Starship Test Flight 5 "Worries" The IAC

The IAC; the International Astronautical Congress, the organization that held their annual meeting in Milan last week, that big professional organization expressed worries after Test Flight 5?  The mission that has gotten tons of pundits talking about what an incredible accomplishment it was - including a big group of pundits that aren't space reporters and don't follow everything going on - has gotten the IAC worried?  That's the headline at SpaceNews: "Latest Starship flight prompts praise and worries at IAC" and it caught my eye. 

SpaceX themselves kept a low key at the IAC. They didn't have a booth at the show, and didn't put on any big presentations. They let the test flight speak for itself. Along with some other big names that also spoke for it.

“Just yesterday, SpaceX has a very successful fifth launch as they develop this very large rocket,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during an Oct. 14 plenary session that features the heads of several space agencies. “This was another one of the steps in the iteration of developing that.”

He added at a press conference the next day that work on the HLS version of Starship was on schedule. “I think you saw as a result of Sunday’s test of SpaceX and its big rocket that they are moving along very well, and that will determine ultimately the timing for the landing of Artemis 3 on the moon,” he said. “As of Sunday’s test, it was right on the mark.”

“They are right on making the benchmarks as they are planning to land in late ’26,” he said of SpaceX later in the briefing.

The worries end up being nothing negative about the test flight itself. The worries are that SpaceX is so far ahead of the rest of the industry that they can't catch up. Things like last night's post about them getting 100% of new contracts might become more common. 

“Congratulations to SpaceX, what an incredible feat of engineering! Mars, here we come,” Rocket Factory Augsburg stated in a social media post Oct 14. “At the same time, the coin has a second side: it shows and confirms that Europe has completely lost touch. Can it still catch up? No chance. At least not the way things are going at the moment.”

Rocket Factory Augsburg?  They're the company that had a static fire test of their rocket end in a RUD in August (first story in a Roundup post). They're a privately owned space company but the European Space Agency isn't that far ahead of them. They used to be one of the world's major space agencies, but seem to have lost their recipes. 

In an Oct. 15 interview, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, said he was “fascinated” by the launch from an engineering perspective. “I then have to think, what does it mean for Europe, and to see what would be the change in the landscape and the ecosystem, and what do we need to do.”

Europe, he acknowledged, cannot compete head-to-head with Starship but could instead take advantage of broader changes in the space economy enabled by Starship. “How do we position ourselves in this ecosystem that is developing now?” he said. “You can imagine that if Starship brings 100 tons into space frequently, this will change everything out there in space, how things are constructed and how space is being utilized.”

Screen grab from a video seconds before the grab. Image credit: SpaceX 

While the American "old space" industry still hasn't really come to the realization that reusability changes everything, the Chinese are getting close to reusability and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has announced a development program for a Next Generation Launch Vehicle that will provide increased payload performance over existing rockets and be based on a reusable booster. S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian space agency, estimated NGLV will take six years to develop.

“I think all of you realize that reusability is mandatory for launchers,” he said. 

Meanwhile, we have an American old space company (whose name I will omit out of too much courtesy) is figuratively saying, "we'll spit the engines out of the booster and let them fall into the ocean. Then we'll just clean 'em up and reuse 'em. They're more expensive than the rest of the booster."  This is reusability as an afterthought.