Comments by "William Warren" (@wbwarren57) on "Scott Manley"
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Make Starship OPENSOURCE!!!
If Elon Musk is really serious about saving the human race from being wiped out by war or an asteroid or a virus or dramatic climate change, etc., then he should make the current version of the Starship (but not the Raptor engines) and the Super Heavy booster OPENSOURCE creative commons. Not licensed, but opensource so that the maximum number of different countries and corporations would have a good starting point to vastly increase the world's economical heavy lift rockets for exploiting and colonizing space.
Think about it - this would unleash so much more money and intelligence towards space. Companies and countries that cannot currently afford to develop reusable space vehicles would suddenly be "in the game"! These countries and companies would no have to waste valuable talent, time and money developing reusable space vehicles from the ground up (i.e., reinventing the wheel) but could instead apply that money and time to making improvements to Starship or to use the Starship technology to make entirely new vehicles and - more importantly - apply those Starships to accomplishing a plethora of new projects in addition to colonizing Mars.
Making the current version of Starship open source would certainly help speed the exploration and exploitation of Mars but could actually help SpaceX maybe more than anyone else:
1. A huge amount of new engineering talent and money would become available to improve and iterate on the Starship. Elon may be a genius, but even a genius can't think of everything you need entirely on his own. I have no doubt that SpaceX would want to buy or license many new Starship-related technologies from the new companies and countries that began improving Starship.
2. Making Starship open source would mean that there would very, very soon be a WHOLE LOT MORE STARTSHIP class launch vehicles which would bring launch costs down significantly in the VERY NEAR FUTUEW.
3. More companies and countries having their own Starships (or improved versions) would allow a huge number of new space-based endeavors to start and flourish in addition to Elon's project to colonize Mars. Other companies and countries would probably want to more aggressively and much sooner pursue projects such as colonization of low Earth orbit, near term mining of near-Earth asteroids, colonization of the Moon, exploration and colonization of Venus, exploration, and exploitation of the asteroid belt, further exploration of Jupiter and Saturn, investigation of the possibility of life on the moons of other planets, building large new space-based telescopes, building solar energy harvesting stations to beam power to Earth, building effective asteroid defense systems, and YES, more countries going to colonize Mars among many other projects.
4. Lower the main barrier that companies and countries face in undertaking new space-based endeavors. Namely, the costs, time, and most importantly risks that they would fail at the first step - developing a completely reusable launch vehicle.
5. More companies and countries operating their own Starships would vastly speed up the understanding of the issues involved with operating fleets of Starships and would allow for a diversity of different operational approaches to be implemented and evaluated
6. Spread the risk!!! Right now, the fate of Starship is completely dependent upon the continuation of SpaceX and - in reality - Elon Musk staying healthy and productive. Right now, SpaceX could easily go bankrupt if they have any major accident that causes investors and governments to lose faith in SpaceX. If Elon Musk stops being healthy and productive, accomplishments by SpaceX would undoubtedly slow down drastically if not stop altogether. If dozens of companies and countries are building and operating their own Starships, any single accident or company bankruptcy would just "one of those unfortunate things" but far, far from a reason to lose faith in what Starships are and can do.
7. Turn enemies into collaborators and partners: Right now, it is probably the case that many large companies and countries would be less than sad - and probably very happy - to see SpaceX fail and, undoubtedly are lobbying hard to make that happen. If Starship becomes open source then these companies would be able jump onboard the reusable spacecraft revolution instead of sitting on the sidelines being jealous.
8. Greatly increase the market demand for heavy launch vehicles over what it is now. Right now its hard to find a lot of customers who think they need heavy launch vehicles which means that heavy launch vehicles seldom fly now. However, with an opensource Starship more projects that depend on heavy launch vehicles would start - first in a trickle and then in a flood - and the market for heavy launch services will increase exponentially.
Elon Musk thinks that the human race must expand into Space as soon as possible to survive. What better way to increase the speed and breadth of this expansion than to greatly increase the companies and countries who can bring money and talent to the effort?
NOTE: I don't recommend that the Raptor engine be open sourced. Open sourcing both Starship and Raptor would immediately give countries like Iran and North Korea everything they need to build very dangerous ballistic missile sources. Most countries already can build ballistic missiles of some sort, but creating a Raptor-class motor is way beyond their current capabilities.
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