July 31, 2026 Quick space links
Because BtB’s stringer Jay is on a work assignment for the next two weeks, he will be unable to send me the links. Thus the daily quick links post is either going to be non-existent, short, or empty until he returns.
However, I welcome my readers to send me links in the interim. I do not want major stories, which I will cover myself in full posts. What the quick links requires are generally short X posts indicating some item of interest but doesn’t merit a full post. For example, reader Nate P. sent me this X post yesterday:
- Musk: Launch cost for Starship could drop well below $100/kg to orbit with fast reusability and access to local production of liquid CH4 & O2
At that price it would cost only $10,000 to place an average person in orbit. Obviously, the actual price would be higher but, based on this very typical overly optimistic Musk estimate, getting to space will become not much more expensive than buying a first class airline ticket.
If you see something on X that you think will work, use the “Copy Zelle Email” button in the tip jar to get my email address and send it to me.
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
Say what? You’re planning to send newborn infants to space? Without food, water, air, cribs, spacesuits, life support systems, or even diapers?
It appears you stopped reading after those first two sentences to quickly post a critical comment. You would have been wise to read the next sentence: “Obviously, the actual price would be higher.”
Or did you cut it off in order to purposely try to justify the nitpicking?
I don’t mind criticism and correction. I do mind people who come here interested only in tearing down others.
Much higher I would think. At $100.00/kg, a hundred kg would be $10K. $400.00 per person would require price to be $4.00 kg.
You are right. There are reasons why I am not an engineer. I have revised the post.
I don’t have a link from X, but I do from Youtube. It is from The Infographic Show.
Jeff Bezos Screwed Up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq0S3uNIVqc
It talks about the trouble that Blue Origin is in, and how Spacex does things differently. I’m glad that The Infographic Show is mentioning. You, and Rand Simberg have mentioned it many times.
$100/kg is $10,000 for a (somewhat overweight) fully-grown man, not so?
You are right. I have corrected the post.
That’d be about $12,700 for this particular rather more overweight man.
Doing some math: Each tonne is expected to be ($100/kg * 1,000kg) $100,000 in revenue.
If Starship can take 100 tonnes to orbit, then the company is pricing Starship launches at ($100,000/tonne * 100tonnes) $10 million. $15 million if they can get 150 tonnes. If they think they can reach their goal of 200 tonnes with version 4, then they expect to charge $20 million per launch.
As I understand it, they are charging their first couple of customers somewhere around $100 million per flight.
Starships best use might be for deployment of other forms of space lift that really would reduce the cost of space access.
If space elevators become a thing, unmanned cargo and robots could take the slow-boat approach, with quicker forms of transport for humans—winged TSTO designs with comfort and redundancy being chief concerns.
On hydrogen storage
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-smarter-thicker-cooling-liquid-hydrogen.html
Space elevators are like wet workshops. We don’t need them, and they have enormous upfront costs to accomplish tasks we could better do some other way. If it’s raw materials, we should stick within the bounds of practical engineering, mining the asteroids and put a mass-driver on the Moon. Hardware that can most easily come from specialists or factories on Earth, or more people, can be delivered in the usual way. Or we could save ourselves most of the trouble, and build rotating tethers, which still boost our capabilities, but are actually within the state of the art, instead of pining for space elevators.
The Japanese aren’t so negative as you be:
https://www.obayashi.co.jp/en/thinking/detail/space_elevator.html
They and Elon may come to an agreement.
This may be of use…perhaps as a mixed use JMOB deal along the equator for launch…perhaps atop a guyot with jack-up rigs adding length:
https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2026/08/plans-to-dismantle-nuclear-aircraft-carrier-in-mobile-building-steam.html
That deserves better than scrap.
I’ve read the papers, Jeff. Note they call it a concept, which means there are many unknowns. You rail about the solvable problems with Starship’s heat shield, but you accept uncritically the substantially greater issues around building a working space elevator. And, as is your wont, you avoid numbers of any kind, or who will actually pay for your dreams. No, proposals are not buyers or funders.
There are numerous problems with attempting to reuse the Enterprise for a civilian project, and none of them are solvable within the time frame of any realistic space elevator.
Your uncritical adoration of space elevators, despite the huge error bars around their affordability, effectiveness, and technical feasibility, when viewed against your continual rants about Starship’s heat shield, shows your arguments are not serious concerns, but partisan wrangling.
There are numerous issues with using an old aircraft carrier to power a space elevator, and none of them are solvable in the time frame when any space elevators could actually be built.
It is too late for space elevators at Earth to succeed. Except for some geosynchronous orbits* (including geostationary), every satellite and space debris in Earth orbit will twice a day cross the path of any Earth space elevator. At some point in time, the two will be at the same place at the same time. Collisions of satellites into any Earth space elevator are inevitable. There are just too many existing satellites and too much space debris for a safe space elevator, and there is a rapidly increasing number of satellites every week.
It is not yet too late for a Moon space elevator or one at Mars. There are other problems to overcome for space elevators at these two bodies, but this is a different topic. Asteroids, other moons, and dwarf planets could also conceivably have space elevators.
Rotating tethers at Earth have even more risk of collision with orbiting objects, as their entire lengths cross many existing and future orbits with each rotation of the tether. The number of rotating tethers would be limited at Earth and at other bodies (moons, asteroids, etc.), because of risk of the tethers colliding with each other and tangling themselves together. As with space elevators, rotating tethers have other problems to overcome (one of which is noted by BMJ, below), which are topics for other discussions (such as BMJ’s, below).
____________
* A geosynchronous orbit is defined as having a rotation period synchronous with the Earth’s. For this discussion, we can think of such orbits as having the same ground track each day. The lack of drift of these orbits means that they can be set up to avoid approaching any and all space elevators.
A number of the papers on tethers that I read were looking at lengths of up to around 100 km. None of the authors mentioned the possibility of them encountering or even colliding with any other objects in orbit. (Those were written a number of decades ago, long before the invention of cubesats and the increase in launch rates as a result of companies like SpaceX.)
There was, however, one potential problem that had been identified. If a tether had been deployed to such a long distance, it had to be carefully reeled in. The reason was that, during recovery, it might begin oscillating like a pendulum and that the arc through which it moved could, if large enough, allow the tether to wrap itself around the shuttle orbiter.
Some of the papers suggested ways of dampening that motion.
BMJ,
Many people who talk about tethers and space elevators assume the they will remain in a straight line, as though they were rigid. However, even a space elevator is so long relative to its diameter (or side length) that it will begin to act like a string, easily flexed by the Coriolis forces on the gondola taking loads up or down or even on empty gondolas. These forces imparted onto the elevator add instability to the structure and an amount of pendulum oscillation at the top end of the elevator.
For tethers, there are additional instabilities created by the gravity gradients and the natural orbital speeds across the altitudes spanned by a tether. Dropping a tether from a high altitude to a lower one puts the end of the tether, and any load it carries, into an altitude with a different orbital speed. Complications develop with tethers.
Orbital mechanics can be a real nightmare.
Yeah. Tethers have their own challenges, but they are at least possible from a technical standpoint.
I wasn’t convinced of the feasibility of tethers. There were too many questions and assumptions about them that I didn’t consider them to be practical.
I’m sure that many of the papers I read about them were written solely for the purpose of padding publication lists for funding or tenure applications.
Many of the computer models for the tethers made a lot of assumptions, such as the atmospheric density at the altitudes in question, as well as the properties of the materials from which the cables would be made.
As you said, many of the investigators assumed that the tethers would remain straight and rigid. One reason was that the modelling was sufficiently difficult without adding that extra bit of realism. If anything, the tethers would likely behave much like a fishing line. Even when trolling behind a boat, the lines will have some slack in them.
Then there’s the aspect of how much those tethers would weigh. Think of how heavy a roll of, say, 18 gauge electrical wire is and then imagine the shuttle carrying 100 km of it. There’s also the aspect of how much it’ll stretch when fully deployed. Hooke’s Law will still be in effect, so there’s the question of whether that tether will reach its elastic limit.
At the same time I was reading about tethers, there were a number of researchers looking at the behaviour of structural beams in orbit. That came from the idea of solar power satellites, which were proposed by Peter Glaser in the late 1960s.
The photovoltaic arrays would be quite large, perhaps several km on each side, and the structural members holding them would be long and slender, much like dry spaghetti. Of interest was how much those members would deflect while in service, as well as whether they might begin fluttering and how much the resulting deflections would be.
We discussed space elevator pros and cons a few years ago. Some excellent ideas and options we explored.
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/japan-to-launch-space-elevator-experiment-to-iss/
I still think a bi-medal ribbon with alternating current is the best option for elevator being “self propelled” without actually touching the surface. With magnetic propulsion, once you were outside the atmosphere you could accelerate to thousands of miles per hour getting to geosynchronous in hours instead of weeks. (it takes time to slow down so you don’t overshoot or crash into the counterweight)
A chemical rocket accelerating up the cable this way could detach from the ribbon at maximum speed without using any of its propellant!
Perhaps a combination of a geosynchronous cable dropping down to low earth orbit were a dual stiff Ferris wheel style rotating system can catch a load in the low atmosphere where it swings it up slowly (not too many G forces) to release the payload outside the atmosphere still in low earth orbit not having to take the ride all the way to geosynchronous. No traveling needed on the cable, just an effortless ride. Traveling up the cable towards the pivot will lessen G forces, and accelerating off the cable will extend the whip force flinging payload further into space.
With thousands of Ferris wheel style platforms at the end of the cables, A trip to/from near earth orbit can occur nearly continuously… Excelerator motor at the center to maintain rotational velocity. Powered by energy collected from the ionosphere where the ions are nearly infinite.
Space elevators on airless low gravity moons and planets would not be able to compete with systems using magnetic propulsion to reach orbit. Why wait your turn for a busy cable when you can point and shoot your load directly into orbit using an electrical Excelerator?
As for the enterprise aircraft carrier, it should be used as the centerpiece for a floating city. (Portland cement mixed with packing peanuts and gasoline create hard concrete blocks with “half the weight” that float!) A honeycomb structure with livable space below the waterline, farms, golf courses, parks over your head. Just drifting with the current in the Pacific with lots of endless boating / fishing. The aircraft carrier of course will have a fully staffed hospital for a geriatric retirement community, and propulsion to avoid typhoon storms.
$400 / person at $100 / kg is 4 kg / person, which is 8.8 lbs, or about the weight of a newborn baby.
Surely you can see the humor in an image of a Starship full of naked newborns bouncing around the cargo hold in microgravity like ping pong balls in a bingo machine?
If you had simply noted my math error, without being insulting (as others did), I would have thanked you and fixed it. Instead, you gave me snark that failed to tell me anything.
It was the humor in the error I was pointing out.
Mars ion loss
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-solar-mars-upper-atmosphere-boosting.html
Lofting humans on Starship will ultimately happen, but it’s going to be a ways off yet, maybe flight 80 or 90, in 2030+. Nearer-term, a Starship on orbit docking with a crewed Dragon (as a ride-along lifeboat) will be the first manned Starship (after Artemis, which I suspect will be short-lived).
But recall when F9 was starting out, SpaceX was hopeful they could get 10 launches out of a booster, and now they’re up to what, 36? And climbing.
SpaceX still has two serious nuts to crack with Starship: Making the heat shield last as long as possible, and orbital refueling. Get to a shield with a 10-flight life, and a decent tanker on orbit, and things start getting serious.
Following that link, they’re not worried about the heat shield. Mass produced Starships are efficient enough they only have to be reused once to improve upon multiple F9 flights. And of course if they don’t reuse them they improve on the Falcon Heavy missions that already aren’t reusing all their boosters (let alone SLS).
Consider short tethers, not the full space elevator.
… for Earth. Space elevators from the Moon to L1 to maybe 70 megameters over Earth are possible.
I did some work on the use of tethers a long time ago.
Before STS-1 was launched, a number of papers were published about how the orbiter could be a platform for deploying tethered subsatellites which would eventually be reeled back in after their mission was completed. Some of the investigators thought that the tethers could be used to hoist construction materials from a lower orbit, particularly for building solar power satellites.
About 15 years after I first heard of this idea, it was tested during two space shuttle missions. The first time, the payload got out to a short distance (50 or 100 m, as I recall) and stayed there, the tether becoming slack. I don’t remember if the package was ever recovered.
The second attempt ended in failure as the tether snapped and the payload was lost.
It was never tried again during the shuttle program.
I do think we are approaching a tipping point with spaceflight similar to the one that bought in mass international tourism at the start of the jet age.
Elon is usually right in the end, just never on the schedule he wants. So much of this question of cost *is* bound up in the heat shield, as he has always admitted, and it *is” a hard problem to lick. And they have licked a lot of hard problems to date.
But I don’t think they have to lick this one all the way, not for now. A heat shield you can inspect and return and turn around in a few weeks could be enough for basic Starlink and refueling ops at a profit, for the time being, if they build a decent fleet of the things. Maybe in 5 years (pick a time span) steady learning and iterating gets it down to a week, or even less. That would still be a very mighty feat, one Charlie Camarda could only dream of, once upon a time.
This might be the greatest advantage Starship has over the Shuttle, a vehicle that was originally only intended to be a first generation cut at a reusable space plane. Starship can keep iterating. The Shuttle just couldn’t iterate. NASA was stuck with four multi-billion dollar orbiters and a production line of throwaway tanks, and all it could ever do is minor tweaks; the heat shield (TUFI upgrade notwithstanding) was still basically the same one in 2011 as it was in 1981, they just got a little better at inspecting it and repairing it. NASA and Rockwell engineers appreciated all this, of course, but they were stuck doing the best they could with the situation. SpaceX isn’t.
What will the Starship of 2036 look like? Or 2056? That’s the thing. No one knows, other than that it will look superficially rather similar, but the ability to iterate will unlock all sorts of doors. There won’t be any 30 year old Super Heavies or Starships flying in 2056.
Shuttle could not iterate because it was not modular.
Shuttle’s mistake WAS reusability uber alles.
By insisting upon returning SSMEs out of the box, you doomed the orbiter to always having to be part of the LV stack.
Buran orbiters didn’t have that boat-tail.
With engines under the ET (SLS/Energia style) one orbiter could have been a Faget strait-wing, one a lifting body. Each orbiter a different design within reason…as long as the 747 orbiter ferry could handle it.
By focusing on perfecting an RLV out of the box, Elon is hobbling himself.
The resistance to a modular space transportation SYSTEM which an American Energiya/Buran concept offers is puzzling in that it could—as a technology demonstration project—only HELP Elon’s cause at no cost to him.
When I see SLS bashing after USgov wastes far more on non-space nonsense…it leaves me thinking that some conservatives are no better than the DS they denounce.
Red Eye radio is an overnight talk program for truckers…and they crowed about how most Americans didn’t want to go into WWII (isolationism during WWI)—seeming to indicate that what taxpayers want doesn’t matter when it comes to war spending.
Any complaints over war bloat? Well, the interventionist try to nix that by acting like ONLY THEIR interpretation of the Constitution is allowed—common defense joining the cross and the flag as a blind.
That is as much an abuse as the common welfare deal—at least that keeps MY taxes in MY country.
But the common defense evasion fails in that the same individuals who presume to speak for the Founders routinely disrespects their views about no entanglements.
So it doesn’t matter if the American voting public doesn’t want wars—-and it doesn’t matter what the Founders wanted either.
That is no different than the DS folks who also want to use tax dollars despite what the Founders wanted—and they would cut Boeing more than you..so I guess that makes them heroes to y’all?
No, Jeff. Modularity is tangential to iteration. Falcon 9 was not ‘modular’ as you prefer, but SpaceX has iterated on it repeatedly. Nor was Shuttle’s mistake reuse in toto, but in spreading out manufacturing to please political interests, which forced substandard design and engineering choices for trying to build a reusable vehicle. Consider from first principles why nobody building reusable vehicles today is using solid rocket boosters.
For what purpose? Who is going to pay for this? You know full well spaceplanes can launch in-line, they don’t need to be sidemounted.
You’re puzzled because you haven’t remotely thought this through. Starship is close to an orbital flight already. It will be long proven before this ‘Energiya/Buran’ system you propose would achieve first flight. It can’t help Starship at all. Also, because you would no doubt insist it be built by the usual suspects, it would cost an exorbitant amount of money that would be better spent elsewhere.
You know spaceflight isn’t the only important thing in the US, right? Energy, agriculture, ground and air transport, the sewer and water systems; all of those are vital to our quality of life. Spaceflight as you go on about is so divorced from people’s needs that it looks like a bunch of childish stunts that won’t affect their lives–no, temporary prestige doesn’t qualify. Wastage in other segments of society does not justify SLS spending, Jeff. It never will. For the love of God, stop trying to use this argument. It’s the verbal equivalent of using a BB gun against an aircraft carrier.
You do realize that until after Pearl Harbor, American military spending was quite low, right? And that the sneak attack transformed American opinions? Just because people were isolationist before the war doesn’t mean their minds stayed that way during the entire conflict.
You know, you can just come out and say you hate your fellow Americans and feel entitled to our money. You’d at least earn respect for being honest.
You’ve written many whoppers in your time, but this is more absurd than most of what you write.
You’re all over the place, grasping at every argument you think you can use to get people to stop criticizing the SLS. But Jeff, these spells don’t work because none of them answer the questions people like me raise. You have to meet people where they are and understand their priorities to persuade them, no matter how distasteful actually caring what other people want is to you.
I am not sure that a highly-reusable heat shield is that relevant, because I fail to see the value of a human-carrying Starship that is designed to return from space multiple times… unless we are talking about point-to-point passenger service, which is in the far future!
I think of the majority of human-carrying Starships as being mainly launch-once and then operate in space permanently (until a fiery retirement). Crew and supplies can be ferried up and down by capsules and utility vessels like Starfall. Surely there is no need to repeatedly launch and recover entire living environments multiple times, at least in the Earth-moon space. No need for wings then either.
Obviously huge constellation of Starlink and Starmind sats can best be maintained by reusable Starships,.. and I assume that sat launchers will be pretty light on reentry, and their heatsheilds can be designed for reuse relatively easily and cheaply.
But I am not sure that the idea of launching and landing dozens of humans and their living accommodations multiple times in an huge ship adds up!
Ray Van Dune, “… unless we are talking about point-to-point passenger service, which is in the far future!”
Maybe not that far in the future. Once starship can carry passengers, a point to point trip could conceivably carry 300 or 400 for the hour of boarding, flying, and disembarking. At a price of $20 million per flight, that could be $50,000 to 67,000 per passenger. I would expect that SpaceX would charge much closer to the actual per-flight cost (unit cost), dropping the price closer to $5,000, which is somewhat nearer to the current price of a 14-hour flight. Side benefit for the passengers: they have been in suborbital spaceflight, earning them SpaceX’s astronaut wings, if they have any.
“Crew and supplies can be ferried up and down by capsules and utility vessels like Starfall. Surely there is no need to repeatedly launch and recover entire living environments multiple times, at least in the Earth-moon space.”
This is the kind of space logistics that I envision in a farther future. Shuttles carrying passengers to a space way station (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey) for transfer to space ships (space only) for voyages to the Moon, Mars, or other space destinations. The heavy reentry and landing gear only exist on the surface-to-orbit shuttles, saving that weight — and the associated delta-v propellant — during the space voyages.
(Goodness gracious, Robert and Nate P. One sole link brought about quite a discussion!)
The missions for Starships that can carry large numbers of humans into space and then back to Earth will be at least three-fold and needful soon:
1. A Starship-based “city bus”-type routine multi-point crew and cargo exchange service to multiple commercial LEO space stations is the only way to get logistics costs for such stations down to a level where they become economically rational. Continued use of small capsules for space station crew and cargo logistics is not economically rational.
2. Industrializing the Moon on the scale required to support Elon Musk’s plans for mass fabrication and deployment of generations of AI data center satellites beyond those now planned for the Earth-circling Starmind constellation is going to require a lot of human crew to routinely travel from Earth-to-Moon and back again. A Starship designed to accomplish this sort of transport might well carry more passengers, on average, than even the commercial LEO station-serving “city bus” Starship just described. It will also need to be able to survive direct returns to Earth from cis-lunar space so its TPS system will need to be a step up from that of the “city bus” Starship model. I think this model of Starship may well begin service even before the “city bus” variant outlined previously – likely within three or four years.
3. The same will apply for Mars settlement, once that starts in earnest too. Again, a Starship will need a TPS system sufficient for both a direct entry at Mars and a direct entry upon return to Earth.
To Nate
No I don’t hate my fellow Americans, especially the poor constituents of Lindsey Graham who found out recently just who’s Senator he really was:
link text
And while he bragged about reaching across the aisle in supporting Sotomayor and Kagan:
link text
–Shelby put the Second Amendment first
https://www.al.com/live/2009/07/sen_richard_shelby_says_hell_v.html
–And yet you chose to hate on an individual who not only gave America a win with Artemis II, but had true respect for that most sacred of amendments.
But all of your posts are just “Orange Rocket Bad.”
Shelby’s and Graham’s actions do not justify the SLS. I don’t think Artemis II was a win. You claim not to hate others, but you show such disdain for us on a regular basis. Your actions don’t line up with your words. Grow up for once.
You want to steal tax money from Americans for wars they don’t support…do it is you who hates Americans.
I defend them when they say they do support SLS/Artemis and don’t support conflicts that impoverish them with gasoline hikes
If the goal is to keep the Islamic world nuke free–that has already failed ..the Paks have nuclear weapons, and there is nothing to keep them from selling one even if we carted nuclear dust out of Pickaxe Mountain.
It could very well be that Iran’s nuclear ambition was largely quelled during the initial strikes…in that it set them back to the point that competing interests like infrastructure repair would have resulted in INTERIOR politics that helped to dissuade the.
But if you keep on…Treaty of Versailles style—that only makes them come back worse.
Jeff, you are still acting like a petulant child. You aren’t going to win any support for the SLS this way. You never will unless you can answer objections to the SLS. You have to have incredibly compelling, well-defined arguments. Not justifications.