Another Day, Another World-Changing Milestone From SpaceX

Oops, they did it again. 

So casually that even a launch industry nut like myself failed to notice until today, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) revealed Monday the results of its point-to-point rocket cargo delivery test, courtesy of SpaceX's experimental Starfall capsule.

Remember when Domino's used to promise to get a pizza to your door in 30 minutes? Starfall promises to deliver over a ton of cargo anywhere on Earth in about 90 minutes or less — no runway or landing strip required.

PJ Media's own Charlie Martin covered Starfall's initial flight test in June, but last week's AFRL flight was a test of the capsule's ability to safely deliver "representative mission equipment" for the Pentagon, while studying "the effects of temperature, shock, and vibration of the cargo environments during launch and reentry."

The AFRL showed off some survival gear packed for the mission — water bottles, what looks like a milspec cellphone, first aid, MREs, and the like — but I like to think the kit included a couple M4A1 rifles and a couple cans of ammo.

While each Starfall is fairly small, a single Falcon 9 (or eventually Starship) rocket could carry multiple capsules. 

The first thing my mind went to was resupplying troops in a Great Pacific War with China. Our Navy just doesn't have enough ships, particularly the non-sexy types that actually deliver stuff to the men who need it. 

Where it gets really interesting is that Starfall can loiter "indefinitely" in orbit. It might behoove the services to preposition supplies in orbit — for even faster delivery when needed, but also to have stuff ready to go in quantities that not even SpaceX could deliver in time. 

SpaceX, of course, has more in mind than high-speed Pentagon deliveries. 

As Starship and even more emergent technologies like Starfall mature — plus the inevitable competitors — we must stop thinking of space as the most expensive and difficult place to do things or send things. Particularly in pharmaceuticals and advanced materials, the microgravity of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is really the best place to do stuff.

Getting mass quantities of goods back to Earth quickly, safely, and cheaply, however, is a real problem. And it's the problem Starfall is meant to solve.

But before you think I'm doing the Elon Musk Fanboy thing again, SpaceX isn't the only space company doing really cool stuff this week. 

Cowboy Space (great name, eh?) this week unveiled its Big Iron rocket, the launch vehicle underpinning the company's plans to put 20,000 AI data centers into LEO. Actually, Big Iron's second stage is the data center.

"It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion," founder Baiju Bhatt said during Monday's reveal. "The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite."

Bhatt is the billionaire cofounder of fintech firm Robinhood, and so now of course, he's into rockets, too. He's into really big rockets — Big Iron is 282 feet tall — that do a Transformer act into orbital data centers. He also claims that AI compute will be cheaper in LEO than on Earth by 2031, but I have to take issue with that. I think he's a little pessimistic, and that the cost balance could shift as soon as 2030.

Cowboy Space (seriously, that name!) hopes to get Big Iron flying in 2028, and they'd better get 4K video of that transformer trick.

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