Grasshopper 744m Test | Single Camera (Hexacopter)

1. How fast can a satellite travel up the tether? Let's say 50km/h, and it's going to an altitude of 35,000km. That's a month just in travel time. Using the tether for that period of time would be extremely costly. Currently, around 125 satellites launch a year, so they would need to be going up the tether at 500km/h, one after the other, day and night. And if we need to wait for a platform to descend, they need to be moving at 1,000km/h. Otherwise, we need multiple space elevators, or multiple shipments climbing at once and passing one another to meet current demand. 2. What's the cost of building and maintaining a space elevator? 3. What's the cost of having a satellite climb the tether to an altitude of 35,000km? That's a lot of energy. Taking this into consideration, is it tantalizingly cheap compared to strapping on a rocket? SpaceX has run tests with a reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Cost of fuel for a launch is $200,000. I'm skeptical the space elevator would be much cheaper. The magic of SpaceX... [this video] Downside of a rocket, it's heavy, and most of the energy is wasted lifting the rocket, and not the payload. Advantage, you don't have to pay to maintain cables that are long enough to wrap around the entire Earth.

The DC-X was a tiny compared to Starship. Starship uses revolutionary new Full-Flow Staged Combustion engines that have never flown. Starship is testing a never used before method of reentry and guidence. Starship is testing a never used before method of landing. Starship is testing never used before method of heat shielding tiles and how to attach them. Starship is not just testing the ship itself, but also the mass manufacturing line for Starship. Its not a test mule, its a mass production pipeline that is being designed at the same time as the product it produces. Will likely be the first Orbital rocket to use Methlox fuel. The DC-X was a fundamental dead-end, many of its engineers went to BlueOrigin and worked on New Shepard, a sub-orbital only hopper. SpaceX Grasshopper is more comparable to the DC-X then the DC-X to Starship. [this video] That program likely cost less then $60 million.