"Alain Fournier" wrote in message ...

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. 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 have to disagree. I don't think it's existing simply because it will
replace Soyuz for US crew exchange at ISS.

I think it's exciting because it'll prove that commercial crews flights can
be cost affordable.
This means that folks like Bigelow start to look more viable.

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.

Agreed on that.

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.

I think we need the 737 before the 747. So I'm quite happy with stuff
that'll get us at least to LEO.
I think we'll see far more folks going to LEO for "vacation" than Mars for
any reason in the next decade and possibly two.



Alain Fournier

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