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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space! SpaceX President Gwen Shotwell said this week that she wouldn’t be surprised if the company launched Starship 400 times over the next four years. What do you think? How realistic are these numbers, on a scale of “almost certain” to “not a chance in hell”? I believe SpaceX has the industry know-how to make this happen. But I can’t help but wonder whether regulators and the rest of the industry are prepared — regulators, to handle that volume and keep up, and industry, to fill all those spaceships with useful mass.
But hey, with the online government competency department, anything is possible.
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Speaking of Starship, I’ve written a little explanation of the craft’s history and development, with the intended reader being your family member who doesn’t really get WTF, which is the big deal about it. For the die-hard space enthusiasts, there’s probably not much you don’t already know…but keep the link as a bookmark to easily send to all the spacecraft skeptics in your life.
As the saying goes: “Space is hard.” This difficulty was clearly demonstrated with ABL Space Systems’ announcement that it would switch from commercial launch to missile defense. There is certainly a huge appetite within the Department of Defense for this technology – within the department Budget for fiscal year 2025 ABL has committed $13.5 billion to missile defense programs — but we’ll have to wait and see to know exactly how ABL plans to use existing intellectual property for this new purpose.
This week we celebrate the Apollo 12 crew, which landed on the Moon on November 19, 1969. Astronauts Charles Conrad Jr. and Alan Bean spent about 31 hours on the Moon while the third person on the crew, Richard Gordon, remained in lunar orbit. One of the mission’s most significant accomplishments was a precision landing: the Intrepid spacecraft touched down just 535 feet from the Surveyor 3 probe.
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