First, a quick forward: I wasn't sure whether to put this in FH or Post-1900, and settled on this forum because a) I am posing this happens prior to the present and b) I'm more interested in the impacts in our general time, rather than decades out from now. But I won't protested too loudly if a mod decides this is better placed in the FH subforum.
Anyway, the premise here is that Elon Musk (or Jeff Bezos, it really doesn't matter) falls in love with the idea of a Launch Loop, rather than reusable rockets. Advocates claim that one could be built in the ballpark of $10 billion. So, SpaceX becomes a company dedicated to the idea of building one of these massive machines. What happens?
Note that I'm not asking "What if Elon Musk builds a Launch Loop?" What I'm asking is "What if Elon Musk decides he wants to build a Launch Loop, instead of building reusable rockets?" In other words, the discussion is about the attempt to do so, and the consequences in the near term
Things to consider:
- He brings his celebrity to the idea
- Launch Loops need a lot of space on the ground (2000 km), who is going to humor him, if anyone?
- There's less of an opportunity to build on incremental improvements: either it works amazingly better than current tech, or not at all. No gradual transition from just launching rockets, to launching and recovering the first stages, to launching and recovering both first and second stages.
- How does this influence the rocket market? There's one less competitor, but there's still Blue Origin (or SpaceX, if we've swapped out Musk for Bezos)
- Would SpaceX be able to secure gov't contracts, as it has in reality? Would it starve for customers until it could (maybe) get the thing working? Or would NASA be pumped to see someone else throwing money on a grand project like this, and do what they could to support?
- How does this mesh with his HyperLoop idea?
Discuss amongst yourselves.