There are customers from three letter agencies who could find a use for this payload capacity, for sure.
OTOH imagine if a reusable launch of this costs approximately the same as an expendable Atlas 5 in it's most performant configuration and reliability is proven - NASA could launch a Pluto probe like New Horizons, except it'd be able actually make orbit over there.
Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much.
But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space.
Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
>Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much.
Which is why the rocket has been discontinued.
This is also why Boeing Starliner is dead man walking. Starliner is only certified for Atlas 5, and there are enough spare boosters for the launches NASA contracted with Boeing for, no more. The consensus is that Boeing will fulfill the contract then that'll be the end of Starliner, which is great for Boeing in the sense that it'll finally close that money-leaking wound, but not great for NASA because the whole point of Starliner + Crew Dragon was to have two separate US-owned ways to send people into space.[1] Even if Starship passes every test going forward ahead of schedule and gets man-rated, NASA would prefer to not have one company provide both methods, but I don't know what would be a better alternative. Sierra finally gets that big contract to man-rate Dream Chaser? Blue Origin?
[1] Setting aside how everyone at the time believed that Starliner would be the first one into orbit
There is still the possibility of either New Glenn or Vulkan being crew rated to carry Starliner. With Vulkan the concern was mainly that no one was willing to foot the bill, but with the rumored acquisition of ULA by Blue Origin, there's a chance they might want Starliner as their own crew vehicle. The main limitation being that Boeing has already shutdown Starliner production, only making the 2 needed for the ISS contract. So even if anyone else wanted them, they'd have to put in a bunch of money to restart production. Putting all those costs together it might just become better to do something else, e.g. crew rate Dreamliner.
That said, right now it's kind of up in the air, since as it stands, Dragon's second crew contract and Starliner's existing contract are likely to cover all remaining ISS launches. So what's needed afterwards depends on the commercial space stations NASA is pushing for.
I'm not certain what is meant by "certified" because it still hasn't made a human flight test yet.
Notwithstanding the retirement of Atlas and Delta, Starliner was intended to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the ULA Atlas V and Delta IV, and the SpaceX Falcon 9
> When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space.
It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
Most of what SpaceX has already achieved has sounded similarly, but costs were so astronomical to begin with that it didn't make any immediate difference to most people. So for instance the Space Shuttle was only retired in 2011. After all was said and done it ended up costing $1.6 billion per launch - about $30,000 per pound of payload. The Falcon Heavy costs about $0.1 billion (in reusable mode) and brought the costs down to less than $700/lb.
That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it.
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As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted).
>So for instance the Space Shuttle was only retired in 2011. After all was said and done it ended up costing $1.6 billion per launch - about $30,000 per pound of payload. The Falcon Heavy costs about $0.1 billion (in reusable mode) and brought the costs down to less than $700/lb.
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison? Each shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion when including development cost (that is, $200 billion in total spending on the STS program / 135 launches); as your link discusses, the incremental cost per launch was "merely" $450-500 million. The $0.1 billion figure per Falcon Heavy launch is only the incremental cost since we don't know how much Falcon Heavy cost to develop (And how to account for the Falcon 9 development costs that Heavy is heavily based on?). Obviously Falcon 9/Heavy has every potential for launching far more times than the shuttle, further reducing the development cost allocated to each launch (or at least, until Starship gets going I guess). But we ought to be as accurate as possible in comparing Falcon and STS.
It's all about what the customer pays. In the case of the Space Shuttle the customer also completely paid for the development of the launch system, so it doesn't really make sense to exclude that. It's also fair to include it because it's also included for SpaceX. When we say a Falcon Heavy got launch costs down to below $700/lb, that also includes a enough of a profit margin built in to completely fund their past operations and development, as well as future ones.
SpaceX's 'real' (in the sense you're speaking of) per launch costs are going to be substantially lower than even $700/lb. In the case of Boeing/Lockeed/etc, they didn't have to pay for any of this - as it was all completely taxpayer funded. That should have enabled them to offer prices that would be unbeatable by any company paying for their own operations.
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To put this another way, imagine Boeing et al operated like SpaceX, or frankly most any "normal" company does. They would need to set their launch prices in a fashion such that they'd be able to recoup their tens of billions of dollars in development costs on the Space Shuttle, and then also add a profit margin on top. It's likely their charged cost per launch would have been even higher than $1.6 billion!
> It's all about what the customer pays. In the case of the Space Shuttle the customer also completely paid for the development of the launch system, so it doesn't really make sense to exclude that.
Good point. I agree that from the customer's perspective, the flyaway cost is what matters. That said, wouldn't that also mean that for Starlink launches, the development cost would still have to be amortized across them when they are not for other launches? That doesn't feel right to me; surely the flyaway/incremental cost is still what matters.
That link compares a cargo Dragon mission to ISS against a Shuttle launch. Did a Shuttle mission have more overhead because of the people on board? I'm not clear if the Shuttle cost is just the launch, or the whole manned mission with all the astronaut preparation.
That begs an interesting comparison in fuel usage (kJ or $ basis): supplying dV for one pound to orbit vs. the energy required to perform the work needed to overcome ~8,000 miles of marginal drag from +1lb of cargo on a ship.
Fuel usage being the limiter of terminal economics once launch systems are commodified to the degree ships are.
Asteroid mining I think is one of the most interesting initial space industries. Something silly like a single asteroid having metals with current valuations of a million times the global GDP. Obviously you can't sell for that much but asteroid mining could make a lot of commodities become insanely cheap, and that would enable some pretty amazing things here at home, and in space.
Like what if steel were cheaper than plastic? If there was enough of it around to build a bridge between New York and London? If you could build a ship the size of Manhattan and then a city on top of it to roam the oceans? If you could build entire cities in orbit or city-ships that slowly wandered the solar system.
Yes, send up the robot miners. Plow the results onto the moon a safe but close distance to a base. Manufacture parts in lower G and far easier vacuum (it's super useful for MANY industrial things). Possibly even use solar collector ovens to melt/cook.
Returning bulk products to earth might not be viable in the short term, but this could really bootstrap what we do off planet and I'm hopeful it might eventually make space elevators viable which would open a lot of options.
Think of all the science you could do with asteroids! Peer into the early history of the solar system . . . see what precursors to life existed before Earth was habitable. . . and all people think about is how fast they can strip-mine our extraterrestrial heritage. . . All that belongs in a museum!
Imagine vacuum foundries. AFAIU lot of metallurgy gets very complicated by the ubiquity of everything rusting all the time, exponentially moreso if it becomes hot.
Also, wont it theoretically speed up and decrease international shipping + travel. We should be able to go from the US to Japan in an hour or two in the future.
I am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast supersonic flight. You can get almost anywhere on Earth in 36 hours' notice with conventional jet travel relatively cheaply on 1-2 weeks of US median income for a return ticket - that sweet spot of speed and cost is hard to beat.
I think there is a pretty large market for a trip to space and an hour flight from LA to New Zealand, New York-Sydney, London-Shanghai, etc. for $10-20k. What an amazing combination that would be.
I don't think there are many cities that have suitable launch sites near them. It's unlikely they'll ever get approval to launch over populated areas, or even from most populated coastal locations.
Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem. Planes don't split in two and have half return to the launch site but Starships do. So you could land the upper stage in Tokyo, but then what? How do you get a booster there for the return journey?
Personally I doubt they'll even use these to bring people to orbit anytime soon. I think they're purpose built for launching massive LEO constellations.
> Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem. Planes don't split in two and have half return to the launch site but Starships do. So you could land the upper stage in Tokyo, but then what? How do you get a booster there for the return journey?
IIRC, the suborbital point-to-point transport use case doesn’t use the booster (SuperHeavy), just Starship.
Yeah the short term approach for crewed Starship seems likely to involve transporting crew to a Starship once it is already in orbit and vice versa for return.
The NFL wants to expand to Europe, Asia, South America badly. Problem is the logistics of Mach-1 air travel won't allow that. Same for the NBA, NHL, and MLB. A true world super league of futbol.
We're talking 10s of billions of dollars in new annual revenue for these sports leagues ... if they could transport a whole team anywhere in the world in 4-5 hours.
It costs a couple hundred thousand per flight for a team? Um, the Super Bowl brought in 600 million in ad revenue and probably another 50-200 million in ticket costs.
A transcontinental flight ranges from low five figures for a long range business jet to upper five/lower six figures for a widebody jetliner. Those are machines purpose built for the job of moving people transcontinental distances. They benefit from decades of heritage building tens of thousands of units leading to extremely aggressive cost optimization. I just can't see Starship getting the cost per flight down into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Not to mention the boring (but important) constraint of trying to insure a team of valuable athletes flying around in a rocket with way less of a safety record than conventional air travel.
That said, having a sports team arrive in town by literally descending from the heavens on a burning rocket sounds badass. Unfortunately I can't really see it happening, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
sub-orbital military applications would be risky as they'd look like an ICBM launch to other nuclear powers. Commercial rockets depend on advance public disclosure of launch dates to stave off WW3 from itchy trigger fingers.
Watch Elon call it something like Airship and have it be fit for tens to hundreds of people per launch with no need for a pilot (though one may be present). It'd take twenty years to get to market, sure, but hey that's progress.
I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.
It failed because trading slightly shorter flight time for much higher cost was not worthwhile. Instead, airliners have been optimized for cost reduction and efficiency at high subsonic speeds.
I am aware that airlines today fly slower than 50 years ago, to improve fuel efficiency. That said, all orders except the British and French flag carriers' were canceled because of the overland bans, correspondingly greatly increasing the per-unit cost of those that were sold. I think the NYC-to-London/Paris routes were (slightly) profitable; were there no overland bans, are there really no other routes that Concorde could also have flown?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this was definitely a key factor that made Concorde into a niche product.
It's not that customers preferred slower and cheaper flights over Concorde—they didn't, Concorde had very healthy average occupancy rates and operating the flights was very profitable for BA and Air France (they got the planes for free, of course).
It's that you can't fly a 1960s plane forever and you also can't amortize the design and development cost of new models with the only addressable market being first class customers travelling between the East Coast and a couple of European capitals (and this was directly caused by the overland flight restrictions).
It was cancelled because Boeing were late and over budget; by the time they started work on a prototype, Concorde was already being shown at airshows, and the US Senate voted to stop throwing more money at them. Sonic booms were at most one contributing factor among many to that senate vote.
Concorde was also late and over budget. And until Congress defunded the 2707, it had more pending orders from more airlines than Concorde did. Sonic booms weren’t the only reason for the cancellation but they were probably the single biggest reason.
Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.
But imagine the PsyOps impact of the enemy looking up and seeing the US raining down literal ODSTs on them ;)
Realistically, they'd be dropping into an allied base in-theatre with a pad able to support a Starship landing, and then taking conventional means the rest of the way. Of course, I suspect that when it comes to "drop operators from space" vs. "train extra operators who can be forward deployed," the latter is probably going to be way more cost efficient. Would make for a cool movie though.
The fundamental physics involved in suborbital flights mean that you are likely experiencing sustained acceleration of 3+ Gs minimum. That is a lot, something near the max g force of a roller coaster but lasting for minutes. Combine that with the launch/landing zones needing to be many miles from anything, and it isn't really ready for primetime. Just for reference 1.3 Gs is the max sustained load you will feel in a regular airliner, very rarely 1.5 Gs for terrain avoidance.
For cargo, maybe medical stuff like moving organ donations around, but largely I can't imagine a ton of use cases where getting something to an antipode in 3 or 4 hours is that much more valuable than getting it there in 19 hours.
If you’re a military unit about to get wiped out by an enemy force due to running out of ammo, I imagine getting 100 tons of ammo in 1 hour vs in 19 hours would be a big difference?
The scenario where you have access to a space launch system, and an LZ at the front, and abundant supplies on the opposite side of the earth, but your logistics have failed to keep supplies in theater doesn't exist.
Forces that run out of ammo don't have access to cutting edge ICBMs is a rule that I would bet money on.
It might actually be cheaper even if the booster is expended.
Falcon9 is estimated to cost about $30M/launch. $20M to build the upper stage, and $10M to launch. Starship is estimated to cost about $100M to build both the booster and the second stage. Add $10M to launch.
$110M is insane. Anything under $1B seems unfathomable. $25M for a 2MN full flow staged combustion engine seems cheap. SpaceX plans on building them for $250K a piece. They're not there yet, but current estimates of $1M a piece are just as insane.
Considering the reusable Falcon 9 costs more than twice as much as launching a Soyuz despite the reusable components. It's a bit of a boondoggle, but I am so glad we have national capacity for launching payloads.
