my starship twitch ramble from 2021

This was apparently late feb early march 2021, transcribed from a twitch stream where i said it all on voice

on the industry as a whole:

"I think we're headed into the next crash, honestly. Everybody thinks that the boom times are around the corner, but... the boom times are here, we're just used to them. We keep thinking it's going to get better and better, but we're gonna reach that tipping point with the launch market crashing. There's way too man smallsat companies competing right now (Rocketlab, Virgin Orbit, Relativity, Astra, Firefly, Orbex, Skyrora, Momentus Space, and many more), and they're all gonna die. Except like maybe one of them, and even then now I'm not so sure about that one (Rocketlab, with the news that they're being acquired by a Special Purpose Acquisition Company and going public, developing a new bigger launch vehicle, and such).
With what knowledge of history I have, it looks now like it did in like 2001, basically. Right as the dotcom bubble was about to crash, right as the new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (Atlas V and Delta IV) were about to come online, right as everyone was talking about how the future [indistinct], right as Iridium (satellite phone and internet constellation) came online and Motorola went bankrupt over it.
It does, if you want my space policy armchair opinion, look like we're about to hit that dotcom-bubble-burst launch market crash again. At least in the commercial spaceflight industry."

so that's your primer because then i segued into starship on that. All of this started because i was showing off my minmus station and how it was a reuse of my original LKO station by sending it out there, and someone said "they should do that for the iss" and then we got to talking about space policy in explaining why that couldn't happen

actually a bit more primer

"spacex originally took lessons from the dotcom bubble. You know Delta IV, you know how everyone thinks Delta IV is expensive and bad for what it is. It is. There's a reason for that: Delta IV was designed to be produced at scale. they built an entirely new factory in Decatur, alabama for it, to build 40 rockets a year. They were expecting the boom times to continue, they were seeing dollar signs. They were seeing more and more satellites looking to be launched. It was going to be crazy... and then it wasn't. Because that was a bubble. Turns out there was a ceiling, and everything hit that ceiling hard when the bubble burst, including the space industry. Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin hurt, but I would argue that Boeing hurt a lot more because they bet the farm and designed Delta IV to be economical only at a very high flight rate. A rate that could only be sustained by the boom times they hoped were coming, and were not coming.
That led to the formation of ULA actually, both Boeing and Lockheed Martin were looking to leave the space industry because they were looking towards commercial spaceflight on top of government launch, and then that didn't exist and they wanted out. (ULA was formed to ensure the government maintained launch capability).
We almost lost Iridium becuse Motorola overextended themselves, but that came back and that's a story in its own right (there's a book on it i haven't read).
(as a response to a chat message) Boeing was expecting the line to keep going up."

what spacex did diferently before being clouded by ambition

"SpaceX, if you look at Hawthorne... Hawthorne is a TINY factory. and SpaceX designed a rocket not for reusability at first, but for market/cost effectiveness. The first and second stage both use the same engine, both use the same tank tooling, and they both started out very simple. At least, for falcon 9. Because they knew what kind of a gamble they were taking. At least early spacex did. Early spacex did not let its ambition get ahead of itself (as much). They took the lessons from Boeing making a fool of themselves with Delta IV and realized their rocket needed to be very modest if they were gonna succeed. Small factory, relatively simple rocket, very little configurability compared to other rockets (both Delta IV and Atlas V have multiple fairing options and booster configurations, Falcon... you get what you get.). And that's how falcon succeeded, even before they opened themselves up to reuse.
That's how they didn't become just another footnote in the history of failed commercial space enterprises (hi rocketplane kistler, rotaryrocket, conestoga, otrag, pegasus arguably!)."

starship and forgetting your roots

"To me, it's starting to look like SpaceX is starting to forget what they learned. Like, starship, it's cool. But it promises a LOT. And, who knows if it'll deliver? It reminds me of early Space Shuttle levels of ambition and confidence. of Boeing levels of confidence. You have to wonder if they didn't get complacent and forget their roots. I think everyone's seeing where things are going right now and thinking things are gonna keep being like that. But there's only so much room in the market for that. And i think we're gonna see it come crashing down in the near future.
SpaceX aims high, but usually that's grounded in something. Like if you look at how conservative early SpaceX was with Falcon. They did not aim for reusability, they didn't aim for all that stuff out of the gate except for a couple attempts at sticking parachutes on the thing. They designed a rocket first, and not something that was supposed to be everything. And Starship, is not modest. Starship is trying to promise everything, it's trying to be the space shuttle.
And that COULD be good. It could possibly prove that many of the doubts people have about reusable spacecraft because of the Shuttle are wrong. But that measns it has to learn from the shuttle's mistakes, and I don't know if they did. It's too early to tell, but sometimes it looks... startling sometimes. Maybe that's just because we're seeing the tests out in the open, who knows. Maybe we're just... [indistinct.] Only time will tell.
The shuttle saw a lot of destructive testing, but it wasn't destructive all-up testing, it was destructive component level testing. The shuttle failed a lot in testing, but is that the same as what starship's going through now?"