I’m not convinced anymore that we can handle freedom. Many children grow up glued to a phone or tablet watching AI videos and are targets of dis-information from foreign and/or hostile actors.
If "dis-information" is the core of the issue, then perhaps we ought to start banning religions?
Despite doing that, China is a champion of spreading "dis-information" within their own walls.
Hostile actors are not foreign, most often they are domestic. The biggest offenders are governments. Only freedom opposes their power, which is why they want to restrict it.
The people who want unchecked pursuit of profit simply beat you to the punch by manipulating the social zeitgeist to accept that the unchecked pursuit of profit is the very definition of freedom.
It is a cynical view of humanity, but one that seems most correct.
If for example there is a deadly virus going around people will quickly restrict freedoms to prevent its spread. And even in the case they don't people that believe in freedom over precautions are evolutionary culled.
So what happens when the issue is actually infohazards? One of the common assumptions the freedom group makes is with all the information they have, anyone else would come to the same set of decisions they have. Of course I see two problems with this.
1. The freedom group is quite often hypocritical. That is, freedom is defined however they think, and anything outside of how they thing is "Not true freedom™". Elon Musk is a common source of this kind of freedom.
2. The individuals personal definition of freedom is anecdotal (We'll call this set A). Set A individual thinks by telling another individual with set B ideas on freedom that set A will win somehow? (A + B = A). That when you put ideas out there, by some magic process the best ideas win and take over and everything is happily ever after.
Of course where number 2 commonly fails is if an infohazard is more addictive than actual knowledge, and where the inoculation to said addiction takes a long time to reach herd immunity. And example would be that it's faster to destroy a nation due to ragebait faster than open democracy can adjust, hence democracy always fails in these conditions. Nice catch-22 situation.
SpaceX already launches multiple times per month just to maintain Starlink. That will be much cheaper with Starship while enabling larger and more capable satellites. In fact, it's likely that one of the reasons SpaceX built Starlink is to create their own customer (and spur competitors) to plausibly use a significant fraction of Starship's capabilities. None existed at the time.
In the near term the biggest reason to do multiple launches in a day will be orbital refueling. This is required for sending much, much larger payloads to the Moon and Mars. It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit, and obviously doing that as quickly as possible will be beneficial. NASA has already committed to this plan for Artemis.
> It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit
Require, or just make comfortable? Saturn V had the lift capacity of "only" a couple of Falcon Heavies, but was enough to carry astronauts, a car, a lunar lander with enough fuel to take off, and a command module.
We're not trying to do Apollo again. That would be easier, but we want to build a base this time. For that we need to send a lot more mass and it needs a lot more fuel.
Is that true? SpaceX [0] gives the capacity as 150t reusable or 250t expendable, which is significant, but not enough to make one "enormous".
If you really got order-of-magnitude gains from an expendable upper stage, it wouldn't be that exciting to have reusable rockets (which are more complex and still only fly one order of magnitude more times) in the first place.
If the upper stage wasn't designed to be reusable, it'd probably have a lot less structural dry mass - no heat shield, no fins, possibly different geometry (depending on how much volume they wanted). It might also be possible to drop the sea-level Raptor engines and just use the more efficient vacuum Raptors. I don't think you'd get an order-of-magnitude difference, but it'd be significant, especially for higher-energy trajectories than LEO.
I don't understand why they don't make such an upper stage. It would allow them to refine the booster design and catch logistics while also launching payloads.
They are making an upper stage with no fins or heat shield. It's called HLS. But they don't need it just to launch payloads to orbit. Starship has such a bonkers huge payload capacity already that it's plenty for now. Nobody is asking for more yet. Testing Starship reentry is super important too, so it makes sense to do it on every launch until it's perfected.
My guess would be that it would take too much extra design work. Making the current upper stage reusable is necessary for the HLS contract anyways, and they've got a lot of work to do already on refining the heat shield & fin protection, enabling landing, and working on propellant transfer.
Also because of the Lunar Gateway part of the plan. That pretty much just serves to waste fuel and funnel taxpayer money to the companies funding several congressmembers' election campaigns.
The HLS (Spaceship) will need many refuels at orbit in order to get to the Moon and back. That means at least a dozen of fully-loaded Heavy launches to LEO just so each one of them can load a bit of fuel into HLS. The fuel in orbit can't sit idle for too long, or it deteriorates; I haven't found a limit on days for that, but a week-long launch window is considered a dealbreaker, we're talking a dozen Heavy launches in a week.
It's either a short launch window, or at least 6 Starships built and launched twice in ~10 days. Don't count out on SpaceX building 12 Heavy Starships just for that Artemis mission.
200 years ago, there was no need to use electricity. 100 years ago, there was no need to use a programming language. 30 years ago, there was no need for gigabit wireless Internet.
Counterexample: space stations. We've had small manned space stations for decades now, but no real application for them. They're national prestige items only.
And most importantly for anyone who cares about space the way Elon claims to: The ISS has done pretty much all the research we have on how humans survive in space.
We have the means to build pyramids or moa statues (Easter Island-style) much more quickly and efficiently that the ancients did, but we don't feel the need anymore.
If we want to establish long term bases on the Moon or Mars then yes, you need not only to send crew and habitation modules but ongoing supplies and equipment.
Other use cases include launching and maintaining satellite constellations (Starling / Starshield), and launching singular large payloads like space telescopes.
Even for smaller payloads, having both the first and second stages be reusable will reduce launch costs.
Thought most products with batteries undergo a standard set of test procedures to catch these things. It’s a known risk, increased significantly with toasty wireless charging involved.
