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SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

economist.com

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Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#81

Post by jmyeet »

The real problem for Starship (IMHO) is Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most reliable launch vehicle ever created. With reuse the may well be $10m per launch or even less by now and likely to continue to drop. F9 can deliver ~22t to LEO and smaller payloads to geosynchronous orbit. The payloads F9 can't deliver are quite small.

What people forget is that payloads are deeply coupled to their launch vehicles. The launch vehicle will dictate the maximum weight and dimensions of the payload. You can't just take a payload designed for one vehicle and put it on another.

The evidence for this is the relatively few Falcon Heavy launches we've had and are planned.

So now SpaceX has all this launch capacity without the matching demand for it. It's a big part of why Starlink exists.

Cheaper and larger payload capacities will ultimately change the industry and create demand but that takes years.

It's likely Starship will launch ISS replacements but is there sufficient demand there for this ambitious launch vehicle? What else will it be used for? That's a bit of an open question.

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#82

Post by arcticbull »

sgjohnson wrote: post #80
arcticbull wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space shuttle is a human-rated launch vehicle capable of taking 7 people into orbit at a total cost of $445M per launch, or about $65M per seat. When subcontracted to Russia, the charge was about $85M per person. Crew Dragon costs about $55M per person - which is one place my 10% number comes from. Cargo flights are different, and you should also look at total program costs from the deal with NASA. The NASA contr…

The first citation is irrelevant as it is from 2008.

The second one is from 2016 and shows where my 10% number comes from.

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#83

Post by bumby »

kashkhan wrote: post #43
arcticbull wrote: post #39

Remember folks Elon has a way of, er, overstating. He promised that SpaceX launches cost what, 1% of current launches? So far, they're more expensive than the Space Shuttle it replaced in NASA contracts. Their own numbers say that in the fullness of time they may be 10% cheaper. So far, not so. Space exploration is great, we should do it, and this rocket sounds cool. We should do it even if it is expensive. But "dirt…

weren't shuttle flights $2B each? List price of Falcon launch is <$70MM.

I think there's a difference in methodology here. When those numbers of the shuttle are listed, they're including all the upfront R&D spread across the life-cycle of the program. I believe the Falcon costs disregard all those as a sunk cost and only list the actual "launch" costs

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#84

Post by caoilte »

arcticbull wrote: post #49
kashkhan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weren't shuttle flights $2B each? List price of Falcon launch is <$70MM.

Russian Roscosmos costs $35-48.5M per launch. [1] Shuttle launches were about $450M per launch, with 7 people and 50,000lbs of cargo. Came to about $10,000 per kg, vs SpaceX Falcon 9 at $27,000 [edit] and the Dragon around $9,000. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-2

Max Payload to LEO 8,200kg. Max payload of falcon 9 is 22,800kg.

Looks to me like falcon 9 is considerably better value on those numbers even at twice the price.

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#85

Post by croddin »

Tepix wrote: post #5
spicybright wrote: post #4

If only we could lower that peskty 1% chance of exploding each flight down a smidge. Well, at least this means the rockets will be cheaper to replace!

What's the source for the 1%? It's not even flown into space yet. Its extremely high flight rate makes it likely that its reliability will be closer to planes than rockets eventually.

I'm guessing it is just referring to reliability of rockets in general. Reliability should be improved and being able to fly more rockets by being "fully and rapidly reusable" is the right approach. Planes would not have been able to become as safe as they are if we had to build a new one for each flight.

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#86

Post by marktangotango »

inglor_cz wrote: post #52
kklisura wrote: post #42

Starship can deliver 100 t payload to LEO. Does space industry really need that payload requirements? When you look at Falcon Heavy, it can deliver 68 t to LEO, but there was only one launch back in 2019.

It will take the space industry a few years to adapt to the new possibilities, yes. But already in the beginning, Starship should be able to deliver several hundred Starlink satellites to their orbits, so it could accelerate deployment of the network quite a lot.

> It will take the space industry a few years to adapt to the new possibilities, yes.

There are tons of possibilities; James Web 2 with 10x the diameter, a probe to catch up with Oumaumau, real asteroid prospecting. Oh and orbital hotels. Does anyone know of any concrete projects?

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#87

Post by pfdietz »

mlindner wrote: post #51
emkoemko wrote: post #34

how will it be dirt cheap?

By being fully (and rapidly) reusable.

The point mlindner is making is that the cost of launch vehicles is in the vehicle, not the propellant. So full rapid reuse, so you can refly the entire vehicle a lot, drives the cost per launch way down.

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#88

Post by grecy »

ProAm wrote: post #65
JaimeThompson wrote: post #55

I think Gwynne Shotwell is the rather unsung hero keeping SpaceX running correctly day by day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell

The sheer fact she has put up with Elon this long is nothing short of amazing.

One of my favourite passages in the SpaceX book is from Gwen after working with Elon for a couple of weeks.

She worked really hard on a proposal about how they would go about selling the Falcon rocket to potential customers. Elon took one look and said "That's great. I don't want you to write reports and proposals, I want you to do it.".

My god, I would give anything for a boss like that.

Re: SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

#90

Post by trhway »

jmyeet wrote: post #81

The real problem for Starship (IMHO) is Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most reliable launch vehicle ever created. With reuse the may well be $10m per launch or even less by now and likely to continue to drop. F9 can deliver ~22t to LEO and smaller payloads to geosynchronous orbit. The payloads F9 can't deliver are quite small. What people forget is that payloads are deeply coupled to their launch vehicles. The launch…

>Cheaper and larger payload capacities will ultimately change the industry ... is there sufficient demand there for this ambitious launch vehicle? What else will it be used for?

extended weekend around Moon in cattle class for say $100K/person. Suborbital flight LA to Shanghai in 1 hour for $5-10K. Though it seems that the first years the SpaceX Mars program will gobble almost all the capacity (according to that recent update Elon wants to launch non-stop several times a day to get several million tons into orbit), except for the high margin and/or already contracted stuff like NASA Moon.

>The real problem for Starship (IMHO) is Falcon 9.

F9/Heavy are cheaper than competition, yet not that cheaper to enable new revolutionary uses. They also will never be made to the airline level of safety/robustness/operational simplicity/etc. which is one of the goals of Starship and its Raptor 2 engine.

In particular - according to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor#/media/File:Rapt... the full flow allows them to run turbines under 600 C for fuel and under 500 C for oxygen pump on Raptor 2 - it feels like cheating :) being like steel temperatures, and they of course are using Inconel which gives them great reliability here, like in order of magnitude better than on other engines. That naturally translates into capability to perform many reuses with very frequent launches with minimal operational costs.

If anything i think with Elon having blazed the path there is an opportunity to quickly start and ramp up SpaceX copycats(s) as whatever capacity the industry would produce at the Starship level low prices and high convenience the demand will still be bigger.

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