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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

#201

Post by moralestapia »

inasio wrote: post #108
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…

I suspect it could disrupt at least some form of earth transportation. The fuel costs are not that different than a transatlantic 787 flight, and it's likely simpler and with fewer moving parts. In similar style to Tesla's vertical approach, they could own the full stack (rocket, fuel production, launch/landing facilities).

>The fuel costs are not that different than a transatlantic 787 flight [...]

LOL, not even in the same order of magnitude ...

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

#202

Post by jcims »

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.

The increased volume is probably more useful than the mass.

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

#203

Post by throwawaylinux »

arcticbull wrote: post #68
CompelTechnic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So far, they're more expensive than the Space Shuttle it replaced in NASA contracts do you have a source for this? Wikipedia data in the Launch vehicle estimated payload cost per kg table disagrees with you. By a factor of ~20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...

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 article there cites per-kg costs at $10,000 on the space shuttle vs $27,000 on SpaceX. With the Dragon it came down to about $9,000 per kg, which is again about 10% below the price NASA was paying for the shuttle.

> Their own numbers say that in the fullness of time they may be 10% cheaper. So far, not so.

How do you reconcile these two statements? Are the costs now 10% cheaper per kg or not?

Also from the link 2

> Margasahayam points out that, while the space shuttles were more expensive — a whopping $500 million per launch (or possibly $1.5 billion, according to one analysis we've seen) — each mission carried about 50,000 lbs. (plus seven astronauts!). That means each pound of cargo used to cost about $10,000 to ship on a shuttle.

Some estimates are even higher than that, close to $2 billion, inflation adjusted

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/03/first-spacex-astronaut-launc...

So the low estimate is not really fair, SpaceX has to pay off their R&D costs as well.

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

#204

Post by LeoPanthera »

caycep wrote: post #29

"dirt cheap Starship" kinda reminds me of a backwoods project where all that was needed to achieve spaceflight and warp drive was a drunk James Cromwell and a few wise-cracking Starfleet officers who traveled back in time...

Cochrane and Musk have a lot in common.

Dr. Zefram Cochrane: Please! Don't tell me it's all thanks to me! I've heard enough about the great Zefram Cochrane! I don't know who writes your history books or where you get your information from, but you people got some pretty funny ideas about me! You all look at me as if I'm some kind of... saint, or visionary or something!

Cmdr. William Riker: I don't think you're a saint, Doc. But you did have a vision. And now we're sitting in it.

Cochrane: You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs, money! I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I wanna go to the stars? I don't even like to fly! I take trains! I built this ship so that I could retire to some tropical island... filled with naked women. THAT'S Zefram Cochrane. THAT'S his vision. This other guy you keep talking about, this historical figure? I never met him. I can't imagine I ever will.

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

#205

Post by kcb »

giantrobot wrote: post #161
inasio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it could disrupt at least some form of earth transportation. The fuel costs are not that different than a transatlantic 787 flight, and it's likely simpler and with fewer moving parts. In similar style to Tesla's vertical approach, they could own the full stack (rocket, fuel production, launch/landing facilities).

A Starship can't land at any random commercial airport, a 787 can. The 787 can also divert to any other airport due to aircraft issue, weather, or whatever. Starship doesn't have anywhere close to the same cross-range capability.

Airports aren't naturally occurring. They have to be built.

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

#206

Post by xoa »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #188
Tepix wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2020.html Soyuz is the only rocket that has flown much more than 100 flights, and it has a reliability of 97%. Several other rockets, including Falcon 9, have flown enough successful flights that statistically their reliability is unlikely to be less than 99%, but we cannot know that it's any higher than that. NASA figures that the failure rate of a Dragon flight is about 1 in 500…

>Soyuz is the only rocket that has flown much more than 100 flights

Falcon 9 has had 140 flights of which 138 were successful, but that includes 1.0 and 1.1 which were significantly different early designs. It's had 120 flights for F9 FT, all successful (though over 111 flights ago one was destroyed in preflight testing). It's arguably the safest rocket system ever made [0].

That said, Starship should easily surpass it. It has more margin to work with and will run at a much higher cadence with much more opportunity for refinement and testing.

----

0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-roc...

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

#207

Post by ordu »

jmyeet wrote: post #120
inevaexisted wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They solved this problem with F9 too, with their ride share program. Starship will make it even cheaper to deliver small payloads too (you'll likely have to wait for enough payload to get lined up to make sense financially), however with the need to continuously deploy starlink satelites, they'll probably fill loads as required with them to fill starship up.

You raise a good point: taking multiple payloads could help bridge this gap. But I still believe it'll take quite awhile to match the economics of an F9 launch (assuming that payload is within the launch parameters). Falcon Heavy is again evidence of this. We're not seeing ride-sharing on FH. We're seeing large (primarily military) payloads that F9 just can't do.

> Falcon Heavy is again evidence of this.

Not necessarily. I'm not a rocket scientist or economist, but it is possible that FH is less cost-effective per kg on LEO than F9. You need to accelerate three boosters to several thousand km/hour and then to decelerate them to 0 km/hour at ground level. And then to do all the maintaining on those boosters, which takes about a month. Does it allow for 3x payload?

There are other potential issues, like a volume: a payload is not just mass, but a volume too. It needs to fit into fairing. Adding two more boosters doesn't increase available volume.

> I still believe it'll take quite awhile to match the economics of an F9 launch

Musk says that he relies on Starship launches to make it work reliably as expected. And yes, I believe that it will take years. Maybe it will be faster than with F9, but not an order of magnitude faster.

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

#209

Post by AtlasBarfed »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #172
jmyeet wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. bigger and much more capable interplanetary probes One of the things I'd dearly love to see in lifetime is a return to the ice giants (ie Uranus and Neptune). We've only visited once and it was in the 1980s with the limited tech of Voyager 1 and 2. Think of what we could learn with a Cassini-level mission and Cassini itself is now ~14 years old. But these missions take a long time to develop. We actually have a…

> I do suspect we need to find commercial enterprises to justify the Starship economics and I'm just not sure what that looks like yet. At $1 MM per launch with 100 t per launch puts Starship roughly at $10 per kg. Asteroid mining: Will be a huge industry. Especially with growing environmental concerns all around Earth. Waste can basically be disposed of very cheaply into the atmosphere or sun. Starlink, Kupier, etc…

The military wants a C-130 payload anywhere in the world in 1 hour. Military up the wazoo in contracts. Militarization of space is inevitable, they'll want bases up there. If the payload costs are true for starship, they'll put big ones up there.

Starship will represent a total paradigm change in space superiority on economics alone. I'm surprised China and Russia aren't loudly complaining about this. It would enable an actual space fortress to some degree. 10 billion dollars for a 1000 tons of hardware in space? Um, that's less than an aircraft carrier.

An aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons...

As stated, space tourism will be HUGE. If 5g/ticket is true, I mean, who on hackernews wouldn't go on that trip? Even if 1% of people in the world take only one flight that in our lifetime that's 80 million people.

How many people want to do the Red Bull parachute from space? I would guess: A LOT.

Just wait for the private Starships. Hey they should be cheaper than megayachts. Show up at starport, anywhere on earth in an hour.

My biggest dream: starship payloads to get a moon-launched 1.5 million ton Project Orion pulse nuclear ship. That is serious equipment payload to do real asteroid mining. One heavy metal/rare earth metal asteroid will pay for that round trip.

But really, I'd argue we just need to enable:

https://space.nss.org/technologies-for-asteroid-capture-into...

Why fly it out of the gravity well? Need material? It's out there. A bit hard to catch, but it's out there.

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

#210

Post by rtsil »

thebigman433 wrote: post #154
inasio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it could disrupt at least some form of earth transportation. The fuel costs are not that different than a transatlantic 787 flight, and it's likely simpler and with fewer moving parts. In similar style to Tesla's vertical approach, they could own the full stack (rocket, fuel production, launch/landing facilities).

There is a reason Musk and co have stopped pitching the point to point transfer on Earth. Aside from technical challenges, this is a massive regulatory and logistics problem

They didn't stop pitching it, they just focused the pitch on the sole customer really interested in it for now: the Military.

https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-102-million-air-force-cont...

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