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Starship is still not understood

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Re: Starship is still not understood

#201

Post by snowwrestler »

burlesona wrote: post #181

The article is really interesting, but the stress the author expresses about the potential downfall of NASA seems misplaced. This is just creative destruction at work. If NASA can adapt to capitalize on the new paradigm, then it will, and there will be NASA logos everywhere in future space stuff. If not, then NASA will fade away, and some of us will wax nostalgic about how cool NASA seemed when we were kids but nobod…

NASA, like most government programs, is actually a mission-driven purchasing program. They are not threatened by SpaceX at all. If SpaceX can deliver what NASA needs, NASA will just buy it from SpaceX. See for example: human space flight.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#202

Post by dr_orpheus »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #173
dr_orpheus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with SpaceX's accomplishments in dramatically reducing launch costs, the $10M price point is still insane. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy advertised prices are ~$50 million and $90 million per launch. The actual launches and mission management for any more custom launch tend to push those prices to almost double. So to assume that a much larger as yet unproven rocket with launch for $10M seems quite out of range…

Falcon9 still throws away the second stage every time. The idea of Starship being $10M is that it's fully reusable, so your marginal cost is only fuel/maintenance/launch.

Okay, according to Elon [0] the cost (to SpaceX) of a refurbished Falcon 9 is $15 million, $10 million of which is the upper stage as you say is not re-usable. So $5M for everything else for a rocket that gets 18k lbs to Low-earth-orbit. If we scale that up to the Starship (220k lbs to LEO) then lets estimate a re-use/refurb cost of $61M.

So if a Falcon 9 costs $50M to launch, then 70% of that cost is SpaceX profit/recouping its design cost. Starship is supposed to be even more re-usable so lets assume that they only need 30% of the launch cost for recouping design costs/profit. This would be $87M/launch

So my really aggressive estimate is still almost an order of magnitude higher, which is why I am doubtful. Lets also remember that SpaceX got $396M from NASA for the development of Falcon 9 and Dragon [1]

[0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and_fundin...

Re: Starship is still not understood

#203

Post by macintux »

burlesona wrote: post #181

The article is really interesting, but the stress the author expresses about the potential downfall of NASA seems misplaced. This is just creative destruction at work. If NASA can adapt to capitalize on the new paradigm, then it will, and there will be NASA logos everywhere in future space stuff. If not, then NASA will fade away, and some of us will wax nostalgic about how cool NASA seemed when we were kids but nobod…

The problem I have with that analysis is that there’s little commercial value to purely scientific missions. What will we lose if NASA isn’t sending (much bigger!) explorers to all corners of the solar system?

Maybe mining companies will pick up some of the slack, maybe that’ll be enough.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#204

Post by oxplot »

panick21_ wrote: post #192
oxplot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no financial guru, even enthusiast, but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit. If you listened to last Telsa's shareholder meeting, one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! People expect a company that's ramping up faster than any other in the history, building largest factories left and right, to pay dividends to its share holders! I'm i…

> but my impression is that your average investor is interested in very short term profit You can actually figure out how much of a stock is traded and if your assumption is true then there would have to be far more trading. > one of the top questions was whether Tesla was going to pay dividends! How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?

> How do you know what answer the people who voted for the question wanted to hear?

Interesting point. My intuition tells me that most people who are looking to get paid are the ones asking the question.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#205

Post by sschueller »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
vanattab wrote: post #41

>Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows. So at 100tons per starship sent to Mars that's 10,000 trips or 1000 per launch window. But the current plans call for something like 16 starship launches just for refuelling the one starship for the lunar mission. Suppose we can do the Mars trip with the same number of flights that's 170,000 laun…

Would anyone like to estimate the CO2 emissions produced by that?

Everyone keeps pointing to the CO2 of the rocket itself but forget the enormous infrastructure requirements to launch a rocket the CO2 that creates. Even if starship bursn clean, it's infrastructure does not.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#206

Post by panick21_ »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #162
ncallaway wrote: post #8

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentall…

I think part of the point that the author misses is that while designing a spacecraft for a Starship launch does remove a lot of the constraints there is not the infrastructure to take advantage of that (yet). There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the road. It would most likely hav…

> Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019.

This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on Falcon 9.

There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty late.

The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-usability. However the end result was more then double as powerful then the version announced in 2013.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#207

Post by AnimalMuppet »

vanattab wrote: post #166
brianwawok wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if computers taught me anything.. it's if you can do 1 thing really really well perfectly, it's not a ton of work to do it 10x or 100x in parallel. We don't have enough data to know reliability of say Falcon long term. Is it 99% successful? 99.9%? 99.999999%? Doing a ton of launches, you really want to work on the 9s, so 0-1 of your launches blow up, not 100+. But once you do, you just copy paste it baby and go to to…

I am not convinced the scalability of cyberspace applies to actual space.

I don't think it's a good example either. But the scalability of mass production may apply, and that might be good enough...

Re: Starship is still not understood

#208

Post by dr_orpheus »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #190
dr_orpheus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the point that the author misses is that while designing a spacecraft for a Starship launch does remove a lot of the constraints there is not the infrastructure to take advantage of that (yet). There have been some preliminary studies on spacecraft that could take advantage of a Starship launch capability, but we currently can't transport a spacecraft that large over the road. It would most likely hav…

When your primary customer says that they will never man-rate your rocket, as NASA's administrator Bolden did, it's more surprising that they actually went on to finish Falcon Heavy than that it was late.

Yeah, that's fair. But the original first operational launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was to help certify it for the National Security Space Launch. So one of their main targets was to get classified business that was going to the Delta Heavy rockets. So I don't know how much/little NASAs planned use of the Falcon Heavy affected their decision.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#209

Post by stcredzero »

One way to summarize this article and relate it to software engineering: Before Starship, orbital launches and their payloads were like "snowflake" servers. Meticulously crafted one-offs. After Starship, launches and their payloads should become like containerized servers. (Starlink is already going this direction. No wonder, since Falcon is just a stop-gap and that system was designed for Starship)

Re: Starship is still not understood

#210

Post by shalmanese »

ncallaway wrote: post #8

I’m kinda confused by the criticism of the industry and NASA not designing for Starship. The author argues that NASA doesn’t understand Tempe game changer that Starship is, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. If NASA (or other industry players), assume Starship will deliver the benefits it promises, they to fundamentall…

In the days of steam powered factories, a central power plant was used to drive belts that would power various machines. More power intensive machines were sited near the central power plant to maximize efficiency and parts were moved to where the machines were.

Electrification allowed the replacement of belts with motors but machines were expensive so they were upgraded in place and electricity was thought of as just steam, but less messy and cheaper.

It took several decades into electrification before people fully wrapped their heads around: a) many small motors didn't cost more than one big motor and you should redesign your machines so that the motors were where they made sense and b) now that machines could be placed anywhere, you should design your factories so that the machines were in the path of the parts.

Sometimes, quantitative changes become qualitative changes and you need to start from a clean sheet because all of the existing received wisdom stemmed from obsolete assumptions. It takes a while for this process to happen because we don't fully know how all of our assumptions stack on top of each other and we resist the change because our power/identities rest on elements of the status quo.

Disruption theory is premised on upstarts recognizing opportunities that incumbents are structurally unable to exploit because they derive too much benefit from the old status quo.

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