Space X

 

 

Although superficially there is no connection with electric vehicles in fact there is a close connection between Tesla and Space X. The previous post was about electric vehicles and now a post about space travel which appears very different.. The connection is visionary scientist and entrepreneur Elon Musk who leads both. Tesla is a public company and its vast rise in value in the past year sees Musk into the ranks of the super rich. In contrast Space X is his private company, which he started and financed in its early days and which is devoted to space travel. Musk sees mankind’s future as a multi planetary species and is using Space X to develop spaceships to travel to Mars.

Space X, as a private company funded by Musk and a few other wealthy investors has to be as close to a commercial profit making organisation as possible. To this end over at least a decade they have developed Falcon 9. This rocket has contracts from NASA to supply freight to the International Space Station ( ISS )and just in the past year to fly astronauts from the US to the ISS .Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 US astronauts have been transported by Russian Soyuz rocket to the ISS. In addition the Falcon 9 is used as the launch vehicle for many satellites for a variety of customers. These range from the quite small, of a few kg, up to communications satellites of several thousands of kg.

Falcon 9 is not the only rocket capable of an orbital capacity of several tons ( competitors include US United Launch Alliance, Europe’s Ariane and Russian Soyuz ) but it has some unique properties. Firstly it uses a cluster of nine engines so failure of one doesn’t fail the whole mission. More importantly the first stage is designed to land back on earth for reuse. This reduces the cost per launch considerably. As Musk has said of the era of throwaway rockets it makes no sense to fly the Atlantic with an aeroplane, junk it and build another to fly back.

The fuel necessary to fly back to earth does impose a limitation on the weight carried to orbit but the savings in cost are large. This saving means Space X can offer orbital capability much cheaper than other companies or organisations. The saving is such that Space X can offer launches for less than 20% the price charged by others. This has led to Space X capturing a large market share over the past few years.

Another string to the bow at Space X is the development of Starlink; many hundreds of satellites in low earth orbit to provide wireless links to the internet. This should bring internet capability to remote locations where wired or conventional wireless links are impractical. Starlink should not confused with existing high ( or  geostationary ) satellites which provide expensive internet connections with high latency. Latency is the measure of the time taken from computer to internet backbone. Radio waves travel at the speed of light but even though this is very fast  a round trip of nearly 50000 miles to high earth orbit takes far too long for many applications. A round trip of 1000 miles permits much more use for example making internet multiplayer gaming possible. The investment required for world wide coverage is estimated at about £10 bn. Space X is moving stepwise and is just starting consumer testing in a limited area of southern Canada and  the northern US.

For those few customers who need a higher orbital capacity Space X has Falcon Heavy which essentially is three Falcon 9 linked together giving an orbital capacity in the high teens of tons. Famously the first trial launch of Falcon Heavy carried a Tesla car as payload rather than the more usual inert weight of concrete. Musk amused himself by for example fixing a “Don’t panic” notice to the dashboard of the car.

Musk is both a humourist and a fan of science fiction. In naming the barges which act as landing platforms for Falcon 9 first stages he has chosen names with the style of Iain Banks, a science fiction author. So one is called “Of course I still love you” and another “First read the instructions”.

Having successfully developed Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Space X is now developing a Mars spaceship called Starship. This is far larger than anything built to date, far larger even than the immense Saturn 5 which carried the Apollo missions to the moon in the 60’s and 70’s.

Starship has been in development for just over a year. The first serious Starship flight has just happened. A prototype with three engines instead of six flew to 2 miles high , turned on its side, descended and then flipped into the upright position ready for landing. Fuel was not properly supplied for landing so the prototype  crashed ( Among the cognoscenti this is known as a RUD for Rapid Unintended Disassembly; sounds so much better )  Starship is massive, the height of a 10 storey building, but in use it will set above a booster first stage larger still. Hopefully an unmanned Mars mission will be possible in 2026.

A feature of the Space X ethos is that they are very open about progress. Most flights are streamed live. A small ecosystem of Space X watchers has grown up around the assembly site at Boca Chica in Texas. This site is quite open and cameras are trained on it day and night. It would be no exaggeration to say Musk has cult status and probably a dozen Youtube channels devote themselves to the activities of Space X. These include a channel regularly overflying the site. Some channels devote themselves to all of  Musk’s activities while others focus on particular facets.

Incidentally while the name Space X is now vey widely used the company is actually called Space Explorations. The company is both large and costly. While Musk has now the money to go a long way he will probably rely on some kind of collaboration in the future.