Part 2 of the series looked at third party manufacturing and how it needs to increase sharply to meet the developing payload needs.
This post discusses the need for partnerships to produce more payload.
Partnerships
Increasing production is not a quick step. Planning ahead and creating strategic partnerships now is required to ensure payload will be ready when needed.
Goals for most mission profiles are already clear. Even with a cursory evaluation, many required products are already known.
Finding and forming strong partnerships with non-standard space companies to start producing such cargo will greatly improve the likelihood it will be ready in time.
This also allows for scale. Initial cargo can be produced in smaller scales to suit the smaller number of initial Starships. However, with Starship factories being completed, the number of ships and required cargo will increase rapidly.
Having partnerships in place early will ensure this scaling can take place before needed.
Partnerships imply funding and resources to ensure companies can start to scale up even before the fully volumes are needed. This is where government support and private input will be important.
Summary
Space exploration in the near future will become busy. Rockets are getting bigger and also reusable.
This means a lot more payload can be carried to space. Especially with the number of rockets that SpaceX will produce per month. For the Moon and Mars missions alone, thousands of tons of payload are required for them to succeed.
Several things can be done to ensure enough payload can be manufactured to meet that need.
Rules around the use of clean rooms can be relaxed. This would allow faster and cheaper production of non-critical equipment needed for colonization.
Third party manufacturing will be helped by relaxed rules. Allowing companies with existing production plants to adjust for space rather than needing to create new lines will help a lot.
Additionally, if partnerships are formed early, companies can begin to prepare and ramp up production. Partnerships imply additional funding and resources to enable this to happen.
Our space future will be busy - let's plan ahead for it.