I am hopeful that Starship will really achieve those figures, but I am also skeptical... I'll believe it when I see it being done.
That's still not cheap enough to do lander/surface manipulation science in the asteroid belt without significant philanthropic or government funding.
At $500/pound, if a Ceres unmanned probe lander with drill/melting apparatus weighs 15000 kg when placed in low earth orbit (before whatever staging/fuel it expends to get to ceres and land), that's still a $16.5 million launch cost before you add the cost of the R&D to build the spacecraft, operate its command and control network, etc.
I will be very pleased and enthusiastic but also shocked if something like that is accomplished for a project budget under $30-40m in the next 20 years.
Not saying it's impossible but we're well within the realm of "big budget" science. Like the operating budgets of one of the smaller (not McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott) permanent research bases in Antarctica, or something like the this:
That's still not cheap enough to do lander/surface manipulation science in the asteroid belt without significant philanthropic or government funding.
At $500/pound, if a Ceres unmanned probe lander with drill/melting apparatus weighs 15000 kg when placed in low earth orbit (before whatever staging/fuel it expends to get to ceres and land), that's still a $16.5 million launch cost before you add the cost of the R&D to build the spacecraft, operate its command and control network, etc.
I will be very pleased and enthusiastic but also shocked if something like that is accomplished for a project budget under $30-40m in the next 20 years.
Not saying it's impossible but we're well within the realm of "big budget" science. Like the operating budgets of one of the smaller (not McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott) permanent research bases in Antarctica, or something like the this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiky%C5%AB
Big enough that even top tier universities form consortia to collaborate in science projects such as the ALMA array.