On Dec/31/2019 at 03:13, David Spain wrote :
On 2019-12-30 8:19 PM, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article , says...

Happy New Year to all.

What do you expect will be the most interesting things coming up in
2020?

Commercial Crew flights to ISS.Â* Starship tests.

Jeff


Yep 2020 will be a bellwether for Commercial Crew. I expect to see the
first flights to ISS either by early summer or early fall. I expect both
Boeing and SpaceX will pull this off before the end of next year.

Starship MK3 first flights sometime in March I think. But progress will
be incremental. I'm somewhat pessimistic and I don't think crewed
flights will take place until 2022, perhaps later. I depends upon how
much of Dragon V2 tech gets incorporated into Starship early on. Or not.
Also the *early* emphasis may actually *not* be in crewed flight for
Starship compared to an automated and fully reusable launch system for
Starlink. I think the emphasis may actually be on Starlink support for
MK4. Getting a working LEO Internet satellite cluster up and running
with a global customer base could pay the way for the costly Starship
upgrades for crew to come later. What is fascinating to me is the
incremental launch costs for Starship. If we are down at around $100/kg
of cargo, it might actually become possible for Starlink to upgrade it's
infrastructure at a speed faster than terrestrial cable can perform
roll-outs of new tech. Future bandwidth races might be between cellular
and LEO satellite constellations, with wire or fiber becoming the
anachronism due to the physical cost to upgrade it. This would be a very
new phenomenon for the satellite business. Time will tell.

Yeah sure I'm *not* saying Starship won't hold people, just not sure
exactly *when*. It isn't necessary to put Starlink up. I wouldn't expect
the ability to do so would be deferred until it can handle crew. That's
just not necessary. But to get Starlink up and running, AND to provide
the ability to be cost effective at fleet maintenance and upgrades,
yeah, it (Starship), seems quite necessary.

In my opinion Commercial Crew isn't all that exciting. We've been using
capsules since the 1960's. Going from Soyuz to US capsules isn't a big
deal. Dragon will allow cost reductions, but the real cost reductions
here are in fact about the Falcon 9 which isn't something new for 2020
it was something very exciting that happened in December 2015 (the first
successful return of the first stage).

I think SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy are much more exciting. I also
hope and expect that we will hear a little more about Blue Origin.
Having one company developing a new technology revolutionarily reducing
cost is exciting, having two companies doing so, adds competition in the
mix which will make them both try to reduce cost yet again.

Super Heavy, Starship and Blue Origin are putting us on a path to Mars
and other such interesting things. Commercial Crew is about LEO. I'm not
saying Commercial Crew isn't nice to have. It is very nice to have. But
I'm not as excited about that as I am about very cheap reusable heavy
launch vehicles.


Alain Fournier