Mini-Throughput: Rockets Rockets Everywhere

It’s been crazy week or two for space. We had another aurora that was visible in North America. I’ve done a video on aurorae here and my picture of the aurora is at the top of this page. We then had Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS unexpectedly get so bright it was visible to the naked eye after sunset. My picture of that is below:

But it was also a crazy week for rockets, with no less than three major launches in the span of a week. Let’s walk through them:

Hera Returns to Didymos

You may remember a few years ago we deliberately smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if we could intercept and potentially deflect a dangerous asteroid that was coming to Earth. On October 7, the European Space Agency sent the follow-up to that, Hera, on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.

Hera will survey the double asteroid to see just how much of an impact we had on it, how we changed the face of the asteroid and whether we can put together enough information to reliably predict the result of future impactors. We had fun smashing a satellite; now comes the “boring” part where we sift through the debris and figure out exactly what we accomplished.

SpaceX Catches Starship

Six days after that and for the fifth time in a little over 18 months, SpaceX test-launched their super-heavy lifter. This time, however, they tried to capture the booster stage with the launch tower. The result was something straight out of science fiction.

SpaceX has been landing boosters on launch pads routinely now — and yes, it seems crazy to type that sentence out. But the booster for Starship is so massive, it would collapse if it landed on a gear setup. Hence the capture from the tower, which has the strength to hold up its substantial weight. It’s a stunning feat of guidance I would have thought was impossible had I not seen it with my own eyes. And another milestone for Starship joining the small but critical fleet of superheavy lift vehicles.

It’s hard to explain just how revolutionary this spacecraft could be. Musk has a target of getting space flight costs down to under $100 per pound. That is a bonkers number, considering it once cost $10,000 per pound to put things in orbit. At that price point, we could start launching space stations that make the ISS look like a tinkertoy. At that price point, you could go to space for less than the price of a used car. Musk is also planning to have starship capable of a one-hour turnaround. I can’t imagine any circumstance under which that would be necessary except one. If we discovered an asteroid or a comet were on collision course with Earth, we could use starship to launch a series of projectiles to knock it off course. Yes, this technology could literally save the planet. Or … at least make it affordable to do so.

Let’s also put some perspective on this. Starship has now had five launches since April 2023. The first had to be terminated and sprayed debris all over neighboring communities. Seven months later, the second launch saw successful stage separation but both stages had to be terminated. Five months later, the third launch got Starship to orbit but it failed on re-entry. Three months after that, both the booster and the ship achieved successful reentry. And here we are, four months later, and we’ve added tower recapture to the program (the vehicle itself attained orbit and successfully re-entered).

In that time, the Artemis program, currently slated at $150 billion in cost, has had … zero launches. Their last launch was in November of 2022 and their next isn’t scheduled until almost a year from now, assuming no further slip in schedule. The difference between the two programs could not be more stark. If Artemis doesn’t get going, their return to the Moon will involve having to buy landing space on SpaceX’s base.¹

Europa Clipper Heads To Jupiter

The smoke had barely cleared from the Hera and Starship launches when the third member of SpaceX’s fleet, Falcon Heavy, put Europa Clipper on its 4.5 year journey to Jupiter’s second moon. The initial plan was to get it there a little faster on Delta IV, but Falcon Heavy saved $2 billion over the competition.

You can check out this video here for the crazy details of this mission. To sum up: Europa Clipper will enter a highly elliptical orbit around the moon. Four days out of every two weeks it will plunge close and use its suite of nine instruments to scan the surface of the moon and analyze its features to see if there is indeed, as we have long-suspected, a subsurface ocean that has the ingredients to create life. We won’t be landing and drilling through the ice this time around. But it will tell us if such a future mission is worth it and bring us one step closer to figuring out if we are indeed alone in the universe.

All three of these launches came courtesy of SpaceX. I’ve been clear on some of my issues with Musk, especially now that he’s decided to go full in on supporting Trump for President. But let’s not let the man’s other activities distract from what SpaceX is doing: igniting a potential golden age of space. A huge amount of the credit goes to Gwynne Shotwell, an engineer and COO of SpaceX who manages the day-to-day operations. She’s the one who makes Elon’s vision reality. But it is his vision. And sometimes a vision is what you need the most.

The year isn’t over yet of course. If you take a peek at the upcoming launch calendar, we are shooting something into space almost every day, including the first test of Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital rocket. Whatever one might say about the state of our civilization — and I’ve been getting a little pessimistic lately — spaceflight is becoming a regular feature of our lives. And it will only get better from here.

1. In my freshman year of college, back the Late Cretaceous, I wrote a term paper on the potential of private spaceflight where I joked that if NASA ever turned ot the moon, they would have to rent the landing space. Here we are, 34 years alter, and I’m not joking anymore.