![]() In 1880, The Pall Mall Gazette described Verne’s Columbiad as a "space-ship" - the first recorded use of this term. In the 1865 Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon, successful attempts are made to launch three people in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. Reusable launch systems are currently being developed by private industry.Įarly spacecraft or space vehicles were sometimes hyped as " spaceships", a term which comes from science fiction to designate a hypothetical vehicle which travels beyond low Earth orbit and is 100% reusable, needing only to be refueled like an airplane. An early exception to this, the Space Shuttle, consisted of a reusable orbital vehicle carrying crew and payload, supported by an expendable external propellant tank and two reusable solid-fuel booster rockets. The earliest space vehicles were expendable launch systems, using a single or multistage rocket to carry a relatively small spacecraft in proportion to the total vehicle size and mass. ![]() Ī space vehicle is the combination of a spacecraft and its launch vehicle which carries it into space. ![]() But that strategy carries risks: If the economy slips into a prolonged recession, Quilty warns, "they could find themselves out of cash and out of runway.Apollo/ Saturn V, the largest and heaviest space vehicle brought into operational status as of May 2022. "SpaceX is probably betting that market conditions will be better next year," he says. Given the troubles in the tech sector, it makes sense that SpaceX would try and stretch its existing cash for now. "We do not anticipate needing to raise funding," he said in response to a question from Reuters.īut Starship will take multiple years to bring to market, and it likely will need additional money, says analyst Chris Quilty. SpaceX did not respond to NPR's request for comment about how it's planning to finance Starship, but Elon Musk told listeners at his briefing that, for now, the company's existing investments and government contracts should be enough to keep the program going. "I think we're seeing the market start to adapt." Already, he says, some startups are planning giant satellites and other projects that would require Starship's huge cargo bay. "I think it'll take some time," he says, but he believes companies will find ways to use Starship's enormous launch capacity. If Starship can work, it will allow SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites cheaply, and will likely enable many more companies to develop new space business models, says Brendan Rosseau, a research associate at Harvard Business School who tracks space. "Who is Starship going to serve? I think that's a question," she says. And investors have been lining up to plow money into its bold vision and big projects. It's valued at close to $140 billion, making it one of the biggest private companies in the country. That would be a problem for most space launch companies, but SpaceX is different. ![]() "Until Starship is flying and the development costs are down and it's generating revenue instead of consuming cash, and until they start getting new Starlink satellites on orbit, I think it'll be a challenge for them," he says. But Quilty and other analysts believe Starship and Starlink will keep the company in the red for a while. SpaceX makes money launching commercial and government satellites on its existing rockets, and it's starting to generate income from Starlink. "It's hard to imagine how they could be generating cash with those level investments," says Chris Quilty, the founder of Quilty Space, a company that tracks the space industry. Space SpaceX's massive rocket Starship explodes 4 minutes after liftoff
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