I've been sitting on episode 2 in the space series for a while, but with the recent spate of tests and firsts I thought now was the time to go ahead with this one (ep 1 on ASAT here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--xl0C6K2Nug.html). A few notes on this one beyond the obvious caveats, and they relate to questions of development and 'failing fast' - Fast or affordable development for something is always going to be a relative statement. It's entirely possible for a project to be behind its stated goals and yet ahead of the rest of the industry - I think some of the systems in this video might fit squarely in that category - Failing fast is also relative - and it's important to draw the distinction between wasteful and efficient when it comes to taking testing risks - Rockets are a capital intensive, risky business - and trends can flip quickly (as the data presented shows on some of the major players out there), so keep in mind the level of uncertainty here - No, none of this is financial advice Perhaps I'm desensitised somewhat from working with projects for military equipment (which, you might say have the occasional tendency to experience delays, cancellations and failures) and consequently took those risks as given in this episode. They shouldn't be forgotten. Starship, Long March 9 and other future projects are not a reality until they work - so keep in mind both the implications of success and possibility of failure. I also want to note I do sometimes use the term Starship interchangeably to mean either the second stage or combined first and second stage of the Starship + super heavy combo. Thank you all for watching this slightly different episode, and we'll be back to the world of dedicated defence and defence economics matters next week.
I think SX stumbled into satellites only by chance. The goal was and is to give humanity a 2nd leg on Mars and somehow other companies wanting cargo capacity into LEO/etc buying flights would pay for the dev to get ships for and to Mars. And then One Web appeared and Elon must have done a quick calc and figured that he can beat them to their goal (creating a smallish constellation) and creating the income stream that will finance Mars.
Yeah, it's nice to go through this multiple times with the same person, I was originally following Perun for his Dominions content before he started posting about defense economics, I remember holding my breath as I clicked play on his first Ukraine video fully expecting to have to unsubscribe from yet another entertainment content creator for subjecting me to a moronic take on geopolitical matters they didn't even begin to understand, but then being pleasantly surprised.
I am a PhD candidate in Economics and when I first saw one of Perun's defense economics videos recommended to me by the algorithm in 2022 I realized quickly this guy understood economics. Then I showed my dad, who is a physician, his video about combat medicine in Ukraine and he said that it was spot on. Now I see him talking about SpaceX and once again, completely on the ball. This channel is special.
Usually when I see analysts from sectors outside space try to analyze the space sector they get a lot wrong - but not this time. Perun has pretty much nailed it perfectly from describing the cost reductions in accessing space to their implications and even explaining why sovereign autonomy will mean many different countries and companies will continue to increase their involvement. Great work Perun!
@@namenloss730 Which figures are you referencing? The weight figures? The prices that are public? I think the opposite, he has not nearly shown the game changer that is starshield. It allows to do the whole ISTAR, targeting, guidance and BDA loop for all air and navel targets and arguably even land targets. And do it 24/7 in real time with no real horizon.
@@namenloss730 agreed, healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely necessary when looking at prelim figures for _anything_ but *especially* products from you-know-who
I laughed so hard when putin threatened to shoot down Starlink satelites and Elon just said: You are welcome to, we can put them up cheaper and faster then you can shoot them down, so go ahead, waste your rockets.
And it's even funnier that in the grander scheme of things, your typical Starlink satellite is only intended to be up there for five years before it's deorbited to be replaced with a newer, better satellite. Russia shooting them down would just accelerate that timetable by a few years, but we'll eventually be at the point where the entire Starlink constellation as it is now will have been deorbited and replaced with the larger, far more capable Starlink v2 satellites yeeted out of Starship's pez dispenser, and the cost of replacing those will be even cheaper than it is now.
Starship’s idea of “when in doubt use more -dakka- propellant”, means that it’s almost enough payload to carry as much as perun carries the whole defense and technology education sector of the internet.
Space launch times need to be reduced to point demonstrated in 1977 where passengers hire the ship & crew in a bar. While they are strapping in, the copilot fires up the ship while the pilot is shooting at the bad guys. Pilot hops aboard, hatch closes, and spacecraft launches. None of this T-24 hours stuff.
To a degree, that's never going to happen. Fueling and systems checks simply take too long, it's a commercial plane's checklist X100, and there's not much room to winnow that down with chemical rockets. What can really help first and foremost is reliability. A major reason for the countdowns is so that anyone downrange can be notified or cleared in case the rocket goes boom and debris rains down. Launch 10,000 rockets without issue, and maybe that can be forgone.
@@jeffcooper7258 If we're including Starlink ISL and the nearest ground stations for the Indian Ocean being in western Australia, probably five to six ISL links between Starship and a ground station (if the ISL linkage is dependent on orbital planes and the orbital plane used instead aligns with ground stations in Japan, then 7-8 ISL links), terrestrial internet linkage to SpaceX's video streaming setup, terrestrial internet linkage to X's video streaming servers, terrestrial internet linkage back to your Starlink point-of-presence, terrestrial linkage from there to the most ideal ground station, and then a single Starlink satellite relay between the ground station and your terminal, provided you're in an area close to a ground station. (And mine, I'm also on Starlink, in north Idaho, so I'm really kinda doing these numbers based on what I'd get as I'm only about 30 miles from the closest ground station). I used the Starlink Coverage Tracker to estimate ISL numbers and orbital plane proximity to ground stations since I don't know if the ISL links can jump between orbital planes or if it's limited to linking with other satellites on the same orbital plane.
@@syjiang At one point when it's getting close to the ground you can see how the nose dips to almost pointing straight down and the software compensates and manages to get it back into the position it's suppose to be in.
It's a tragedy when an analyst you rely on for good data and interpretation covers a field you happen to know a lot about, and you realise that they don't actually have a clue what they're talking about. THIS WAS NOT THAT TIME. :D
People say to watch Perun at 0.75 speed to absorb the material better. I just tried that and I swear it sounds like he's talking to me like I'm an idiot. "Thiiiis is hoow weee dooo waaaar, okay Billy?" 😂
@@st-ex8506 Solar Rooftiles, Tesla Semi, Tesla Roadster, Autonomous Driving comming next year every year. We can do it now, I promise. Tesla Bot, Neuralink we can do it now. I don't know. I'll aknowledge when the companies he invested in succeed but I'll doubt his promises without concern. Starship did succeed in it's last flight, but I don't want to know how much the previous three failed attempts cost them. I mean they failed to open a door the flight before, and They seem to be nearly out of fuel when reaching orbit while empty. Maybe they didn't completely fill the tanks but still, I'll believe it when I see it.
great seeing this after the insane week in spaceflight that was this last week. Chinese lunar regolith recovery, Boeing Starliner, and Starship flight test 4 with the little flap that could. Awesome to get a Perun video on the now fast paced growth of the spaceflight market.
The way you laid it all out, made me realize that what Space X has achieved so far is a lot more impressive than I thought it was. I hope they 10x that in the future, wonder what that would look like.
Reducing the projected unit-mass-cost of Starship by a factor of 10 would look like "Mars is the current hot vacation destination for rich people". Reduce it by another factor of 10 and it's "Robotic asteroid mining has become competitive with traditional ore extraction and smelting methods".
What spaceX achieved is beyond extreme impressive... ...issue is that Musk is a liability. As in he could face jailtime for fraud. As such the real question is "will the powers that be care to salvage spaceX after the inevitable catches up with musk?"
@@GrahamCStrouse it already has. if you look at the price per KG on the space shuttle VS a falcon 9. its already 25x cheaper on the falcon 9. (2600$ per KG on falcon 9 to 65,000$ per KG on the space shuttle). really only needs a 4x price decrease for anders to be right with what hes saying.
While the "new space" procurement method of "get payload to ISS" is an important factor, I also don't think one can overstate the importance of workforce competence and dedication, giving the best and brightest minds an inspirational goal and an environment free of bs and red tape. I've talked to so many SpaceXers who basically said something along the lines of "I worked for ten years at and we never launched anything, here I was designing parts that went into orbit in my first month. I will never go work anywhere else."
@@7secularsermons Elon Musk was involved in the _design_ (style, requirements etc ...) of the Model S not at all in the engineering. *Please stop calling him an engineer.* He has never worked as an engineer and has no engineering skills or experience. *He* called himself an engineer (alot) and a founder of Tesla (he wasn't) while he was a promoter, fund raiser and manager. Please learn about him _outside of his own (self) promotional materials_
@@7secularsermons I think that at this point Elon, personally, can be a factor in either direction. The culture he built, though, of constant iteration and real testing in order to enable rapid improvement, is what counts IMHO.
@@squireson he is an engineer many former and current spacex and tesla engineers attest to it, that you have a problem with his politics and want to discredit him for that is irrelevant.
Well, Rocket Labs is just next door and they are bringing out a mostly reusable rocket named Neutron which in my view is the best spaceship design out there - particularly if what you care about is rapid, cost effective reuse. Lots of Oz engineers work for them.
@@VikingKong. True, but he did mention orbital weapons which GDI did have from Tiberian Sun (drop pods) and C&C 3 had GDI using orbital bombardment artillery. Shockwave EMP shells anyone?
@@rhedosaurus2251 to be fair. the americans in C&C generals also had a orbital weapon..sort of. that being the particle uplink cannon. wich uses a massive space mirror to blast a lazer fired from the ground at the enemy.
One of my favorite RU-vid analysts doing a deep dive on my favorite company is a real weekend treat. Regarding the weight trade-offs of steel vs carbon composites. It's true that carbon composite is stronger than steel for a given weight, under normal circumstances. But these are not normal circumstances. SpaceX uses something they call "deep cryo methalox". This means unlike others who chill their propellants to just below their boiling point, SpaceX chills theirs all they way down to just above the freezing point. They do this because colder propellant is denser and therefore they can pump more of it in the tank. The ship's hull needs to handle anything from those extremely low temperatures (minus 218°C for liquid oxygen) all the way up to the inferno of reentry (there's a heat shield, yes, but I'm guessing the amount of heat that still gets through is significant). SpaceX did their homework and found out that across this range of temperatures, stainless steel actually has better strength to weight performance than carbon composites. So much better in fact, that using steel leads to weight savings. Partly because they get to use less material, and partly because they get away with using a less substantial heat shield.
Yeah, I recently watched an interview with Elon where he also mentioned that using stainless steel also makes it easier to keep the propellants pressurized without using an extra gas (e.g. helium). Deleting that entire system also reduces the overall weight of the rocket.
There's a chance that they capture the first stage for reuse on the next flight. That will be pretty impressive. Apparently Starship touched down at almost zero speed which would make it catchable. The issue is likely whether they have adequate control over location. Grabbing Starship with a couple of arms makes for a smaller target than landing on a barge.
@@bobwallace9753 Small correction, it's the booster that will be the thing they try to catch. Catching starship comes later as it's landing profile is much more complex and will require more practice flights to get to a point where it can precisely target a small point.
lol how condescending are some of these critical comments. "Perun, if only you listened to my favourite RU-vidr that knows nothing about spaceflight, then you'd know the truth about SpaceX!"
LOL. Perun nailed the military, commercial, and science (including exploration) impacts of increased launch capabilities and laid out the big picture beautifully.
SpaceX wasn't having failures with those crashes of Starship. They were making incremental progress. Everyone knew that they were likely to end in fire before the launches. But they were able to speed up production while at the same time testing new system. Every launch has been a success whether it be an advance or just getting an already out dated version off the pad and out of the way.
There are very well founded arguments that ground testing was insufficient, qnd significant test goals were missed on the first three launches, with the first onw being grossly negligent and incredibly dangerous. Their progress so far is comperable to, but slower than that on Saturn V.
38:29 what makes this even funnier is that Europe's launch capability shortage got so bad they recently had to launch some of their aforementioned Galileo GNSS satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9, because the Ariane 6 was coming along so well.
I actually think that was an overreaction because Europe has used ULA before and NASA has used arriane space for the James Webb so there's always been mutual Sharing of payloads
@@TheMagicJIZZ These are companies, Arianespace, ULA, and SpaceX. Anyone can pay them to deliver payload to orbit. Of course there are some limitations and launch platform and host country must agree for launches these companies do. In other words, it's a market.
What is interesting is that 5 years ago Elon Musk was doing a publicity tour in Europe and told a British interviewer then that the proposed Ariane 6 would not be able to compete with Falcon, so he didn't understand why they were going ahead with the design. I have yet to see any sign that Arianespace is even testing a reusable rocket. This is a good example of why private enterprise - usually small up-and-coming companies - will always be the ones to innovate. For the established, government funded players, there's no upside to risk. They have guaranteed jobs, a guaranteed customer, and lots of political downside for making mistakes. All their incentives point away from experimentation and risk.
@@StereoSpace While your theory is sound, there are alternatives. For example China can use sort of vertical integration, because the economy there is different. Government funds it but they have similar control over it that Soviets did. Bit different though, as Soviets had competing design commissions, but you get the point. We don't fully know how China handles their program, but basically they also have customers already, themselves as the government. Maximum profit or marker share is not the goal here, the capabilities are, so different things can be optimized than payload cost. So while countries and economies have these differences, their goals are different too. It doesn't mean that it necessarily kills innovation if government funds it or not. How much contractor hands are tied matters more, and let's not forget that SpaceX has reached this position they now have thanks to public funding and private investment both.
As he (basically) said in his video on the Japanese defense industry, if it's happening in Japan then Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is doing a major part of it.
Giant conglomerates basically control the Japanese economy. It's a huge part of why Japan has declined so much. It's hugely inefficient and there's just no competition. Not to mention the political control they have too...
Whenever someone is confused as to why at least one of the megacorps in every scifi setting is invariably Japanese, I say it's because the writer was too afraid to actually put Mitsubishi in the setting.
I think the implications of the new space race are that many Isaac Arthur videos will soon be categorized under "current events" instead of "futurism".
3:25 "no matter how slow your modern internet connection is, it's probably got a speed advantage over space mail" Being a university student in Australia, I did an IT essay discussing how putting SD cards in a homing pigeon has greater bandwidth than ADSL
Can I just point out what a mind blowing feat of human optimism it was that we were confident that we could shoot a roll of photography tape in a container from a satellite to Earth and recover it to use the photos.
@@ZontarDowimagine thinking that the only innovative space launch provider which is responsible for putting up more mass to orbit per year than everyone else on the Earth combined for a fraction of the cost of the competition can't accomplish anything. 🤡🤡🤡 you wanna hate on Elon? Go for it, plenty to hate him for. But thinking that SpaceX can't accomplish things is some serious alternate reality shit.
@@ZontarDow lol they are doing over 100 launches a year. China does 6% of Earth to Orbit Tonnage, the rest of the world 4%. Space X alone accounts for 90% per year, this number will only increase when the starship becomes operation which is very likely to by sometime next year.
@@harshpandey3907 "Likely by sometime next year"? Musk himself has set it being operational in 2029, with SpaceX needing another 9 billion in capital from outside sources to cover the development costs above what NASA's contracts have given them to do it. And Musk is insanely optimistic beyond what is realistic when it comes to timelines. Starship entering service in the next 5 years is 0% likely, even if we presuppose the unrealistic idea that it ever will enter service.
One thing worth noting is that probably the biggest change since the shuttle has been that the cost-plus paradigm is mostly over, and contractors are expected to bid what they can realistically deliver at the price they bid. But much of the development cost, while more efficiently applied, is still shouldered by the respective governments. SpaceX absolutely would have failed before it had a single successful launch if the government hadn't taken a risk on them.
But it did succeed to the point, where it can deliver triple the launch capacity at only 30% higher cost of Soyuz, which was the unquestionable standard beforehand. And less than half the launch cost is a very significant development to the exonomy of putting stuff into space. Significant enough it might be worth looking at industrializing space to mine Trojans for precious metals again. And once that happens, the world as we know it is over, and a century later we will have as many humans off earth as we have on it.
One more thing with the advantage SpaceX has: the barriers to entry are so big in this field - it's literally rocket science. It's not just programming a new app, but engineering a rocket, getting all the government permissions and then building the goddamn thing
A few weeks ago I posted a few comments talkijg about how much your presentations have improved over the past few years. In that comment I attempted to identify how you improved in specific terms. After looking back at the older videos I realized that I had misidentified the specifics of how you had improved. As far as I can tell, you use the same transitions, the same style, and the same types of imagery, your presentations are largely the same in their base elements. I cannot tell the specifics, but you use all of those elements to a much greater effect in these newer presentations than it feels like you did in your older ones. And yes, your audio quality has also improved greatly since the start. That's all I had to say, love the presentations and I hope you feel better!
"it when to Kerbal space program of rocket design, when in doubt just add more booster" ... I died laughing. My man your video game references are peak comedy.
"There's a broader obsevation to make here... that fear of failure or perceived failure can get in the way of exploiting failure as a tool to achieve success." Well said. I really appreciate this way of looking at it, it's often difficult to succinctly explain the benefits of SpaceX's approach to testing to someone who is unfamiliar with how it works and only knows how NASA or other conventional space organisations have worked, often with the bonus of disliking the program only because of Musk being involved, whether he does significant work there or not. Space is a rapidly evolving frontier nowadays and while I wish it was in better geopolitical circumstances, I hope that it will make for many long years of fascinating analyses yet to come.
SpaceX didint pointlessly lose falcons to engine ignition failiours, launchpad integrity failiours, attitude control system failiours etc. They lost them to insufficiencies in the self landing system, whicb was totally new and impossible to test at scale without being in flight. Engine ignition failiour shouldnt evwn have been an option. They ahould have ignited the raptor array then tousand times in a simulator setup, and fixed whatever was causing the issue groundside. What you ended up with instead is losing an entire test vehicle to a preventable issue, and a fix that wasnt thoroughly tested enough because of a repeatable ground test rack. There is a good reason complex mechanical systems only enter working load tesring after extensive quality assurance in component testing, vecause ut has been thoroughly proben to be safer, more effwctive at finding and fixing issues, and more cost effective. Just because musk comes from a software background where full prototype testing is quick painless and cheap, does not make it suddenly applicable to literal rocket science. Watch starship be delayed by an additional 5 years for thorough ground component QA testing after the first hivh profile in flight falioure of a live mission. Either that, or they will have to do it on their own. The current launches are little more than fireworks.
Nice one. Very impressive to go into history of spaceflight to set a foundation but not turn it into a six hour video. Informative, expansive, but concise. Well done
Worth adding that for all the time, risk, complexity, and cost of building the ISS, Starship can put than same volume into orbit on a single launch. This means that if Vlad follows thru on his threat to remove Russian modules from the ISS, thereby killing it, SpaceX could effectively send up a Starship and just leave it there.
Those of us old enough to remember the early days of the space race, got to see a lot of spectacular failures. Congress is so reactionary. 8-track tapes were invented by NASA to continuously record satellite data. My father worked on lunar orbiter.
I always remembered the bit in the movie The Right Stuff, where the Saturn V blows up again and again in visually spectacular ways...and they pick themselves up and do another launch until they got it right.
@@N0d4chi Didn't know the numbers. In the movie, there were multiple rockets blowing up in testing. Maybe I am getting it confused with Mercury/Redstone.
One quick thing I have to add at 20:49 on the Shuttle’s cost. I am glad you mentioned it could be higher, but the estimate you’re using isn’t exactly correct, at least as an average. There’s 2 numbers on this Shuttle cost claim, one at $500 mil and one at $450 mil per launch. The former is from 2011 (or 2001); the latter has been unupdated on the NASA FAQ since 1998 and likely relates back to 1995 and 1996. If you adjust for inflation, it turns out these are the 1st, (6th), 4th, and 3rd cheapest years respectively per flight of the entire program. 1995 and 1996 were basically at the height of the program; 2011 was likely biased low due to a reusable launch program ending, and 2001 was just a good year for the program. Using data gathered by Roger Pielke Jr. an actual average cost per Shuttle flight, development cost excluded, was in the $1 to $1.3 billion range after adjusting to 2012 dollars, generally with the $1bn estimate excluding extra disaster-related costs (or for an estimate including them at ~1/90 odds of loss with a new orbiter then immediately built), and the $1.2 to $1.3 bn number including them. Just thought I’d add that real quickly. Puts the cost closer to $40K/kg, maybe higher now. Great vid so far btw. Edit: read the report from 2000. Yeah, I see they acknowledged the issue and used the most optimistic number for Shuttle, even if it was unrealistic and never got below $400 million dollars per flight in a year in 2000 dollars. Edit 2: So there’s something about the argument that once Shuttle was retired we became reliant on the Russians to launch men into space. It’s definitely true, but… If we consider that our main activities in space were on the ISS, although we weren’t reliant on the Russians to launch our astronauts into space, we were in fact reliant on them to keep them there, due to the Shuttle’s poor on-orbit duration. Edit 3: The argument around 42:00-ish stated the dev costs for the initial version of Falcon 9 but used a fact sheet for the current version of it. Early Falcon 9 could only do ~10.8 tons to LEO and its reuse method of parachutes failed. Landing and reuse development cost SpaceX a lot more; IIRC $1.7 billion was a number given more recently. This does not change the significance of the NASA quote however.
The Shuttle was a failure on almost every level. Its only actual success was that the orbiter was _mostly_ reusable. The rest of the craft wasn't, really, it could barely reach the lowest of orbits, and having to practically rebuild the 'reusable' bits made it more expensive with a slower launch tempo than an expendable rocket with a similar payload/lift capacity.
Given the excellent track record of this channel, I should not be shocked when yet another well-researched video is released. But considering how completely off-mark the media coverage has been for both Falcon 9 and Starship, I'm still very pleasantly surprised by this video. This a very important topic for humanity's future, so thank you for giving it a well-informed and fair coverage. Keep up the great work! 😀👍
Sitting here watching this in the literal middle of nowhere - using Starlink. Anyone who hasn’t used it cannot comprehend of how utterly world-changing these massive LEO constellations are going to be, and how world changing they have already been.
Thank you for covering SpaceX without hyperventilating. Their achievements are amazing and exciting, and I'd imagine there is quite a bit about the way SpaceX contracts with the US Government that would be very interesting to try to replicate into other industries like Defense. One thing you didn't cover that I think deserves some inspection: the relative payload cost of Starship and things like the B-52 or B-1. The payload nominally goes different places, but to motivate the comparison, consider the combination of AMaRV (small, precision guided, 100 G maneuverable American reentry vehicle that flew three times in 1979-1981) and Starship. Starship could put over 200 AMaRVs onto any battlefield on Earth in 45 minutes. AMaRVs could punch out ships, planes, tanks, artillery, deep bunkers and maybe even subs if they could be located. Reusability and rapid recycle mean that a pair of SuperHeavies and a half dozen Starships might deliver more AMaRVs in a day than the entire United States Air Force can deliver JDAMs in the same time period... with fewer interceptions, for much less money, using crews and equipment entirely based in the continental United States. I guarantee China is thinking about this possibility and what it means for a Taiwanese invasion.
Always nice to get a bit of space-based analysis from powerpoint daddy. Hope you're making the most of the long weekend to depressurise mate, cheers 👍 (same to everyone watching)
I find it odd you didn't mention another "little" snag to the russian space programs - they've been using Soviet launch sites, notably the Baikonur Cosmodrome... which isn't in Russia at all, but in Kazakhstan. Which is pissed off enough at Russia to have seized part of it and shut down russian operations there
I would like to point out that the Santa Maria, which carried Columbus to the new world, displaced around 150 tonnes, had an overall length of less than 20 metres, and a beam of around 5.5 meters. So hypothetically if you gave a replica Santa Maria some folding mast to make it more compact, a Starship might be able to send it to Mars. I would love it if SpaceX one day placed a replica Santa Maria in Martian orbit to sail forever.
Thank you for this video! A clear, thoughtful overview of where the global space industry stands today in terms of both technology and applications - as well as where it's headed.
Finally something close to heart, and still related to high-tech procurement and economics. I keep reciting Robert Zubrin's book every time my ear catches "get launch frequency up, cost per kilo down"
A big game changer is the race to get back to the Moon... _and stay there._ Permanent Bases on the Moon will completely change logistics and the construction and launch of new space based equipment in various orbits. Because while very large sensors and so on can be built on the Moon, it's orbit is not very flexible when it comes to observing specific points on Earth. And then further on, there's the possibilities of resource gathering and "energy farming" of the Moon, with the race for He³. So in a decade or so there will be a lot of attention paid to Mooning... 🌗
I presume this was just a really long buildup to a joke since the moon is essentially strategically useless. Just in case you were serious, what could the moon possibly offer? It's 1000 times the distance from LEO. That means you need to make your sensors 1000 times as big (in linear dimensions so area goes as square) to collect the same amount of signal. Besides you need to deal with landing as well as launching now. It makes sense for *telescopes* because they are looking out towards the essentially infinitely distant stars. Resource farming is only useful because you need resources *on the moon* otherwise your better off just mining it on earth. And He3 just won't be part of a useful power cycle if we have to get it from the moon.
He3 is a pipe dream made by scifi writers who lived through the oil crisis. Energy on Earth is abundant. Clean energy is abundant. Why bother mining and refining regolith on the moon to send energy back to earth when you can set up some windmills, hydro-power, and fission reactors.
I agree with every part of what you just said except for the one about helium3. Helium3 could very well allow for nuclear fusion energy to be possible. I believe that 100 tones of this stuff could support the US energy grid for a year making the extraction of this material so lucrative that it may be worth shipping the stuff back here. Also it's only about 4 days of travel away which is far shorter than than several month to year long trips to and from other planets.
I hope you do another Space video that goes into detail over the sorts of things satellites can do in space and what they are currently capable of doing. Are they able to track targets in real time?
