model soured him on pusher-plate designs.
I wish Agnew had been President–not Kennedy or Nixon. JFK admitted he didn’t care about space.
Proxmire and Mon-dull were anti-space. The ABMA was open to troop rockets, but neither Medaris nor Truax had the pull of LeMay or Rickover.
There is an open source program that looks to let A.I. “possess” different robots, in case Elon is reading:
https://robot-i-o.github.io/
There is a new A.I. that should help with difficult problems called “ReAc Tree”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02424
The Society of Robotic Surgery is having a meeting July 23-26 2026, and an operation was done via telepresence earlier this month.
I can see this technology useful for space exploration as well. I can see humans in orbit using robots to clear landing areas–though the term “Waldo” should be used when robots are not autonomous.
I am seeing more and more websites playing up Titan due to methane seas.
“I am seeing more and more websites playing up Titan due to methane seas.”
I have noticed the same. I would hope that some companies have taken a look at the likely space industry projections, and mapped the known resources around the System that can supply those needs. We still don’t know Jack about the Belt, and I would like to see some images of mineable rocks.
You’re in luck: that’s AstroForge’s goal with their next mission.
In other space news today NASA began stacking the SLS rocket for Artemis III by mounting the aft left SRB segment onto the Mobile Launch Platform. Barring some stacking catastrophe, SLS will once again spend a year waiting for the other Artemis hardware to be ready. This time it will be the lander prototypes that will be the cause of the delay.
Does Congress deserve any blame for signing the SLS into law with no real plan for what to do with it, thus failing to fund a lunar lander at an intelligent date? Or are we just trying to make SpaceX and Blue Origin look bad? If Starship and Blue Moon had started development at the same time as the SLS, you’d have a real argument. This just comes off as passive-aggressive tribalism.
Congress deserves credit for Artemis II returning Americans to the Moon–by keeping Obuma from killing everything.
Frankly, I hope the Artemis III core hits Obama’s library on its way back and knocks it flat….the Orion capsule likely coming back without having docked with anything–what with NewSpace being all hat and no cattle, BEO-wise
If BEO flights are the only measure of a rocket’s value, what does that say about SLS-derived wet workshops, or the SLS itself? Given that New Glenn launched ESCAPADE; Falcon 9 has launched an asteroid missions, multiple lunar landers and will launch more; and Falcon Heavy has sent payloads to the orbit of Mars, to Psyche, and to Europa, with a lunar mission coming up? Right now the score is at least eight to two in favor of NewSpace. Or better yet, we can drop the silly tribalism and consider what takes us forward versus holding us back.
Jeff Wright wrote: “what with NewSpace being all hat and no cattle, BEO-wise”
Beyond Earth Orbit-wise (BEO), SLS has scored twice to the Moon. Well done.
Meanwhile NewSpace’s Falcon and Electron have each sent things to the Moon, trailing SLS’s score. Falcon has Beresheet, Lunar Flashlight (with Hakuto-R), Odysseus, and Blue Ghost (with Resilience) under its belt. Electron has launched Capstone to the Moon.
Other BEO flights include: Falcon Heavy’s launch of Psyche to Mars and Europa Clipper to Jupiter, as well as Falcon 9’s launch of Hera to Mars. New Glenn launched Escapade (2 units) to Mars.
Hmm. It looks like NewSpace is running behind in the hat vs. cattle race, scoring nine Beyond Earth Orbit launches (hats) to SLS’s whopping two (cattle).
The Tornados
“Telstar” (1962)
https://youtu.be/ZxyN3b1bs-w
3:26
Wikipedia describes ‘Telstar’ as “instrumental,” but there’s pretty obviously a vocal track, it just doesn’t feature any words. The same is true, for instance, of the theme from ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’
Voice is an instrument.
Fair enough.
With something like 2,400 times the hydrocarbon mass of Earth, Titan could well prove the future low-cost producer of methane reaction mass. But hydrocarbons, of course, have a lot of uses other than as fuel. I am reminded of a certain iconic scene in The Graduate where young Ben is advised by a very earnest older chap to consider a future in “plastics.”
They played that as a joke—but it was sound advice
I have been reading a lot about chemistry over at -phys.org and one good thing about the ecos is that there are now all kinds of catalysts and reactions. The Green regulations they can cram-but some of what I have read would make Titan ISRU really open up.
If Starship…had started development at the same time as the SLS, you’d have a real argument.
Starship did start development at about the same time as SLS. SLS started development in early 2011 and made orbit in 2022. Starship was first discussed publicly in an interview by Gwynne Shotwell in early 2012 (I believe it was in April) and by Elon Musk in the fall of that year. It was already under development at that time, though for how long wasn’t disclosed. It still hasn’t made orbit.
Does Congress deserve any blame for signing the SLS into law with no real plan for what to do with it, thus failing to fund a lunar lander at an intelligent date?
Congress provided enough funding for the parallel development of two landers by 2028. NASA instead chose to fund a single lander for a manned landing in 2024. That was the entire rationale for choosing SpaceX and only SpaceX for the lander. They were said to be the only company who could make the 2024 deadline. (Congress then added additional funds to the program to add a second lander back in.)
They didn’t make the deadline — not even close. Yet people here and other space sites display a seething hatred for the one part of Artemis that is performing to spec and has been on budget and on schedule since at least 2021 and lavish praise on the part of Artemis whose schedule has been moving to the right at one year per year for its entire existence. It’s not rational.
This just comes off as passive-aggressive tribalism.
Expressing annoyance at the news that SLS is being stacked for its next mission should lead to more self-awareness when making statements like that.
mkent: SpaceX might have been discussed Starship concepts in some manner in 2011, but it is absurd to say development began then. According to Musk, real development began in the period from 2016 to 2017 (when Musk first publicly announced the project). At that time SLS was already about five years old.
As for the lunar landers, Congress did not provide enough funds initially to fund two landers. Moreover, NASA did not like Blue Origin’s first bid. It was way overpriced from a company at that time which ran routinely behind schedule. It was a wise decision to award to just SpaceX.
As for SpaceX not making the 2024 deadline, please note that SLS/Orion were originally supposed to fly by 2015, then 2016, then 2017, then 2018, then 2019, then 2020, then 2021. It only did its first unmanned mission in 2022, eight years late. And this for a rocket that was supposed to be developed quick and cheap because it was established technology using salvaged shuttle parts and designs.
Space is hard. Thus, it is not surprising that SpaceX is behind schedule, especially because unlike SLS Starship is almost completely new in design and concept. Much of that delay can also be attributed to Joe Biden, who slow-walked SpaceX from 2020 to 2024. The company likely flew half as many orbital test flights in that time as it could have, waiting for the FAA to retype reports.
Meanwhile, as much as SLS is doing better now, it still has the slowest launch cadence of any NASA-built rocket, ever. Even if every payload component was ready now, it will still take about a year to get the rocket stacked.
Note too that I don’t express “hatred,” I simply note failure. And as much as SLS might be improving now, it remains too cumbersome, too complex, and way too expensive to be of any practical use. We would have been better served to cancel it in 2011, as I said then, and put the NASA money elsewhere.
” … a rocket that was supposed to be developed quick and cheap because it was established technology using salvaged shuttle parts and designs.”
Yes, this, only a bit more so. Today’s “Space Launch System” is virtually identical to an early 1980s concept called a “Shuttle-derived heavy lift launch vehicle” — the four SSMEs/RS-25s beneath an enlarged External Tank, the two-slightly-uprated solid rocket boosters, all we see. Of course flyably detailed engineering is not done by handwaving or concept drawings, but still.
Only one detail is glaringly different: the S-D-HLLV’s engine ‘pod’ was supposed to be re-enterable and reusable, the SSMEs were reused routinely on the shuttle. The boosters likewise were also ‘supposed to be’ recovered and re-used, “to cut costs” to orbit. Not all thrown away after one flight.
I can’t think of anyone (credible), back in the early 1980s, when this concept was born, who would have been, um, audacious enough to seriously propose that last bit. Yet here we are.
Low-level Starship work began, but in the sense of figuring out what was going to come next versus hardcore design work. That didn’t come for years, and SpaceX really only got to that point around 2015-years later still if we account for the various design changes that went on aside from Raptor development. Starhopper first flew in 2019. If you know anything about rocket development, you’ll know engines are typically the long pole, and the SLS was given its propulsion outright. It still took over a decade to get to its first launch while costing nearly double what SpaceX has spent on the Starship program, and SpaceX has had to hire numerous people, build up its facilities, demonstrate an unproven engine cycle, and design for manufacturing and cost versus accepting an artisanal product, while the SLS was given a budget workforce, and backers loudly proclaimed that it would be quick, easy, and cheap to finish. Senator, and later Administrator Nelson said, “If we can’t do a rocket for $11.5 billion, we ought to close up shop.” Look where we are now.
But they didn’t. This is revisionist history. NASA did not have the money to pay for more than one lander; both Blue Origin and Dynetics proposed far more expensive programs than NASA had the budget for. NASA chose SpaceX because they are funding Starship out of pocket, because they had the best score overall when looking at multiple factors, and this is from NASA’s Source Selection Statement: “Working in close coordination with the CO, it was therefore my determination that NASA should, as a first step, open price negotiations with the Option A offeror that is both very highly rated from a technical and management perspective and that also had, by a wide margin, the lowest initially-proposed price—SpaceX.”
Bolding mine. You don’t have to like SpaceX, but you don’t get to rewrite history. Yes, assuming all went well they might have hit 2024, but it is only a tendentious, specious person who would slam them for delays while eliding or ignoring those of other systems, and ignoring that if Congress was serious about space and returning to the Moon, they’d have mimicked Apollo and funded a lander much earlier. Something like ULA’s Xeus. They didn’t.
The SLS was originally intended to be operational-which meant no more test flights necessary-by the end of 2016. It still hasn’t reached that point ten years later. It was supposed to cost less than $11 billion; it’s triple that price tag now. It can’t ’perform to spec’ because it will never fly a mission that would match the specs required-that’s why NASA originally planned to use Gateway to make up for the SLS’s shortcomings. If you think our objections to the SLS-none of which you’ve come close to answering-are ‘seething hatred,’ perhaps you should stop projecting what you think we must feel, and instead read what we actually say.
Here are reasonable objections to/comments about the SLS that supporters have never satisfactorily answered:
* The rocket is too underpowered to support development of a lunar base (this includes Block II) without relying on approaches that supporters have repeatedly rejected, such as distributed launch and orbital refueling (no, don’t waste my time telling me this hasn’t happened. I have had debates about this with SLS supporters, including people actively working on the SLS program, about this).
* NASA does not have the budget, and will never get the budget, to significantly expand SLS production, let alone payloads for the SLS. NASA’s historical efforts to control costs have failed miserably, and until Isaacman, nobody seemed to want to make the hard decisions to have a hope of reducing the SLS’s price tag.
* No one with the financial resources to use the SLS wants it aside from MSFC. The military said ‘no thank you,’ and the private sector has consistently chosen other rockets when spending their own money. Even NASA itself rejected the SLS for Europa Clipper. NASA’s OIG has repeatedly said the SLS is unaffordable.
* Managers have consistently said they need a flight rate of at least one a year to maintain proficiency. Until Isaacman, nobody seriously tried to make that happen.
* At its most optimistic flight rate and cost, it still wouldn’t be able to manage both a lunar program, a Mars program, and launch even one telescope or probe every five years. Mars alone would absorb its entire capacity for half a decade or more, leaving NASA to rely on other rockets for everything else.
What’s not rational is trying to cast objections to the SLS as irrational. Yes, in a very narrow sense, the SLS works. But it cannot support anything other than a tiny, barebones program if we had to rely on it alone. Commercially-developed rockets will do the majority of the work anyway. Oh, and, I frequently hear SLS advocates claim we need to landers for reliability in case one lander has an issue, then turn around and object to having two manned vehicles to get out to the Moon. It’s clear that objection is from tribalism, not a careful, reasoned appraisal.
You know what you wrote and why you wrote it. Being disingenuous won’t change anything.
Shuttle-derived HLLV concepts vastly predate MCT, as Starship is now known as—and opposition kept it from flying back when it was Magnum, or even Shuttle-C
There was no Elon, and different administrations would start and stop things—which is why NASA chiefs need to be like Supreme Court justices but with Rickover level pull.
We will see what happens on the 15th.
To Mr. Zimmerman,
If you had a athletic child who liked to run—with opposition tripping him every five steps—he’d have a slow cadence too—and you very much stuck your foot at at MSFC projects every chance you got.
That happened when Ike interfered with attempts to launch a satellite atop Redstone before the Soviets…when the ABMA Saturn IB was killed in favor of Air Force Titans, with JPL and Goddard Greens who didn’t like the idea of humans beyond Earth orbit and Marshall STILL put four Americans around the Moon despite fierce opposition.
Yes—I have (Saiyan Prince level) pride in what should have stayed the ABMA—the OG Space Force. Guilty as charged. When China caught a booster with arrestor gear—that too was nationalistic pride….something I see less and less of.
In other news, there is a way to leverage A.I. for complex tasks.
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-hierarchical-ai-agent-tackles-complex.html
What you’re really asking for, Jeff, is for an agency doing something genuinely important. Administrations flip so often because very little NASA does really matters. You’re never going to get the independent government agency you deaire. Everything you claim to want will come from the private sector. That aligns with what really drives American flourishing, Jeff. Not increasing dependence on the state.
Nate P wrote: “But they didn’t. This is revisionist history.”
Well, yes and no. The rocket scientists in Congress truly thought that they had provided the funding for development of two landers. The reality is that they have no idea what they are doing (and not just in rocket science). The reality was that there was enough money to fund a modification to an otherwise existing rocket but not enough to design a manned lander from scratch.
… and SpaceX really only got to that point around 2015 …
I am going to nit pick at this one, too. I agree with our host, that Starship was only a Power Point presentation in September of 2016, and it was not much farther along twelve months later, although it was a somewhat better thought out Power Point. In addition to this entire argument, Starship was designed completely from scratch, where all development efforts and expenses include not just the rocket but also all the facilities and ground equipment, most of the technologies, and virtually all of its methods.
SLS does not care about the rocket equation, reentry heat protection, launch availability, or cost, but Starship is fighting all of these concepts all at the same time. It is awe inspiring the number of advancements have been made in the past nine years, since the September 2017 Power Point presentation. Someone here recently called Starship a water tower, just as it had been called five or six years ago.
Oh, how far Starship has advanced in those five years. Far, far beyond any advance that SLS has made — oops — SLS has regressed from the technology of the Space Shuttle to the technology of the Saturn, but not as capable. These are not words of hatred, they are words of facts. Congress stopped caring about advancing space technology, but NewSpace is doing it in spades — or I should say “in space.” NewSpace has already developed better launch vehicles, and continues to do so; has advanced to orbital manufacturing, where NASA has only done experiments; has worked out affordable space station modules, where NASA spend billions on each; and is developing lunar landing vehicles, where NASA has abandoned the entire concept. Oh, did I mention space suits, yet? Those are in the hands of the commercial NewSpace companies, too.
It is amazing how just a couple of years after SpaceX catches a fly with a pair of chopsticks, everyone seems to yawn at the achievement that amazed and thrilled them at the time. SpaceX has solved many other impossible problems, including protecting the launch pad and hardware (AKA stage zero) from the world’s largest blow torch — and we saw what can happen from that.
Trying to compare all that to the silly regression of the SLS to 1960s technology and methods — and completely failing to live up to Apollo’s capabilities — is like comparing apples to Cadillacs.
_________
From mkent: “Yet people here and other space sites display a seething hatred for the one part of Artemis that is performing to spec and has been on budget and on schedule since at least 2021 and lavish praise on the part of Artemis whose schedule has been moving to the right at one year per year for its entire existence.”
mkent means the solid rocket boosters that are performing to spec, and he means the NASA version of the space suit that slipped schedule year for year.
“Starship did start development at about the same time as SLS. ”
Well, SLS uses flight hardware from the Space Shuttle, and that development started in the 1970s. SLS also uses facilities and ground equipment from the 1960s, so if we compare SLS development time to Starship’s, we really have to go back several more decades than most people are willing to do for SLS. SLS started with far more than Starship did, yet Starship is advancing the state of the art far more, far faster, and far cheaper than SLS has done.
By itself, a Starship fleet can supply a lunar base for a fairly reasonable price, but SLS does not have the launch cadence to do the same.
The biggest problem that SLS has is that it was assigned a job that it does not have the capability to perform. Each launch cannot lift enough to do the job, it cannot launch often enough to continue the job, and it costs too much to sustain the job.
SLS cannot support a sustainable lunar base, nor can it sustain much in space. It could, however, put up heavy space station modules at a rate that could sustain a long-term space station that retires the occasional obsolete or worn-out module, but that is not the job SLS was assigned.
The biggest problem Starship has is optimizing launch payload despite the tyrannical rocket equation, optimizing the thermal protection system for rapid reuse, and finding enough customers to support the rapid launch cadence. Huh. That’s three problems, but one of them is the biggest one, I’m pretty sure.
________
From Jeff Wright: : “… MCT, as Starship is now known as …”
In 2013, the Mars-ship that eventually turned into Starship was proposed to be called “Mars Colonial Transporter.” It has undergone several other names since.
“… with opposition tripping him every five steps …”
That does not describe SLS, which our host has no power to trip, but it does describe Starship under the Biden administration.
“That happened when Ike interfered with attempts to launch a satellite atop Redstone before the Soviets…”
Eisenhower was adamant that the military not launch anything into orbit, otherwise the Soviets could have claimed airspace violation and spoiled orbital space forever. Both the U.S. and the Soviets had announced that they would orbit an artificial satellite for the Geophysical Year, a worldwide science event. It was vitally important that the first U.S. satellite be civil, not military, or that the first satellite launched be Soviet, so that the Soviets would not claim that their airspace had been violated. Eisenhower saw the advantage of spy satellites even before there were artificial satellites, and he did not want anything to interfere with that.
“… and Marshall STILL put four Americans around the Moon despite fierce opposition”
The opposition was not to put Americans around the Moon, it was to the demonstrated heat shield hazard and the unproven life support aboard Orion being tested so far away from a safe return, should anything have gone horribly wrong. Talk about revisionist history …
“I am seeing more and more websites playing up Titan due to methane seas.”
I don’t see this as being economic.
It would have to stay at pressure for compact transport.
It would have to be filtered first then shipped. Then purified.
Just as much oxygen would have to be found purified and transported.
That would be a huge planetary or orbital facility plus add in the landing areas.
I do not see it happening inside the next 100 years.
You can make plastics there…carbon fiber.
I have been racking my brain in terms of how to bootstrap.
An idea would be to have a spacecraft with a tether to containers on Titan’s surface. The spacecraft would go deeper into the gas giant gravity well—so as to start a process we have all seen what with a chain that fountains up and out of its container.
There may be a way to liberate vast amounts of liquid methane and liquid oxygen from Titan’s surface….the “chain” would be broken with pods left in orbits in between.
Sever connections at just the right moment.
If Teslabots are a thing—let them go to Titan first to get a supply chain, and humans go to Mars last.
A way to kill Carrington 2?
https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/solar-storm-what-is-stormwall-e2ca1823