SpaceX has been launching Falcon 9 rockets thick and fast of late. With 10 launches since the beginning of December, the company has flown rockets at a rate greater than one mission a week. And another launch could happen as soon as today, shortly after noon (18:13 UTC), with a Starlink satellite launch planned from Florida.

Lost amid the flurry of activity are some pretty significant milestones for the Falcon 9 rocket, which made its debut a little more than a decade ago. //

The Falcon 9 rocket has now launched a total of 139 times. Of those, one mission failed, the launch of an International Space Station supply mission for NASA, in June 2015. Not included in this launch tally is the pre-flight failure of a Falcon 9 rocket and its Amos-6 satellite during a static fire test in September 2016.

Since the year 2020, the Falcon 9 has been the most experienced, active rocket in the United States, when it surpassed the Atlas V rocket in total launches. Globally, the still-flying Russian Soyuz and Proton rockets have more experience than the Falcon 9 fleet. The Soyuz, of course, remains the king of all rockets. It has more than 1,900 launches across about a dozen variants of the booster dating back to 1957, with more than 100 failures.

The Falcon 9 reached a notable US milestone in January, equaling and then exceeding the tally of space shuttle launches. During its more than three decades in service, NASA's space shuttle launched 135 times, with 133 successes. To put the Falcon 9's flight rate into perspective, it surpassed the larger shuttle in flights in about one-third of the time.

There is no way to know how many missions the Falcon 9 will ultimately fly. At its current rate, the rocket could reach 500 flights before the end of this decade. However, SpaceX is also actively working to put its own booster out of business. The success of the company's Starship project will probably ultimately determine how long the Falcon 9 will remain a workhorse. //

Speaking of safety, this is where the Falcon 9 rocket has really shone of late. Since the Amos-6 failure during its static fire test, SpaceX has completed a record-setting run of 111 successful Falcon 9 missions in a row. It probably will be 112 after Thursday.

There are only two other rockets with a string of successful flights comparable to the Falcon 9. One is the Soyuz-U variant of the Russian rocket, which launched 786 times from 1973 to 2017. The other is the American Delta II rocket, which recently retired. (Eventually, the Atlas V rocket could also exceed 100 consecutive successes before its retirement later this decade.)

The 20th-century was marked by competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States, to achieve superior spaceflight capability.

The space race led to great technological advances, but these innovations came at a high cost. For instance, during the 1960s NASA spent $28 billion to land astronauts on the moon, a cost today equating to about $288 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

In the last two decades, space startup companies have demonstrated they can compete against heavyweight aerospace contractors as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Today, a SpaceX rocket launching can be 97% cheaper than a Russian Soyuz ride cost in the ’60s.

The key to increasing cost efficiency?

SpaceX rocket boosters usually return to Earth in good enough condition that they’re able to be refurbished, which saves money and helps the company undercut competitors’ prices.

The Dark Ars Scholae Palatinae

ColdWetDog wrote:

But they're not that expensive either. In the grand schema of boats being holes in the water that you dump money into, a couple of modified barges and a general purpose Gulf workboat or two is pretty meh. All depends on how much money there is in boosting payloads a bit further.

And, of course, SpaceX is looking to offshore launches in the future so as not to annoy everyone in a fifty mile circle. That will take some marine capability and having some experience in that field may be useful.

The estimate I saw from someone in the shipbuilding industry was $10 million to build and outfit the barge, $60 thousand per month in berthing fees, and $120 thousand per launch in operating costs, not including insurance. Use one twice per month over ten years, and you're looking at an uninsured cost of around $200,000 per launch. Reduce the cadence to once per month, and it's over $260,000 per launch. For smaller launchers, it might not make economic sense the way it does for Falcon 9.

Edit to add: the $200k per launch is roughly the minimum possible even if launch cadence increases, because the cycle time for barge operations means you'll have to add more barges to consistently get more than 2 landings per month.

With clearing skies and moderate winds, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket rideshare mission safely launched into space on Thursday. The first stage then sent its upper stage and a payload with 105 small satellites on its way into low Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage made a smooth landing back near its launch site.

Remarkably, this single Falcon 9 rocket first stage has now launched 550 satellites into orbit, as well as one Cargo Dragon and one Crew Dragon. It has flown, on average, every two months since its first launch. It would seem that rocket re-use is more than a fad. //

niwax Ars Tribunus Militum et Subscriptor

Hispalensis wrote:

Quote:

Upon launch, it will become the third Falcon 9 first stage that SpaceX has flown 10 times.

First reaction: hmm, that's interesting...

Delayed reaction: 10 times? That is insane!

It is funny how our brain quickly accepts the extraordinary as the new normal

This booster has delivered two Dragon capsules to the ISS, first with two astronauts then with 3t of supplies, plus a GEO commsat, 295 LEO commsats, 9 traffic monitoring satellites, 48 earth observation satellites, an in-orbit data transfer demonstration constellation, a space tug with 18 payloads, a synthetic aperture radar and an optical spectrum observatory and 10-15 random other cubesats.

That is before todays launch of some 105 new satellites.

I'll repeat what I said way back on SSO-A: The unbelievable projections of the small sat industry have come true, only to be gobbled up by a workhorse F9 on it's 10th flight.

The initiative, however, received no recognition from President Biden. One of Musk’s followers on Twitter asked: “The President of the United States has refused to even acknowledge the 4 newest American astronauts who helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for St. Jude. What’s your theory on why that is?”

“He’s still sleeping,” Musk responded.

The Biden administration’s apparent refusal to acknowledge the mission comes after it snubbed Tesla, which Musk also leads, by not inviting it to an electric vehicle summit — because the firm does not have unionized workers. //

The Democrats turn their backs on Musk for two reasons. For one, many Democrats are radicalized and hate billionaires. They consider their wealth to be an egregious corruption and proof that the capitalist system is evil. They think the billions of Musk and others like Bezos should be taken from them and given to government programs.

The other part of the Democrat party, namely elected officials, don’t like Musk because it’s useful not to. They feel they have to adhere to the first group’s thoughts and feelings and so they turn their back on them. What’s more, they do it because they want to pressure Musk into adopting systems of control that would put him further under their thumb. As Daily Wire reported above, they snubbed Musk first because he’s not using union labor, and union labor and Democrats go hand in hand. //

While Musk is looking up and thinking about how to bring humanity the stars, the Democrats are looking at you and wondering how they can bring you under their rule. They can’t rightly do that if you’re too busy cheering on and wanting to support their enemies.

Democrats are not about the future of humanity, they’re about the future of their rule.

So how on Earth could Relativity Space compete with SpaceX?
Well, Relativity has something SpaceX doesn’t, a 3D printer that can make rockets! This might sound like a gimmick to some, but it is a truly revolutionary piece of technology in reality.

The printer is known as Stargate. It can print around 95% of a rocket, including fuel tanks, rocket engines and payload capsules in various metal alloys to an incredibly high level of accuracy.
This gives Relativity some crucial advantages over SpaceX. 3D printing is one of the fastest methods of production, Relativity claim they can build a functional rocket capable of commercial launches in just two months. This means they can do rapid prototyping and out develop their competitors. This is why their rocket engine, Aeon 1 has already had over 500 test fires, and is already a proven and refined engine, despite only being a few years old.

3D printing also means they can have some very unique architecture. This is most notable in the Aeon 1 engine, which only has a hundred parts, whereas other engines typically have well over a thousand parts. Things like cryogenic fuel lines are embedded into the combustion funnel walls rather than being welded onto them, as they are in other rocket engines. Not only does this mean assembly is quicker and easier, but it means the design can be optimised, far more than traditional engines, as there are fewer manufacturing limitations.
But, Relativity has also taken a note from SpaceX’s book. Their first launch vehicle, the Terran 1, has a reusable first stage that lands just like the Falcon 9. The first test launch is scheduled for early 2022, but we already know some details of what the commercial Terran 1 will be capable of, a cost per launch of $12 million for 1,250 kg to LEO.

"This is a project that is profoundly going to change our area."

In 2019, a few weeks after Trump’s order, Bezos applauded it: “I love this,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.” He was publicly unveiling Blue Origin’s lunar lander, Blue Moon. But, like Trump, Bezos was underestimating the technical challenges. And underestimating Musk. //

If all it took to succeed was a massive amount of money thrown at these projects, Bezos would have easily prevailed long before now. He amassed his many billions long before Musk. He set out a clear plan for Blue Origin in 2012, when Musk was still struggling with the trouble-plagued Tesla launch before he could apply himself to SpaceX. //

How has Musk so clearly surpassed Bezos?
It’s not simply about the hardware; it’s also about people. The differences in the two companies reflect the differences in the two men who own them. Recent revelations about a toxic and bureaucratically crippled workplace at Blue Origin offer some clues, but the cultural divide was baked in from the beginning. Blue Origin followed a conventional aerospace corporate model. SpaceX was far more like a Silicon Valley start-up driven by a charismatic leader. //

Some of the critiques were about contrasting technical choices made by the two companies, but the most consequential cultural differences were directly attributable to their leaders.

First, as was already well known, Musk is a tightwad. SpaceX “had a relentless focus on minimizing costs.” All purchase orders above $10,000 had been approved by Musk himself. Blue Origin, in contrast, was “riddled with poor cost estimating.”

Moreover, SpaceX was a relentless 24/7 operation with 80-hour workweeks, while “Blue is kind of lazy, a ghost town on weekends.” That didn’t mean that SpaceX engineers complained of working in a sweatshop. Quite the reverse: they were highly motivated to get results and, although they were generally paid less than they would have been at Blue Origin, they had Silicon Valley-type incentives like stock options that rewarded top performers. Musk annually culled the bottom 10 percent performers to keep standards high.

In the latest instance of an Amazon-related venture attempting to use regulations and legal routes to suppress competition, Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite internet venture wants the FCC to dismiss SpaceX’s application for the next generation of Starlink satellites.

In a document filed with the FCC in late August, Project Kuiper took the significant step of asking the regulatory body to entirely dismiss a SpaceX request to modify plans for the next generation of Starlink satellites. As previously discussed on Teslarati, SpaceX submitted that modification request on August 18th with one clear focus: optimizing Starlink satellites and the constellation’s orbital ‘shells’ to best take advantage of the imminent capabilities of the next-generation Starship launch vehicle. //

Nominally capable of launching at least 100 metric tons (~220,000 lb) to low Earth orbit (LEO) in a fully reusable configuration, Starship would boost the mass of Starlink satellites SpaceX could orbit with one launch by a factor of 5-6 or more relative to Falcon 9. In other words, with Starship, SpaceX could feasibly fill out its Starlink constellation at least 5-6 times faster than with Falcon 9. //

In turn, while not unprecedented, SpaceX chose to modify its license application for the second (or third) phase of Starlink satellites – a constellation made up of almost 30,000 spacecraft – to include two distinct options: a constellation where Starship is ready on time and one where it is not. Amazon’s Project Kuiper project, Effectively a Starlink clone helmed by former senior managers and engineers that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk personally ousted in 2018 for being slow and overcautious, Amazon’s Project Kuiper was apparently not happy with the changes its competitor made. //

Published six days later, SpaceX pulls no punches in its response to Amazon, raking the company through the coals for an incessant number (dozens) of filed objections to Starlink while simultaneously failing to address crucial FCC questions about the nature of the Project Kuiper constellation. Bizarrely, SpaceX’s response also accurately points out how Amazon’s legal team seemingly fails to understand SpaceX’s modification request, which poses two mutually exclusive constellation layouts with mostly marginal differences. Amazon’s central argument appears to be that SpaceX actually hasn’t submitted enough information by meticulously detailing two constellation layouts instead of one, claiming that it left “every major detail unsettled.”

America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed bit thanks to...PDFs?

A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files. //

According to Blue Origin, there are "fundamental issues" with NASA's decision. The company also claims that the agency was supposed to provide multiple awards.

However, the process has been delayed due to PDF problems. PDFs are a proprietary file format created by Adobe used primarily for documents. Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice say there have been a myriad of issues related to the PDF format.

According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. //

Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.

Both Blue Origin and SpaceX agreed to the extension. NASA's contact with SpaceX is currently on pause until Nov. 1 due to the lawsuit. This latest development would seemingly extend that for another week.

Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin, is offering to knock up to $2 billion off the cost of developing a lunar lander and to self-fund a pathfinder mission in exchange for a NASA contract. //

The specific contract in question relates to developing a lunar lander for the Human Landing System program, which aims to return humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo days. NASA announced in April 2020 that Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics were chosen for the initial phase of the contract, and it was thought that the competition would likely be whittled down to two final companies to build lunar landers. //

But a year later, in a move that veered from historical practice, NASA announced it had selected just one company for the contract: SpaceX. That company, headed by Elon Musk, proposed a $2.89 billion plan for its lander – around half of Blue Origin’s $5.99 billion proposal. Bezos is now offering to cut that price tag by $2 billion. //

26 Jul

I think Elon Musk and SpaceX should indicate they would support the competition with Blue Origin if Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin accepts an HLS contract at the same $2.89B fixed price as was accepted by SpaceX. It was Blue Origin's choice to distribute their HLS development across multiple companies. SpaceX should not be short-changed for deciding to take it all on in-house while also exceeding the HLS requirements in many important future-looking ways. This would clearly show that SpaceX is not afraid of competition and is supportive of increasing the world's options in expanding access to space. It would also show that Blue Origin is not afraid of competition on a truly equal basis. //

Ben Wah
26 Jul

Just says alot how much they thought they could get away with taxpayer's money. ULA's playbook.

Edit: This is Bezos gameplan. When his proposal is rejected, get things stalled just like with the DOD’s JEDI program. It eventually got cancelled cause his complaint kept our warfighters in limbo for years to get ahead of our near-peer adversaries.

Blue Origin and Dynetics are still steaming over NASA’s decision to award only one contract — to SpaceX — to build a Human Landing System for the Artemis program. Their protest of the decision was recently rejected, and now the Government Accountability Office’s arguments, which Blue Origin publicly questioned, are available for all to read. Here are a few highlights from the point-by-point takedown of the losing companies’ complaints. //

Even had several of the decisions been successfully challenged, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, the report explains.

SpaceX received the following evaluation totals:

• Technical: 3 significant strengths; 10 strengths; 6 weaknesses; and 1 significant weakness
• Management: 2 significant strengths; 3 strengths; and 2 weaknesses

While Blue Origin received the following:

• Technical: 13 strengths; 14 weaknesses; and 2 significant weaknesses
• Management: 1 significant strength; 2 strengths; and 6 weaknesses //

…Even allowing for the possibility that the protesters could prevail on some small subset of their challenges to NASA’s evaluation, the record reflects that NASA’s evaluation was largely reasonable, and the relative competitive standing of the offerors under the non-price factors would not materially change…

The protests are denied.

On Friday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk sent a clear message to the FAA and other federal regulators. One evocative photo, in particular, drove home his message to anyone watching. It showed workers standing beneath Starship, as it was lowered onto the first-stage rocket. In releasing a black-and-white version, Musk knew exactly what he was doing in harkening back to the age of skyscrapers.

The 21st-century skyscrapers are being built right now, the photo screamed, by modern engineers and welders. Such rockets are not to be found in PowerPoints or wooden mockups any longer. They are living, breathing machines nearly ready to breathe fire.

It's taller than NASA's Saturn V moon rocket.

SpaceX's newest Starship prototype was briefly placed atop of its massive booster for the first time on Friday (Aug. 6), setting a new record for the world's tallest rocket ahead of a planned orbital test flight this year.

Engineers performed the stacking test at the SpaceX Starbase facility in South Texas, near the village of Boca Chica, in view of livestreams from NASA Spaceflight and Spadre.com. SpaceX has not commented on the stacking procedure yet on Twitter, although founder Elon Musk sent an update suggesting the company actually wanted to complete the stacking Thursday (Aug. 5), a few hours after Starship completed its rollout to the launch pad, but winds were too high. //

Super Heavy alone stands 230 feet (70 meters) tall and Starship SN4 added another 165 feet (50 m) of height. Together they stood a whopping 395 feet tall (120 m), taller than NASA's massive Saturn V moon rocket, which was 363 feet tall (110 m).

“Current plan is to increase base Raptor thrust to ~230 tons or ~500 million lbs & increase booster engine count to 32 or 33. All Raptors on booster, whether fixed or gimbaling, would be the same. 33*230 gets ~7600 tons of thrust & T/W of ~1.5.” //

“Center engines on ship will be same as booster engines. This is basically Raptor 2. Raptor Vacuum would be only variant. Tbd as to whether to commonize R-Vac with Raptor 2 (more thrust), keep same or tighten throat (more Isp). Adding 3 more R-Vac to ship with max Isp maybe …” //

SpaceX’s website shows the previous plan was for the Super Heavy to offer thrust of 16 million pounds. Musk’s comments suggest this figure could reach 17 million pounds.

By comparison, the most powerful rocket to ever fly was the Saturn V. It last flew in 1973, and generated just 7.6 million pounds of thrust. //

"Mass of initial SN ships will be a little high & Isp a little low, but, over time, it will be ~150t to LEO fully reusable.”

For Mars missions, the more important information could be that “T/W” of 1.5. The thrust-to-weight ratio shows how the thrust compares to the weight of the vehicle itself. Unlike an aircraft that takes off horizontally, a rocket that launches vertically needs its thrust to be higher than its weight. The higher thrust-to-weight, the greater acceleration. //

“T/W will be ~1.5, so it will accelerate unusually fast. High T/W is important for reusable vehicles to make more efficient use of propellant, the primary cost. For expendable rockets, throwing away stages is the primary cost, so optimization is low T/W.” //

November 2018 — BFR, first announced in September 2017, gets renamed to Starship.
December 2018 — Musk confirms the new ship has switched to stainless steel.
January 2019 — Shortened “Starhopper” prototype unveiled and Musk explains the switch to steel.
February 2019 — Raptor engine beats a long-standing rocket record.
April 2019 — Starhopper completes a tethered “hop.”
July 2019 — Starhopper launches 20 meters (67 feet).
August 2019 — Starhopper launches 150 meters (500 feet).
September 2019 — Starship Mk.1 full-size prototype unveiled.
May 2020 — Starship SN4 full-size prototype completes a static test fire.
August 2020 — SN5 launches 150 meters (500 feet).
October 2020 — SN8 completes the first triple-Raptor static fire.
December 2020 — SN8 launches 12.5 kilometers (41,000 feet) and crashes into the ground.
February 2021 — SN9 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) and crashes into the ground.
March 2021 — SN10 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet), lands, and explodes eight minutes later. That same month, SN11 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) and hits the ground in several pieces.
May 2021 — SN15 launches 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) and lands without a hitch, except for a small fire at the base.

"In every SpaceX animation, we saw a fade into black right when people walked out of the rocket on Mars," Ellis said. "So what was clear [is] that there needed to be some other company building humanity's industrial base on Mars. Replicating the infrastructure for a million people that live on Mars is a massive undertaking, and I think a lot of people need to work on it."

Relativity seeks to do this by pushing forward 3D-printing technology. Ellis intends to disrupt the long-standing aerospace practice of using fixed tooling to manufacture rockets, which are then finished using a hands-on process of adding thousands of parts. Ultimately, Relatively hopes to use what it learns about printing rockets on Earth to additively manufacture habitats and other materials on the surface of Mars.

Even as Relativity Space seeks to augment the efforts by Musk and SpaceX to make humans a multiplanetary species, the company is also directly competing with its much more established rival. If successfully developed, the Terran R would challenge SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for both government and commercial launch contracts. //

The Terran R vehicle will have a first stage that lands on a drone ship at sea, and the second stage will retain its payload fairing after satellite separation. Then, this combined stack, the second stage and payload fairing, will make a propulsive landing from orbit.

"To my knowledge, we're only the second fully reusable vehicle other than Starship that's even been planned," Ellis said. //

The rocket's first stage will be printed from a custom aluminum alloy, and the upper stage will be built from a more exotic, heat-resistant material to withstand re-entry temperatures. For the rocket's first missions, Relativity will seek to bring back the first stage, incorporating full-vehicle reuse over time, Ellis said.

If all of this sounds ambitious, that's because it is, especially for a company that has yet to launch a rocket or even perform an integrated-stage test firing. However, Relativity's steady growth, to about 400 employees now, and total fundraising of $1.34 billion lend some credence to the idea that it may indeed be successful.

Update, 3:30 pm EDT: Under bright blue skies, the Falcon 9 rocket took off from Florida on Wednesday afternoon and promptly delivered its Starlink payload into orbit. This booster has truly become the workhorse of the global launch industry:

After learning to crawl, walk and run, the Falcon 9 is now sprinting. Today:

• 100th consecutive, successful launch of a Falcon 9

• 16th launch of 2021, a cadence of one rocket every nine days

• 6th launch during the last 33 days, once every five days pic.twitter.com/kmuBJwA82i

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) May 26, 2021

Between 2007 and 2011 the European Space Agency worked with Russia to simulate the conditions of a trip to Mars, particularly as a psychological isolation experiment. Called Mars500, the longest part of this study ran between 2010 and 2011, and revealed a significant degradation of the simulacral explorers’ sleep patterns. While on wide-body airliners a business class cocoon seat can deliver comfort (and even luxury) during an overnight flight, such ergonomic palliatives won’t be as easy for a year-long journey. Space travel to Mars is supposed to be a bold and daring adventure. But what if it ends up feeling more like a super long red-eye flight? //

If the dream of space travel involves new horizons and feelings of unbound freedom—to explore, to discover, to spread humanity—a nightmare lurks just around the corner of consciousness. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s enclosures and pressurized chambers all the way down. When it comes to human space travel, the destination really is the journey. And the journey will be long, and claustrophobic. As far as “quarantine” goes, spacefaring may feel familiar to those who lived through the COVID pandemic—and certain survival tactics may crossover. //

The wish image of habitations on other planets is for simulated environments that feel as good as—if not better than—our home planet. The reality is bound to be precarious and highly contingent—no matter how awesome and intact space settlements might appear in artistic renderings. The motivation for spacefaring is, at least for Musk, premised on a desire to escape a planet in limbo; but the alternative is hardly a safe haven. This is the paradox of spacefaring: it’s a lose-lose proposition.

As anthropologist Lisa Messeri has found in her research on planetary scientists, ideas about inhabiting outer space can tend to revert back to making sense of our place on Earth. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, one of the arguments for space exploration is to improve life back home.

SpaceX’s satellite internet service is a technological marvel — when it works

By Nilay Patel on May 14, 2021 10:00 am //

Starlink is a new satellite-based internet service from SpaceX. In beta, it promises up to 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload speeds. Starlink currently has very limited availability. //

Starlink has set a long-term goal of 1Gbps down. It represents competition, something the American broadband market sorely lacks.

In that context, Starlink also represents something else: the American telecom policy establishment’s long-standing, almost religious belief that consumers are best served by something called “facility-based competition.” Starlink is a new facility for accessing the internet, one that does not rely on existing infrastructure. “Facility-based competition,” telecom lobbyists feverishly whisper while handing out their dirty, sweat-stained checks in Congress. “That is the American way.” //

Of course, the only thing a decades-long commitment to “facility-based competition” has brought to most Americans is… a total lack of competition. Reality, as I have said, is quite irritating. //

(by contrast, in europe, where the prevailing philosophy is called “service-based competition,” large incumbent providers are required to lease fiber access to competitors and there is a thriving market for internet access with much lower prices for much faster speeds. if the united states were in europe, it would have the most expensive broadband in the region.) //

look, i know you’re hyped up about starlink. i feel you. i also wish i could tweet a photo of dishy in my yard to every telecom ceo in the game and tell them to try harder. but the verge has long had a hard rule against reviewing products based on potential because the sad truth is that most tech products never, ever live up to their potential. and starlink, judged on its capabilities right now, is simply not a real competitor to the long, long coax wire running from my house to the local cable company fiber plant. it’s not even a great competitor to my data-capped-and-throttled “unlimited” at&t 5g service because i can reasonably work from home on that connection and i really can’t with starlink. and in the end, starlink’s traffic has to run over fiber in the ground anyway. //

all the people dreaming of starlink upsetting cable monopolies and reinventing broadband need to seriously reset their expectations. at best, starlink currently offers reasonably fast access with inconsistent connectivity, huge latency swings, and a significant uptick in time spent considering whether you can just get out the chainsaw and solve the tree problem yourself. //

maybe this will change as the company launches more satellites. maybe it will eventually work better in areas that are dominated by tall trees. maybe one day it will not drop out in wind and heavy rain. i didn’t give starlink a formal review score because the whole thing is openly in beta and the company isn’t making many promises about reliability. but even when it’s final, you’re still looking at a service whose near-term, best-case scenario is being competitive with a solid lte connection. i am no fan of cable companies and wireless carriers, but it’s simply true that my cable broadband and 5g service are both faster and more reliable than starlink, and they will almost certainly remain that way. //

as a whole, the american telecom policy industrial complex has utterly failed to put fiber in the ground and signals in the air at fair prices and with good customer support. so much so that a total science project of an internet access system — which involves huge tradeoffs for scientific research and doesn’t work if there are trees in the way — has captured the attention and imagination of millions.

broadband on the ground is so wrapped up in the lumbering bullshit of monopolistic regulatory capture that it seems easier and more effective to literally launch rockets and try building a network in the sky. starlink isn’t the happy end result of a commitment to “facility-based competition.” it is thousands of middle fingers pointing at us from the air. it is what happens when there is an utter lack of competition.

A senior lawmaker proposed a controversial piece of legislation on Wednesday that directs NASA to pick a second company to build the agency’s next Moon landers — in addition to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was awarded a $2.9 billion NASA contract to build a lander earlier this year. The bill hasn’t passed the full Senate yet, but it marks a new front in an ongoing effort to overturn or rejig NASA’s decision. It also sets up the first political challenge for NASA’s new administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson. //

Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin and Dynetics. Those companies lodged formal protests against NASA’s decision, triggering a procedural pause on SpaceX’s new contract. Among other things, the protests maintain that NASA should have picked two firms instead of one.

Amid a lobbying effort from Blue Origin, those calls have found their way into a NASA authorization bill, proposed as an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee overseeing NASA. Cantwell represents Blue Origin’s home state of Washington. Under Cantwell’s language, NASA would be required to reopen the competition within 30 days and allow it to use $10 billion of its budget to pick a second lunar lander provider.

Before choosing SpaceX, NASA had been expected to pick two companies, a strategy that guaranteed a backup in case one lander fell behind. But the agency went only with SpaceX — its bid was half of Blue Origin’s — after funding shortfalls from Congress. “It was in NASA’s best interest, along with the budget that was there, for us to award to one,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders, who led the decision to pick SpaceX, said last month.