SpaceX has raised $507 million, bringing the company's valuation to about $25 billion. That makes SpaceX the third most valuable venture-backed startup behind Uber and Airbnb, and also raises Elon Musk's worth by $1.4 billion to about $21.3 billion. SpaceX will launch NASA's TESS spacecraft on Monday, and plans to launch Bangabandhu-1 on May 5 using the Block 5 version of Falcon 9.
While SpaceX is planning to launch a record 30 missions in 2018, and possibly 50 missions in upcoming years, SpaceX expects the bulk of its future revenue to come from its upcoming Starlink satellite internet service. Internal documents show an estimate of $30 billion in revenue from Starlink and $5 billion from launches by 2025.
SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell has said that the company's BFR could be used for 100-person city-to-city flights within a decade:
A lot can (and probably will) change in a decade. But the idea is that a very large rocket, capable of carrying about 100 people, could fly like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on Earth much faster than a plane — halfway across the globe in about 30 to 40 minutes, Shotwell said, landing on a pad five to 10 kilometers outside of a city center. Shotwell estimated the ticket cost would be somewhere between economy and business class on a plane — so, likely in the thousands of dollars for transoceanic travel. "But you do it in an hour."
"I'm personally invested in this one," she said, "because I travel a lot, and I do not love to travel. And I would love to get to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner."
How could travel by rocket cost so little? Shotwell said the efficiency would come from being fast enough to be able to operate a route a dozen or so times a day, whereas a long-haul airplane often only does one flight per day.
She also said that the company could enable a manned mission to Mars within a decade. Boeing's CEO is also "hopeful" that humans will set foot on Mars within a decade.
Finally, Elon Musk has showed off an image of the main body tool/manufacturing mold for the BFR. BFR has a height of 106 meters and diameter of 9 meters, compared to a height of 70 meters and diameter of 3.7 meters for Falcon 9.
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The Mayor of Los Angeles has announced that SpaceX will begin production of the BFR at the port of Los Angeles:
SpaceX can start building its "Big Fucking Rocket," now that it has officially found a home in LA. Mayor Eric Garcetti has announced on Twitter that the private space giant "will start production development of the Big Falcon Rocket (the spacecraft's tamer name, apparently)" at the port of Los Angeles. SpaceX designed the 348-foot-long behemoth to fly humanity to the moon, Mars and beyond. It will be able to carry up to [150] tons in payload, whereas Falcon Heavy can only carry [63.8] tons. "This vehicle holds the promise of taking humanity deeper into the cosmos than ever before," he added, along with an illustration of the company's massive interplanetary spacecraft.
The massive cylindrical body of the BFR's fabrication mold has been photographed at a tent at the Port of San Pedro (compare to this earlier photo of the main body tool):
Finally, it's worth noting just how shockingly busy the BFR tent was on both April 13th and 14th, as well as the 8th (the first day Pauline visited the facility). With upwards of 40 cars parked at the tent, it's blindingly clear that SpaceX is not simply using the tent as a temporary storage location – alongside the arrival of composite fabrication materials (prepreg sheets, epoxy, etc) from Airtech International, SpaceX undeniably intends to begin initial fabrication of the first BFR prototypes in this tent, although they will likely eventually move the activities to the Berth 240 Mars rocket factory. That's certainly not a sentence I ever expected to write, but it is what it is.
The BFR's height may be elongated from its planned total of 106 meters.
Related: SpaceX to Launch Five Times in April, Test BFR by 2019
SpaceX BFR vs. ULA Vulcan Showdown in the 2020s
SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More
Update: SpaceX: All systems and weather are go for Falcon 9's launch of @NASA_TESS today at 6:51 p.m. EDT, or 22:51 UTC. http://spacex.com/webcast
Update 2: SpaceX's live coverage starts at 6:36 PM EDT (22:36 UTC).
Update 3: TESS successfully separated from Falcon 9 and was deployed into a highly elliptical orbit.
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is set to launch on April 16 at 6:32 PM ET (22:32 UTC) aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The spacecraft was developed by MIT with seed funding in Google back in 2008. The spacecraft will perform an all-sky survey using four 24° × 24° wide field-of-view cameras that can image a total of 24° × 96° (2,304 square degrees) of sky every 30 minutes (the Sun and Moon are only about 0.2 deg2 to Earth-based observers).
TESS will use a unique "P/2" 2:1 lunar resonant orbit to image stars in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The survey will image 26 observation sectors of 24° × 96° each, with some overlap at the ecliptic poles. The total survey area will be about 400 times larger than the area searched by the Kepler mission.
TESS will study about 500,000 stars, including the nearest 1,000 red dwarfs, with the goal of finding at least 3,000 new transiting exoplanet candidates. The spacecraft will study F, G, K and M type stars (spanning from F5 to M5), some of which are 30-100 times brighter than stars surveyed by the Kepler spacecraft. Many of the stars will be much closer to Earth than stars surveyed by Kepler, allowing for easier confirmation and follow-up measurements of exoplanets. 30-minute full-frame exposures will be used to search for transient events such as supernovae, star flares, and gamma-ray bursts.
Each observation sector will only be viewed for 27 days (at least in the initial phase of the mission), which will limit the exoplanets seen to those with shorter orbital periods. Potentially habitable exoplanet candidates will likely be found around red dwarfs rather than Sun-like stars. However, TESS's own orbit should remain stable for decades, which could mean that its mission will be extended to allow for a greater variety of exoplanets to be found.
The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved a plan allowing SpaceX to build and operate a facility at the Port of L.A., where the Hawthorne space company will produce its next-generation BFR rockets and spacecraft.
The vote gives formal approval to a plan that got the greenlight last month from the L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners.
During a presentation to the council, L.A. City Councilman Joe Buscaino said the project could result in up to 700 new jobs.
Under the terms of the deal, SpaceX will have an initial 10-year lease with two additional 10-year extension options. The company's initial rent will be $1.38 million a year, with annual adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, but it can offset a total of $44.1 million in rent by making improvements to the Terminal Island site at Berth 240 in its first 20 years of tenancy.
Previously: SpaceX to Begin BFR Production at the Port of Los Angeles
Related: SpaceX to Launch Five Times in April, Test BFR by 2019
SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More
SpaceX's Starlink satellites may use unique solar array deployment mechanism
Spotted on an official SpaceX T-shirt commemorating Starlink's first two prototype satellites and corroborated through analysis of limited public photos of the spacecraft, SpaceX appears to be testing a relatively unique style of solar arrays on the first two satellites launched into orbit, known as Tintin A (Alice) and B (Bob).
It's difficult to judge anything concrete from the nature of what may be immature prototypes, but SpaceX's decision to take a major step away from its own style of solar expertise – Cargo Dragon's traditional rigid panel arrays – is almost certainly motivated by a need to push beyond the current state of the art of satellite design and production.
Unlike any discernible solar panel deployment mechanism with a flight history, SpaceX's Starlink engineers seem to have taken a style of deployment used successfully on the International Space Station and mixed it with a modern style of solar arrays, relying on several flexible panels that can be efficiently packed together and designed to be extremely lightweight. While a major departure from SpaceX's successful Cargo Dragon solar arrays, the mechanisms visible on the Tintins seem to have the potential to improve upon the packing efficiency, ease of manufacturing, and number of failure modes present on Dragon's panels.
[...] To give an idea of where the industry currently stands, satellite internet provider Viasat launched its own Viasat-2 spacecraft in 2017. Weighing in around 6500 kg (14300 lb), the immense satellite cost at least $600 million and offers an instantaneous bandwidth of 300 gigabits per second, impressive but also gobsmackingly expensive at $2 million/Gbps. To ever hope to make Starlink a reality, SpaceX will need to beat that value by at least a factor of 5-10, producing Starlink satellites for no more than $1-3 million apiece ($4.5B-$13.5B alone to manufacture the initial 4,425 satellite constellation) with a bandwidth of 20 Gbps – baselined in official statements.
"Starlink is a satellite constellation development project underway by SpaceX, to develop a low-cost, high-performance satellite bus and requisite customer ground transceivers to implement a new space-based Internet communication system. By 2017, SpaceX had submitted regulatory filings to launch a total of nearly 12,000 satellites to orbit by the mid-2020s."
Previously: SpaceX Deploys Broadband Test Satellites, Fails to Catch Entire Fairing
SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More
Elon Musk went on firing spree over slow satellite broadband progress
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently "fired at least seven" managers in order to speed up development and testing of satellites that could provide broadband around the world, Reuters reported today.
SpaceX denied parts of the story, saying that some of those managers left of their own accord and that the firings happened over a longer period of time than Reuters claimed.
[...] Among the fired employees were SpaceX VP of Satellites Rajeev Badyal and top designer Mark Krebs, Reuters wrote. "Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites," Reuters quoted one of its sources as saying. "Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner."
Reuters described a culture clash between Musk and employees hired from Microsoft, "where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk's famously short deadlines." Badyal is a former Microsoft employee, while Krebs previously worked for Google."
Apparently, the test satellites work:
"We're using the Tintins to explore that modification," one of the SpaceX employee sources said. "They're happy and healthy and we're talking with them every time they pass a ground station, dozens of times a day."
SpaceX engineers have used the two test satellites to play online video games at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California and the Redmond office, the source said. "We were streaming 4k YouTube and playing 'Counter-Strike: Global Offensive' from Hawthorne to Redmond in the first week," the person added.
Also at SpaceNews and TechCrunch.
Related: SpaceX Deploys Broadband Test Satellites, Fails to Catch Entire Fairing
FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More
SpaceX Starlink Satellite Prototypes Include Packed, Flexible Solar Arrays
SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX has asked the International Telecommunication Union to arrange spectrum for 30,000 additional Starlink satellites. SpaceX, which is already planning the world's largest low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation by far, filed paperwork in recent weeks for up to 30,000 additional Starlink satellites on top of the 12,000 already approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
The FCC, on SpaceX's behalf, submitted 20 filings to the ITU for 1,500 satellites apiece in various low Earth orbits, an ITU official confirmed Oct. 15 to SpaceNews.
[...] In its filings, SpaceX said the additional 30,000 satellites would operate in low Earth orbit at altitudes ranging from 328 kilometers to 580 kilometers.
[...] It is not guaranteed that, by submitting numerous filings, SpaceX will build and launch 30,000 more satellites. Tim Farrar, a telecom analyst critical of SpaceX, tweeted that he was doubtful the ITU will be able to review such big filings in a timely manner. He sees the 20 separate filings as a SpaceX effort to "drown the ITU in studies" while proceeding with its constellation.
Nothing a Starship can't launch.
More coverage:
Previously: FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services
SpaceX Seeks Approval for 1 Million Starlink Ground Stations, Faces Pentagon Audit
FCC Approves SpaceX Lowering Orbit of Internet SatellitesRelated: SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More
SpaceX Starlink Satellite Prototypes Include Packed, Flexible Solar Arrays
SpaceX to Launch 60 Starlink Satellites at Once, and More
SpaceX Satellites Pose New Headache for Astronomers
Most of SpaceX's Starlink Internet Satellites are Already on Track
Three of SpaceX's Starlink Satellites have Failed
Near Collision Between ESA and SpaceX Satellite
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday April 13 2018, @09:18AM (16 children)
So I'm curious... how much fuel does one of a hundred passengers in a BFR use for a transoceanic flight, compared to the same flight in economy class in a conventional large passenger jet? My gut says the rocket will burn a lot more fuel, but there might be more to it than simply comparing the quantities.
Whereabouts in the atmosphere does the exhaust from the rocket end up? I guess it would be mostly at ground level. I know jet travel is disproportionately bad for the environment because it tends to drop its emissions right up in the atmosphere where it does the most damage. What kind of emissions can we expect at and around the launch site? Would it be bad for human health?
What about noise pollution? Would a hundred-metre firework taking off 5-10km from the city every hour be a nuisance? From how far away can a launch be heard?
Also: Even if this could theoretically be as cheap as a business class ticket, expect it to cost a hell of a lot more nonetheless. Prices are not set according to how much a service costs to operate, but according to what the market will bear. We know what people are willing to pay for long haul flights, and you can bet plenty of people would be wiling to pay a lot more to complete the trip in an hour. For businesses it would easily be worth paying extra for their important salespeople and executives to spend more time in meetings and less time in flight.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 13 2018, @09:36AM (7 children)
As a landing on Mars is a one-way trip for a human, I wouldn't bet on a high demand for such a trip, unless enough support to establish a colony is available (in advance, if possible)
Orbit around Mars and back is gonna have some demand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday April 13 2018, @10:12AM (6 children)
What? I wan't talking talking about landing on Mars. From TFS:
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 13 2018, @10:17AM
Ah, I see. Sorry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13 2018, @11:48AM (4 children)
As we have often been instructed, once there are competitors and contracts in place, why then the price will magically come down!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday April 13 2018, @12:58PM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday April 13 2018, @02:49PM (2 children)
Especially when there's a limited number of providers. Just look at how prices for internet access and generic medicines have been plummeting lately...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13 2018, @03:36PM (1 child)
In terms of real wealth, outside of the currency manipulation games, prices have been plummeting for all kinds of good and services. Things have never been so cheap in all of human history. We are overflowing with wealth and living in a luxury that kings could only dream of. And it should be good. But it's not. Why?
Wages are also plummeting. (There is some sophistry to be had about wages being another price. But let's cut to the quick: when the working class is disorganized, it has no capability to exert control over that price, and it ends up eating its own seed corn and starving next year instead of starving this year.)
Thus, if you're in the working class, despite the fact that khallow is objectively correct, you will doubt what he says. From your point of view, he's completely out of touch and perhaps even taking out of his ass.
So, I think it's fairly obvious what we need to do. We need wages to go up. The only way for that to happen is for the working class to organize. We don't need the full-on revolution the Trotskyists are ever hoping for. The working class simply needs to become conscious of how badly it's getting screwed, and it needs to find the power at the negotiating table it's always had in numbers.
Capitalism works best with a healthy middle class. If hard work can reliably take somebody from rags, perhaps not to riches, but to a stable, middle-class life, capitalism is the best way we know to organize human industry and the advancement of the arts. (Somebody will say that this still happens today. Sure, luck can fill in some gaps, but luck is not enough.) Without a middle class, capitalism is indistinguishable from dictatorship.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 14 2018, @12:13AM
Not really. In the US for example, they've outpaced inflation. And with benefits, like company-provided health insurance, they're increasing well above the rate of inflation.
In the developed world. Even then most countries are continuing to improve. Once you get outside of the developed world, you see massive increases in various measures such as standard of living, wages, etc.
And you get that with healthy employers and healthy labor competition. No country or region really does enough for their employers, but what is done is still good enough for massive middle class creation outside of the developed world with modest shrinking (much of which actually goes in the wealthier direction) of the middle class in the developed world.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday April 13 2018, @02:47PM (4 children)
Concord had really fast flights between the US / Europe and they still went out of business. Not sure how lucrative that market segment could be. Unless their operating costs are significantly less than Concord's was.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 13 2018, @02:52PM (2 children)
As I recall Concords had a big problem getting regulatory permission to fly more than a small handful of routes - frequent sonic booms tend to create a lot of NIMBY activity.
Of course, I rather doubt that a BFR launch would generate significantly less objection - even an F9 launch is LOUD.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 13 2018, @03:12PM (1 child)
BFR would take off and land vertically from its offshore starting and ending points, and fly higher (suborbital) than Concorde. This could alleviate noise issues.
These two scraps of info need to be verified and are based off what I remember:
1. BFR for terrestrial flight could use less thrust at takeoff, so that passengers experience less acceleration and there would be less noise.
2. You only need to use the "BFS" (Big Falcon Spaceship), aka the upper stage of the full BFR rocket system, for these flights. BFS alone has 12.7 MN of thrust, compared to about 22.8 MN for the Falcon Heavy's [wikipedia.org] first stage + 2 boosters, and ~7.6-8 MN for the Falcon 9 [wikipedia.org] first stage (will increase a few percent for Block 5). BFS would actually be able to get payloads into orbit without its huge accompanying booster.
So if only the BFS is used, and it is throttled down to an extent, then it might not be so bad, especially given that it would be several kilometers offshore. That might be one of the more challenging aspects of the project: sure you have a fast 20-40 minute travel time for just about any two cities, but you have to travel offshore and back onshore using a boat, train... or Hyperloop. Throw in the usual TSA nonsense and your amazing 30 minute trip could be looking like a 3 hour trip instead. If it can compete with international flights on price, which seems optimistic, maybe it will be worth it.
If BFR doesn't make the cut for international flights, there is still hope for improvement with NASA's quiet supersonic X-plane design [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday April 14 2018, @04:37PM
1) Possibly, but reduced thrust equals reduced efficiency as you depart from the optimal flight path, and thus reduced payload. And humans actually make for a fairly dense payload. And even a throttled back launch would likely be louder than a current F9 launch, which is horrendously loud, even from miles away. Offshore launch pads certainly help with that, but limits you to cities along the coast (admittedly that probably covers a majority of the most desirable endpoints)
2) All the SpaceX videos I've seen show the suborbital flights still using the booster, so I question your assertion that it wouldn't be needed. Also, the last claims I saw of the BFR Spaceship making it to orbit on it's own were from last... July I think, when they were still discussing the original design - the scaled-down version wasn't announced until around November. Even if the claims still hold, you'd be talking a drastically reduced payload. After all it's not just the thrust that matters, there's also all the extra mass of the larger ship in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Friday April 13 2018, @09:44PM
The route they built Concorde for was London to LA. They never got permission for supersonic flight over the USA.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 13 2018, @03:25PM
It could have less of an environmental impact than the equivalent jet flight, although it doesn't take into account the upper atmosphere effect you mentioned:
https://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk-suggested-that-the-SpaceX-BFR-could-be-used-for-30-minute-flights-to-the-other-side-of-the-world-at-the-price-of-an-economy-flight-What-would-be-the-carbon-footprint-per-passenger-equivalent-and-how-would-it-compare-to-jet-travel [quora.com]
Here's some more discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2tu78a/has_spacex_made_mention_of_the_environmental/ [reddit.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday April 13 2018, @06:03PM (1 child)
Slightly bigger effect than planes:
http://fortune.com/2018/03/26/elon-musk-spacex-falcon-9-ionosphere-hole/ [fortune.com]
And .. the whole thing is BS. The math doesn't work for a launch of 100 people at business class prices. (a few k$ each). Even at first-class prices ($10k to $20k).
The consumables and the logistics, plus amortizing the price of the rocket, the range, the safety ... Doesn't work.
It's a PR dream stunt.
As others have pointed out, going from a city to a safe launch area, and back after landing, will negate the time benefits, leaving only thrill seekers who want to one-up Virgin Galactic, and can afford a good 6 figures.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Immerman on Saturday April 14 2018, @05:00PM
The BFR is being designed to be fly 100s, eventually many thousands of flights, with only occasional maintenance, amortizing to very little per flight.
- Fuel is something like $1-200,000 to get a full payload to orbit, so probably only a fraction of that for suborbital (so well under $1000/seat)
- Even today logistics is only a small fraction of launch costs - and as they become more routine that will fall considerably - there's unlikely to be a need for even as much ground support as your average airline flight.
- Safety is unlikely to be an issue by the time consumer passenger lines are seriously considered. Besides which the BFR is designed with far more redundancy than the F9 - the BFS will be capable of landing with only one atmospheric engine working, and quite possibly limping in on only the vacuum engines in the unlikely event that both atmospheric engines malfunction.
- I don't know what your issue with range might be - once you go suborbital pretty much the entire planet is in range, so???
I'm dubious that they'll be able to reach economy flight prices any time soon, but could easily see them being competitive with first class tickets, especially on flights halfway around the world, where an airplane would generally have to land, refuel, and pay other airport service fees at least once. And even at twice that price there's probably plenty of customers to whom it's still pocket change who would be quite happy to pay the premium for the convenience and novelty. Doesn't even need to be as safe as a typical airliner really, just so long as it's as safe as driving to the launch site.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13 2018, @06:42PM
Most of those being multi-billion-dollar spy satellites spying on the innocent and helpless in order to enslave them more, all under khazar jewish directions. And still more satellites to control and harm them with radiations.
No wonder mil industry makes so much money, while people starve in a world of plenty.
Eliminating poverty has the inconvenient side-effect of making people free. Therefore the system under khazar jewish direction makes them poorer. This is not fair. Filthy Khazars and their phallus-worshiping religion.