SpaceX's Starship Moon Mission Cancellation Is A Little Suspicious
SpaceX's Starship Moon Mission Cancellation Is A Little Suspicious
Why was the mission cancelled?
One of Starship’s tantalising possibilities is bringing space travel to the masses. Or, at the very least, the wealthy masses. Because Starship is fully reusable, its price per launch could be as low as $2 million! Combine that with its utterly vast payload capacity and cavernous cargo space, and you could feasibly use Starship as an ultra-fast long-haul flight alternative that can go from New York to Sydney in less than an hour. Tickets for such a price would also cost about the same as a first-class ticket for the same journey on a jumbo jet. If your pockets go a little deeper, you could use Starship as a space hotel that orbits the Earth for several days or even private lunar missions. Well, billionaire Yusaku Maezawa realised this early on, and way back in 2018, he booked a private Starship mission to take him and his artistic friends to the Moon by 2023. As you may have noticed, such a mission didn’t occur last year, and Starship is far from ready to conduct human space flight. Well, Maezawa recently announced that he had cancelled this mission due to these delays. However, I am not convinced this is why Maezawa cancelled. Let me explain.
Maezawa’s mission was known as the dearMoon project. The idea was to take Maezawa and eight artists he invited onto the missions for free on a week-long circumlunar spaceflight around the Moon. Maezawa wanted to inspire these artists and, in turn, promote peace around the world. Initially, dearMoon was going to use a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. However, SpaceX changed course and decided not to make a human spaceflight version of the rocket. Instead, it focused on developing Starship, then known as the BFR. As such, in 2018, Maezawa booked his launch on the yet-to-fly rocket, with the expectation that by 2023, the rocket would be ready for dearMoon.
However, a few days ago, the dearMoon project announced that they had cancelled their Starship flight. The announcement read, “Unfortunately, however, launch within 2023 became unfeasible, and without clear schedule certainty in the near-term, it is with a heavy heart that Maezawa made the unavoidable decision to cancel the project.”
On the surface, this explanation makes sense. SpaceX has struggled to get Starship off the ground. It took them far longer than expected to develop and build the first full-scale rocket. The first full-scale test launch also obliterated the custom launch pad and had in-flight mishaps. As such, Starship had its launch licence revoked for a long time and has been under increasing scrutiny by authorities, dramatically slowing down progress.
With his scheduled launch date passing, surely it makes sense for Maezawa to cancel the mission?
Well, not really. As I write this, Starship is getting ready for another test flight, and SpaceX is gearing up for commercial operations within the next year or two. As such, Starship could be ready for human space flight in possibly three or four years. Why can’t dearMoom wait that long? Developing rockets for human space flight, particularly fully reusable giant ones like Starship, takes an awfully long time. Delays like this would have wholly been expected. In fact, the fact that Starship is undertaking test flights and seems incredibly close to entering commercial service shows that it will more than likely be ready for dearMoon in the not-too-distant future. Surely Maezawa can wait just a little longer for his monumental mission?
So, why cancel? And why cancel now and not back in 2021 or 2022 when it was obvious they would never be able to hit their 2023 launch date? Well, I think something else caused Maezawa to cancel. Costs.
The delays SpaceX has encountered, combined with the vast amount of self-inflicted damage to their launch pad and increased scrutiny by the FAA, have pushed the Starship’s costs way past its initial budget. Even with the original development budget, Starship’s launch costs would start at $10 million per launch and only drop to $2 million once the project was scaled and running frequent flights. But, to give you an idea of how much development costs have ballooned, SpaceX has spent over $5 billion on Starship so far, spending $2 billion on it in 2023 alone! Musk’s initial estimate for the development cost of Starship is around $5 billion. As it stands, Starship development will likely cost well over $10 billion before it is ready for human space flight.
I suspect that Maezawa booked his Starship tickets expecting to pay that $10 million price tag in mind. But during 2023, after failed test launches and dramatic redesigns, it became apparent just how much more expensive Starship development would be and, therefore, how much more costly Starship flights would be. It takes time to calculate potential launch costs, so it is feasible that Maezawa was only recently informed about how much his little Moon mission would actually cost. I think this is why he cancelled, as he either can’t afford, or is unwilling to pay that amount. However, being a billionaire and a friend of Musk, he didn’t want to tell the world this, and so made the delay excuse up.
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Sources: Space.com, dearMoon, dearMoon, Reuters, CNBC, NASDAQ