Comment by mmooss
19 days ago
> lots of cheap orbital rockets
It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).
> There are many others
Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out.
> NASA
Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of them and make N times the discoveries!
(With cheap launches, we don't have to make single machines that must be super reliable. We can make cheap machines at fractions of the cost, and so what if a few of them fail.)
Lowering costs by an order of magnitude changes everything.
NASA's work has been reduced to a "handful"? What is the point of writing that? And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?
> NASA's work has been reduced to a "handful"?
NASA has launched about 200 probes since the 1950s. That's maybe 3 probes a year.
> What is the point of writing that?
Building one-offs is extremely expensive, meaning few will be built.
> And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?
Cost goes down dramatically when you build a twin. Maybe even by 90%. And then you get twice the science done! After all, twin Voyagers were made and launched, and twice the science indeed happened. Makes you wonder what we'd have learned if the twins had more siblings!
For contrast, 9600 Starlink satellites have been launched.