In 2010 there were 120 launches into space by the world, 35 by the US. In 2023 SpaceX alone launched 98 and the total launches worldwide were 211. In the last few years there has been a revolution that totally changed our life style. You can now be any place on earth and have tv, internet, telephone etc. The town assessor can set with a cup of coffee in his office and see if you have need to pay more taxes, Have you cut trees, timber permit, added a building or added on to one, building permit, put on a new roof, have a car or truck parked in back yard, is it registered and taxed, I can look at the next door neighbor's house, or one a thousand miles away, and tell you how far it is from the road to the fence line, if there is vegitation along the fence, how far it goes, what roads are around your house. If you have a garden, fields, animals, green house, etc. What the lines of fire are, where I could observe your place without being noticed. With the rapid changes in the cost and ease of getting to space, the change is only going to increase. At this moment SpaceX and its spinoffs are making the biggest changes and they are rapidly increasing, Here are some of the factors causing that change. Here I sit in my chair and look at the airport at French Frigate Shoals, the most remote place I have been in my life. A man sitting an air conditioned office in Kansas can control a drone in Syria and kill a man in the second car in a four car convoy with out harming the other cars. The fact that he can both observe the target in real time, identify it., and then terminate it. All the while doing it remotely while drinking a cup of coffee, may be a reason for concern in the area of OPSEC. GeoGarage blog: Remote Hawaiian Island wiped off the map While I can not speak for them, looking at the available material on their new Starship does indicate some of their design tech. SpaceX developed their first Falcon series and the Merlin engine with their own, Musk's, funds. of about $300 million. NASA figured a standard "research" cost + would of been about $4 billion and might have developed a usable product. As of Dec 2024, they had launched about 400 Falcon 9 with 2 failing to establish orbit. About 99.7 % success rate and were operating a private business making a profit and reinvesting it new projects. In 2024, they would put about 17,000 lbs into a low earth orbit, think space station, for about $70 million. Their new project is the Starship - Raptor engine combination. The first and most impressive is in their selection and construction of the main part of the ship. While there are a lot of advantages to the super strong lite carbon fiber, it won't work for them. The vehicle is meant to be both reusable and designed for rapid turn around. Carbon fiber is about 50 times the price per pound, has to be heated in the curing process, has to be fastened with mechanical fasteners, and the heat of reentry or any stray flame defection will destroy it. So they selected a metal instead. Then the went to stainless steel, not an obvious first choice, as it is very resistant to heat, easy to weld, easy to form, and strong. They then basically built a test model with stick welders, off the shelf components and in a large tent. They went thru a process to see what they could get away with and in the process one ship was destroyed by a bad weld or weld design. What they ended up was friction welding stainless steel being done by robots. In part it is said due to their learning process at Tesla. It does not use a flux, a gas, or a filler rod and has minimal distortion as the metal is fused at much lower temps. They use laser welding, also done by robots for deeper welds and in locations that can not be stir welded. Again, the process, make an informed guess, do the best you can, and learn from your failures has given SpaceX both rapid progress and unexpected results. The rigidity and inherent strength of the design was best shown in the tumbling of the failed launch. They destroyed the ship due to loss of control, it had retained its structure despite totally unexpected forces being applied to it. The design process also shows their ability to rapidly learn and modify. They designed a ship, bought the materials, welded it together, launched it and learned. As seen in the first ship, this lead to a lot of visible and very ugly welds. One major event was buying the materials and then designing the ship. It is based upon the rolls of steel they bought, large pieces with few welds, rather than the first one based on design and then order steel. A lot less welds as a potential point of failure and a lot quicker construction time. The large pieces, stir welding, and improved welds in general make the later ships objects that not only work, but are beautiful. The real strength of the total design process was shown in the ability of the tank system to resist the flames caused by the venting of residual fuel. Open flame on most tanks would have lead to an explosion and not some striking videos. There are other you tubes taken over the years that show the design changes as they were happening. The Raptor engine and use of methane are also typical of SpaceX. The basic design has been tried before, but not put into production. Their first generation hand built engines cost about $2 million each. In production they are expected to be about $250 thousand and reusable. The early designs have been robust, are designed for reuse, seem to have a low failure rate, and are an improvement over existing engines. SpaceX was building 7 engines a week in their plant. NASA awarded a contract to restart the old RS 25 line at a cost of over $1.1 billion. The actual operation and its goal of 4 engines a year was a separate contract at about $100 million an engine. The Raptor engines gimbol. needed for control, and vary in thrust in order to soft land. SpaceX Raptor - Wikipedia
