It's not just the getting things into space that's the hard and costly part. Modules take years to design, build, and test.
That's why the current trend moves towards ever smaller and thus cheaper satellites and big launchers like Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, and Falcon Heavy barely see any action at all.
Starship would enable single-launch space stations, yes. But there are no single-launch space station designs yet and building one will either take time (ISS/MIR) or end up being much more expensive per person day due to weak design (e.g. Skylab).
It's a self-feeding culture. Launches were expensive, so you designed your spacecraft very thoroughly for many years before sending it up. If launches have become cheap, in part due to iterative design processes and letting oneself fail, then the same techniques can be applied to orbiting bodies. Launch a bunch of cheap inflatable labs, test them in real (out of) world conditions, and iterate towards a final design faster
>> It's not just the getting things into space that's the hard and costly part. Modules take years to design, build, and test.
Using the traditional approach, yes. But SpaceX is proving that there are other approaches that yield fruit far faster and also for drastically less money.
Well, how many space stations have SpaceX designed so far?
And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"? Are you aware that Skylab was designed, built, and launched in under 4 years and consisted of a converted Saturn-IVB rocket stage?
The total program cost was $275M per year over 8 years (including design, 4 stations, 4 Skylab- and 3 Apollo launches, as well as operations), which translates to $1.6Bn/yr in 2021 dollars.
Today, Bigelow Aerospace would have - maybe (they're currently defunct due to the pandemic - the B330 more or less ready to fly, but that is launched on an Atlas V.
It took two demonstration models, launched in 2005 and 2007 to get them ready for prime time. In 2013 they developed the BEAM module under a 16 month NASA contract, which was launched and attached to the ISS in 2016.
So BA built and deployed two prototypes in 2 years and a crewed fully functional module in 16 months with just $17.8M. Yet you assume that SpaceX, who never built a space station before, can somehow do it even faster and cheaper? Why? On what factual basis and on which historical examples do you base this assumption on?
> And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"?
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the huge amount of work done to keep things light, thin, self-contained and fit within existing payload bay sizes and can be constructed with minimum number of launches.
If launch costs drop through the floor there is less need for that.
You could build heavier, more robust stations because mass to orbit prices are so low. You could build it without having to minimise the number of launches. You could have much bigger and heavier sections sent up in pieces and built "on-site" so to speak.
Much easier to consider when the price to move those heavy components up to space orders of magnitude cheaper and launches take place daily / weekly.
(Yes I know I am glossing over a lot of things here).
So BA built and deployed two prototypes in 2 years and a crewed fully functional module in 16 months with just $17.8M. Yet you assume that SpaceX, who never built a space station before, can somehow do it even faster and cheaper? Why? On what factual basis and on which historical examples do you base this assumption on?
Why not? The ISS is a spacecraft in all but name. It wouldn't be strange if they decided to use starship as a space station development platform, since they already planned for starship to carry humans to Mars.
