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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

#221

Post by jltsiren »

discordance wrote: post #199
giantrobot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the infrastructure for rocket travel doesn’t exist... yet. That can change. We are moving from being able to crawl to walk with this new capability. What happens when we can run?

Building airports is already difficult, because they require a lot of space and cause a lot of noise. People also oppose them for environmental reasons or simply because they don't like them. Spaceports are going to be worse in every aspect.

I don't see spaceports appearing in the densely populated areas of Europe or US East Coast or in LA, and definitely not in the Bay Area. You have to build them in remote areas or in international waters, and then you have to pair them with a conventional airport or with high-speed rail.

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

#222

Post by XorNot »

marktangotango wrote: post #86
inglor_cz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depending on the final cost, and the cost of amenities, SpaceX could probably profitably just launch people on orbital holidays. By some numbers I think you're looking at sort of "trip to Disneyland" pricing in terms of expense.

There is currently probably an almost infinite market of sending middle class people into space to experience true microgravity and LEO, and if that's viable then you're already setting up a secondary market of people who would want more (3 days to orbit moon? At say...$30,000 I'd do it).

Space tourism gets oversold a lot, but in a scenario where prices are accessible to the middle class and you make a little money...it would be a long time before you'd run out of customers.

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

#223

Post by ClumsyPilot »

wahern wrote: post #166
jmyeet wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is generally (but not always) false. SpaceX has been negotiating a lot of their commercial contracts in a vehicle agnostic fashion. Here's another way of putting that: SpaceX has designed it so F9 and Starship payloads will be interchangeable. That's not quite the same thing. You can't just take an F9 payload and bolt it on top of an Ariane rocket. > Starship is being designed with the intent that it will cann…

> but that's just going to take a long time, particularly if F9 is, say, sub-$15m per launch. 1) SpaceX isn't a public company; among other benefits, there's substantially less pressure to maximize profits. 2) Starship launch costs don't need to compete with F9, they only need to compete with the other competition. Also, it's worth repeating that the goal of this entire endeavor is reaching Mars. The above state of a…

"The above state of affairs isn't a coincidence, but a very deliberate part of Musk's plan."

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target

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

#224

Post by Mountain_Skies »

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.

Does it need to? Sure, if it is trying to make the 787 and other such aircraft obsolete, it needs to have infrastructure everywhere, but there are a dozen far flung coastal cities for which it could be useful. NYC to Tokyo, Sydney, or Shanghai would be useful. Might be a while before SpaceX could fly to China but other coastal destinations that currently are exhausting flights would have a customer base if the price/time ratio was right.

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

#225

Post by Mountain_Skies »

jltsiren wrote: post #221
discordance wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the infrastructure for rocket travel doesn’t exist... yet. That can change. We are moving from being able to crawl to walk with this new capability. What happens when we can run?

Building airports is already difficult, because they require a lot of space and cause a lot of noise. People also oppose them for environmental reasons or simply because they don't like them. Spaceports are going to be worse in every aspect. I don't see spaceports appearing in the densely populated areas of Europe or US East Coast or in LA, and definitely not in the Bay Area. You have to build them in remote areas or…

The main issue would be how far off the coast the launch and landing platforms would need to be to minimize negative impacts to the local population.

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

#226

Post by Mountain_Skies »

thebigman433 wrote: post #156
trhway wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 rece…

> extended weekend around Moon in cattle class for say $100K/person. But how long does this actually last? The amount of people that can afford to pay that is minimal, I dont see space tourism driving any serious markets for an extremely long time (if ever). And there is a reason point to point transfer isnt being mentioned anymore. The logistics and regulatory hurdles are going to be massive, and I seriously doubt w…

Maybe it'd pull some of the crowd away from climbing Everest, which seems to currently be the biggest bragging rights feat for the upwardly mobile.

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

#227

Post by cryptonector »

labster wrote: post #98
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.

Blue Origin can put their entire orbital stage inside the Starship and save money, just like using the post office to deliver Amazon Prime. > Starship, says Dr Heldmann, could carry a full-sized drilling rig that could bore kilometres deep. Or we could use the capacity to dig thermal boreholes on Mars, but I’d worry about mind worm attacks.

I thought Mars was dead cold inside.

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

#229

Post by cryptonector »

ajnin wrote: post #171
hirundo wrote: post #152

The article doesn't mention using Starship for point-to-point transport on Earth. It would seem to make sense for fast long distance commercial travel, and for high value -- like military -- cargo delivery. I'd guess that such terrestrial applications could swamp the more cosmic ones in scale, just because this is where the money and demand is.

The main problem with that idea is that rockets are incredibly loud and noisy. You couldn't launch anywhere close to population centers, where the transportation needs are, and if you need to take a boat to get to a launch platform far at sea you lose a lot of potential. Second problem is that it looks awfully like an ICBM. Lots of countries wouldn't like one of these flying in their direction, which would limit the…

Imagine having to drive for three hours after a one hour flight halfway around the world and complaining that you had to drive three hours to save 16 hours of flying in a jet.

That said, I don't see passenger rockets being a thing for quite some time.

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

#230

Post by techdragon »

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.

The economic case for Starship is even better for small payload customers. At the moment if your launching a cubesat from anywhere but the Nanoracks ISS deployment facility attached to the Japanese Kibo module, then one of your launch costs is a PPOD which gets thrown away

These deployers can cost $10000, or even more depending on the specific cubesat size. So when Starship allows small payload aggregators like Spaceflight Inc to recover the PPOD/deployment hardware then it’s going to provide even further cost reductions beyond the simple dollars per unit mass lifted to orbit. The reusable nature of Starship will be a big part of how it changes the economics of space related industries.

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