00:00Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist and space sustainability analyst, joins us now.
00:06Thank you so much for your time.
00:07You know, we have become used to rocket boosters landing these days.
00:11Also, NASA's space shuttle took off and landed multiple times in the early 2000s.
00:16So why is this Starship return to base so significant?
00:21Well, so the Falcon 9 rockets that come up and land again don't go all the way into orbit.
00:26They're going much slower.
00:28There's an upper stage that goes into orbit and doesn't come back.
00:31So this is the first time since the space shuttle that we've had something that's actually been all the way
00:36to orbit,
00:36coming back at 25,000 kilometers an hour to slow down and land.
00:43Now, yes, the space shuttle did that, but the space shuttles were $2 billion a pop.
00:48And so they never really could be reused very often.
00:52So the real challenge for SpaceX is can they repeat this feat?
00:57Can they reuse this vehicle and do it again and again and again more often than the space shuttle did?
01:04I mean, they're saying that they want hourly launches by 2030.
01:08Do you think that's really possible?
01:11I'm pretty skeptical.
01:13I think that the management is pushing the team to go as fast as it can.
01:20Hourly seems implausible to me, but daily is plausible.
01:25And that would still be a huge increase over what's been done before.
01:29You know, there are many private and government initiatives to push forward the space industry.
01:37Does this development change the competition significantly?
01:42Well, yes, the big question is, will Starship achieve its full design potential?
01:48Can they reuse it repeatedly, bring the cost of launch down, deliver large amounts of cargo to orbit?
01:58And everyone else, I'm afraid, is one or two generations of rockets behind this technology if it can be made
02:05to work.
02:06So SpaceX is really betting the company on this, and I think everyone is watching very carefully to see how
02:14this affects the future of SpaceX.
02:17They didn't manage to catch the booster.
02:20Now, that has been done before.
02:21So technically, they still have to do both on the same trip, I would imagine.
02:26But what's next?
02:28Right, so that's right.
02:29They need to sort of do this again and again, not losing boosters, not losing ships.
02:35It'll take them a few more tries, I think, before they get to a cadence where they can use it
02:40repeatedly.
02:41Then the next big test, right, is when they re-fly a ship, either this ship or a later one
02:49that's already been in orbit,
02:51because that they haven't done yet.
02:53So that's the big test.
02:54Can they reuse it multiple times?
02:57And if they can do that, then they've got a system.
03:00Thank you so much for speaking to us, Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist and space sustainability analyst.
