Elon Musk’s comments last night about a potential sixfold reduction in the cost of sending SpaceX’s largest rocket, Starship, into space will lead to a “giant leap forward” for the space industry, according to Seraphim Space Investment Trust PLC (LSE:SSIT) boss Mark Boggett.
Speaking to Proactive, Boggett said that in recent years the cost of sending a kilo of equipment into space has come down to US$1,000, from about US$80,000.
READ: Musk says cost of SpaceX rocket services to be six times cheaper
This, coupled with satellites being much smaller, in some cases small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, has led to companies like SpaceX’s Starlink arm and some of those in Seraphim’s portfolio planning to launch constellations of hundreds or even thousands of satellites into orbit.
The arrival of the huge Starship, a rocket that when stacked on top of its booster rockets is as high as the Eiffel Tower, opens the opportunity to send almost double the number of satellites than SpaceX’s current Falcon Heavy rocket in a single launch.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2022
Startship’s huge size allied to the reduced total cost of launch, means the total cost per unit carried is going to be further reduced from $1,000 per kg, which Boggett believes opens huge possibilities.
“It's not uncommon for a Falcon Heavy to take 100 satellites into orbit. You can almost right now start putting up a whole constellation with a single launch,” Boggett said.
“But if you can double that and take 200 satellites in a single launch, that could mean a company can go from zero to put in a whole constellation in orbit overnight.
“It's going to enable SpaceX to increase the pace of the rollout of Starlink and it's going to be a big enabler for other satellite operators to be able to get their constellations operational quicker than ever before.”
Accelerating the rate at which companies can establish satellites and possibly space hubs in orbit releases the bottleneck for some smaller space exploration companies, he said.
Two examples he gives from the Seraphim trust’s portfolio are AST SpaceMobile Inc (NASDAQ:ASTS), which aims to provide high speed broadband and connectivity to the planet, and D-Orbit, a space logistics company, which Boggett sees as likely to be beneficiaries.
It also opens the door to many more commercial opportunities in space, which Boggett highlights could have huge environmental benefits for the planet.
“Moving data centres into space would hugely reduce carbon pollution; creating solar farms in space to provide the world with clean energy, agriculture in space, the building out of the lunar economy, the Mars economy.
“We believe that over a number of short years, those kinds of activities are going to start being lifted off into space, where we could stop these polluting activities in our planet and use the benefits of space.”