Playing catch-up
To Dad… You and other engineering types I know were floored when Space X caught a heavy rocket that came hurtling back to Earth. I didn’t see the big deal. I’m starting to.
Sorry, but it still looks to me like they fired from the rocket from this thing and showed the video in reverse. I mean if they can fake a moon landing, why not an Earth landing. Kidding aside, the video is pretty freaking phenomenal. If you don’t quite get why, the cheering should more than tip you off.
Other than ultra-coolness of this, why does this matter? It took me a while longer than most to answer it. And, as usual, it’s money.
In 2019, NASA gave Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower. It couldn’t catch rockets. Just help them go up. They hope it will be finished in 2027. They expect it to be ready in 2029. It will cost $2.7B. SpaceX built theirs in weeks. It cost $383M. Oh, and SpaceX’s tower doesn’t just pitch, it freaking plays catch. With a 20-story building.
Ok, so it saved some infrastructure cost and proved — yet again — that government agencies overpay for the things they buy.
The real payoff is in the cost of payload. From 1960 to about 2005, the cost to put stuff into a low-earth orbit didn’t change much. It hovered – no pun intended – around $10,000 per kilogram. Of course, that’s because we had only one supplier. Government. SpaceX has brought the cost down to about $500. In the next couple of years, that price could be under two hundred bucks.
What goes up there? The Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. Yeah, big expensive toys for academics and scientists. Oh, and communications satellites. The stuff that makes our phones work. Now you’re talking.