SpaceX Update July 2021

Name a more exciting company than SpaceX. Seriously, I’ll wait. Tesla is cool. Neuralink is going to be doing some amazing stuff in 5 or 10 years. But SpaceX is changing the world right now in big ways. Not only have they made space travel cool again, but more importantly, they’ve made going to space more accessible than it has ever been before. And building a fully, reusable, workhorse rocket booster in the Falcon 9 was just the first step. Over the next three years, SpaceX are taking human kind to some crazy places, it can be hard to keep track of. So that’s what we’re talking about in today’s video, we’re checking in on what SpaceX are up to in 2021.

Part 1: The Moon

OK, let’s start out with something really fun, The Moon. People are going back to The Moon. For the longest time, this just seemed like something that might never happen again. For us Millennials, we’ve never had a Moon landing in our lifetime. It all seems so backwards… Anyway, that’s all in the past and we’re turning things around in this decade. People will be landing on the Moon, and the vehicle that they’ll be using to touch down on the Lunar soil will have SpaceX written on the side. The SpaceX Starship has secured NASA’s contract for the Human Landing System, or HLS, on their first and second Artemis missions to the Moon.

SpaceX beat out two competing companies to win this contract, one is called Dynetics - a legacy aerospace company that has been around since 1974. And the other is of course, Blue Origin, the space flight company owned by Jeff Bezos - no need to explain, you all know who that guy is. And it turns out Jeff is a sore loser, no surprise there actually, I mean, just look at the guy. And Jeff has not stopped whining about it since. He’s gone so far as to turn to his friends in the US government and start begging them to legislate his way into a participation trophy. In Lex Luthor’s opinion, one winner isn’t enough because the winner wasn’t him.

All joking aside, NASA had originally planned, in a perfect world, to have two companies building separate HLS vehicles. But they just didn’t have enough money to pay for both. NASA’s budget is higher than it’s been for decades, but it's not unlimited. SpaceX offered so much bang-for-buck with their proposal, that they were an easy choice.

Anyway, here are the details. The SpaceX Lunar lander will be a variation on their Starship rocket design - that’s the giant, Flash Gordon rocket that they have been testing at Starbase Texas for the past year. Mostly, the Starship explodes during these tests, but on their most recent attempt, the Starship managed to take off and land then land all in one piece. That’s a big deal. Landing those little Falcon 9’s is a walk in the park compared to landing a whole ass rocket ship back on solid ground.

So, the Starship will be flying from the Earth to the Moon, but it won’t be bringing any people with it. The people will fly from Earth onboard the Artemis Spacecraft built by NASA. Then they link up with the Starship in orbit around the Moon and ride it down to the surface. Could the people have just rode the Starship the whole way without sending two rockets? Yes. Why don’t they just do that? Bureaucracy. Either way, the first Artemis mission is scheduled for 2024.

What do you all think, are we being too mean to Jeff Bezos? I’m sure he’ll be just fine. Unless he explodes in his own rocket ship trying to fly to space, that would be kinda sad. Kinda. We’ll stop,

So that’s the SpaceX product that actually gets to land people on the Moon, but it is far from the only SpaceX related mission to the Moon. Take the dearMoon project for example, this is a fun one. Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, has hired SpaceX to take him on a private flight to Lunar orbit and back home again. Being the good rich person that he is, Yusaku will be bringing eight, non-billionaire people along with him for a free ride to the moon. There will also be two actual astronauts coming along to handle all the space flight stuff. The idea is that he will bring eight accomplished artists on this private tour of the great unknown. Yusaku’s dream is that the artists will be inspired by the endless wonder of outer space. And upon their return to Earth, these artists will use their new found perspective to create work so powerful that it will create peace across the Earth. If you needed a wholesome story in your life, this is definitely the one to get into. It’s very pure. This one is set to launch no sooner than 2023, but realistically, the flight should be possible in that year or any time after that. Once we know that Starship can reliably take off and land on Earth, then it can basically go anywhere we want.

Here’s another good one, the Doge One mission to the Moon. This is a partnership between Geometric Energy Corporation and SpaceX. And this is the first ever space mission to be paid for entirely with Dogecoin. If you’re not familiar with Doge, then you probably don’t follow Elon’s regular shit posting on Twitter, and honestly that’s probably for the best. But as a proud Dogecoin hodler myself, I’m pretty stoked to see this happen. The mission is to deliver a 40 kilogram cubesat, named Doge One, into Lunar orbit using a Falcon 9 rocket. Doge will basically just orbit around the Moon and collect scientific data with a series of onboard cameras and sensors.

The Doge satellite is just one of a bunch of uncrewed satellites and landers that are heading to the Moon on SpaceX rockets over the next few years. The Falcon Heavy rocket is even getting in on the party soon. This is the big ass rocket that launched Elon’s Tesla Roadster into space a few years back, but it hasn’t really seen action since. Falcon Heavy will be rocketing a landing craft to the Moon that will be made by the company Astrobotic, and inside that lander will be the NASA rover called VIPER, who’s mission will be to find and identify resources on the Moon, particularly they’re looking for frozen water up there.

Part 2: Starlink

OK, admittedly, this is not nearly as sexy as flying to the Moon, but Starlink is almost certainly more valuable for the good of humanity. Starlink is basically the future of the internet, not just on Earth but beyond even that. Starlink means freedom from cables and fiber optics and cell towers. Starlink is high speed, low latency internet anywhere and everywhere you might need it.

We know that SpaceX have been launching satellites for every Tom, Dick and Harry that need something put into space for years now. But over the past couple, they’ve been busy launching their own satellites as well. Lots of them. Each Falcon 9 launch can deliver around 60 Starlink Satellites into low Earth orbit. They’ve now reached a constellation size of over 16 hundred active satellites, with many more to come.

According to Elon Musk, Starlink has already reached 69,420 active users in their Beta testing group, which is currently geofenced to mostly just the Northern United States and Southern Canada. But Elon has just recently said that Starlink will be able to expand to near global coverage by August of this year. The only parts  of the world that Starlink won’t cover would be the North and South Pole, and even those locations are coming by the end of this year.

The amazing thing about Starlink is that it is delivering high speed internet with very low latency to parts of the world that have never had that opportunity before. I know to you and me, this is no big deal, but there are areas in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest where people don’t even have the option of getting proper internet at their home or even 4G cell phone signal available. All you need is a receiver dish that’s about the size of a pizza and a place to put it where there is a wide view of the unobstructed sky. As satellite coverage increases, the necessary field of view to get reliable service will also narrow.

I’ve already got my own Starlink system on order, it should be coming in very soon. Videos with that coming to the channel later this summer. Leave a comment if you’re a Starlink user, let me know how you’re liking it so far.

SpaceX expects that the total number of users will grow fast in a very short time, with Elon forecasting that they will reach half a million subscribers in a year from now. At a 100 US dollar per month service fee, that’s a lot of money coming into SpaceX, but it doesn’t come cheap. Obviously the startup cost for establishing a satellite constellation is no small amount. Elon says that it’s going to take 5 to 10 billion dollars worth of investment before Starlink will start turning a profit. And Elon expects that he’ll end up shelling out between 20 and 30 billion dollars of total investment in Starlink. It’s a lot of money, but this is a global product with a subscription based service, if they can grow that user base to millions and even hundreds of millions of people, that's a solid cash flow of essentially passive income for SpaceX. And what are they going to do with all of that money? Fly to mars, obviously.

Part 3: Mars

You can’t talk about SpaceX and not talk about Mars. This was the singular reason that Elon founded the company to begin with. His first idea was basically just to land a greenhouse on Mars, but over the two decades, Elon has upgraded to colonizing the whole damn planet and perpetuating human civilization into the stars. It’s pretty heavy.

The key to this whole thing is the Starship. That’s why SpaceX are flying through the prototype and testing phase right now. This is the reason why Elon sold all of his houses in California and chose to live in a box next to the SpaceX test facility in South Texas. If we can get a big, powerful spaceship that is able to take off, land and then take off again in short order, then getting people to Mars suddenly becomes something that is very doable. But there is a very critical time constraint in place. Elon is gunning hard for the first Starship mission to Mars in 2024 because that’s the next window that Earth and Mars will come as close to each other as they get. If you launch at the right time, then the trip from Earth to Mars only takes about 6 months. Outside of this period, the sun is going to be situated between the two planets, and you can’t fly through that, obviously. This window comes around every two years. So Elon knows that if he misses 204, then it’s a long wait to 2026.

The ideal plan right now is to land the first Starships on Mars in 2024, those will not have any people on board, but they will be full of supplies. If all goes well, then the people start to arrive in 2026 and they’ll find Mars fully stocked when they get there. This is going to be a whole different kind of space mission, this isn’t like the old Moon landings where they get out and tour around for a bit and then come home. The first astronauts to Mars are there for the long haul. The grand plan for Mars is to slowly build up a colony that can eventually grow into the first Martian city.

But like we said, the first step is to get Starship working. And the next big step towards that goal should be coming this summer. SpaceX are aiming to conduct the first orbital flight test of the Starship and Super Heavy booster within the next month. It’s a very significant proof of concept demonstration, because once Starship is attached to it’s booster it will create the largest flying machine that has ever been built by human beings. And this thing has got to fly all the way to space, then come back down and make a controlled landing. The first orbital Starship and Booster will be touching down in the ocean, just to be on the safe side. This is a big step up, we don’t know what’s going to happen. But once we know everything is cool, then the plan is to have the launches and landings happen from stationary platforms in the ocean. SpaceX has already purchased two decommissioned oil rigs off the coast of their Texas facility for just this purpose. Elon bought the deepwater rigs for 3 point 5 million dollars each from a Texas oil company that was going bankrupt.

Alright, that’s probably enough talking for one day. These are just the major projects that SpaceX are up to, but it’s really just scratching the surface. This company is already doing amazing work, and we are just getting started, this is just step one, folks.