What do you think the medium term future of space exploration will be like?

I thought BFS was meant to be the one size fits all launcher that's (allegedly) going to bring launch costs down to Falcon 1 levels. I have no idea how optimistic (or otherwise) that is but if SpaceX can even get the costs of a BFS launch down to current Falcon 9 prices then I don't see any need for a steady cadence of massive payloads to build up that operational record - they can just continue launching the same kind of payloads that they're launching right now. Sure the thing is vast overkill for most of that but if it's cheap enough to run it really doesn't matter if it's flying largely empty most of the time.

With that said I'd expect that SpaceX would want to fly it fully laden a few times, just to prove that it does work as expected. Again, if it does turn out to be as cheap to run as they hope, then they'll probably absorb the costs. Or, more speculatively, I can imagine any number of awesome Mars science missions that NASA could fly on BFS. SpaceX get a dry run at their proposed mission architecture (including a lot of refilling flights in LEO, which nicely builds up their operational record with fully laden BFS) and NASA get to park a metric shedload of science hardware in orbit around Mars or conceivably, on the surface. Or something even crazier that I haven't thought of. SpaceX is pretty good at parlaying paid-for flights into free R&D opportunities.

Man, I can just imagine a BFS in orbit around Mars deploying a swarm of mass produced (relatively speaking) Pathfinder II style landers, complete with airbag landing systems and Sojourner II rovers.

If (and that's a very big if) BFS turns out to be everything SpaceX hopes it will be, then it'll be a complete game-changer precisely because all the current notions of matching launcher capability (and cost) to payload mass go right out of the window.What do you think the medium term future of space exploration will be like?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit this link to stop these emails: http://zpr.io/nfAVj