Comment by sveit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sveit | Hacker News Reader

"One of the really interesting interesting things to contemplate is the total mass to orbit capability of a large reusable system where you have a significant fleet in operation. If you've got something like Starship where you've got maybe 150 tons capable to orbit and the ship can fly, is capable of say theoretically flying four times a day but you know they call it like 75 percent uptime so theoretical three times a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. So that's like about a thousand flights a year for the ship. The booster can do a lot more than that. This is obviously max theoretical. You've got, you know, 150 tons that service, 150,000 tons to orbit per year per ship. If you've got say ten ships you'd have [...] one and a half million tons to orbit per year. Twenty ships you've got three million tons to orbit per year. I think the total rest of world capacity, if you take all rockets on earth including Falcon, the total capacity to orbit I think is around two to three hundred tons currently. Total Earth capacity to orbit is about two to three hundred tons if all rockets launched at max rate. So we're talking about something that is with a fleet of starships a thousand times more than all earth capacity combined. All other rockets combined would be 0.1% including ours."

How is this not massively disruptive to the entire space launch industry?

It is. Three orders of magnitude leaves everybody else in the dust.

I wonder if this applies to pricing as well. If we get to single-digit dolar prices pe kg to orbit, a tourist ticket would be easily a couple thousand dollars - equivalent to a business class plane ticket.

One more order of magnitude and you can start shipping ready-to-be assembled habitats and fuel factories to Mars. And Boston Dynamics robots to assemble them.

At these prices you can start sending empty nuclear reactors for power, and lift heavily shielded nuclear fuels as well. Not puny RTG generators for a couple hundred watts but 1000MW generators that will sustain cities.

So many possibilities!

It is, and is supposed to be. Elon loves to talk about Mars, but the real story behind this architecture is complete ownership of spacelift until someone else catches up. Then the story becomes enabling actual space industry.

Isn't space launch already demand constrained? SpaceX has flown 9 times this year, with a few dozen undated upcoming missions listed as well [0]. He's talking about being able to do tens of thousands of launches per year, but who's going to pay for it? If almost no-one is paying to put a few tons into orbit now, where is the demand for millions of tons a year going to come from?

[0] https://www.spacex.com/missions

I think you would be firmly in “creating completely new markets” territory at that point. It would be like trying to imagine what one would need 1000x as many transistors for, at the dawn of semiconductors. The world certainly wasn’t buying that many vacuum tubes, was it?

From my perspective, these are the big ones in the near term: 1) LEO satellite internet. Fixes the lag issues with GEO orbits, making space internet directly competitive for some applications. 2) Tourism: I would certainly pay a very pretty penny indeed to see the earth from space.

Longer term: 3) Global sun shade or other system for preventing global climate catastrophe. In 30 years I think we’ll be talking a lot about this. 4) Resource extraction, which otherwise doesn’t make sense with expensive rockets. 5) Self sustaining mars base. Still can’t figure out what the economic incentive is for this. It will cost a lot of money for what return exactly?

Spacex hasn’t shown a payload capability yet; ie a starship model with clam doors, but they’re going to at some point I wager. Or an expendable second stage.

A thing being impossible or highly cost prohibitive kind of hampers demand for it, wouldn't you think?

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