> With an eventual flight rate of once per day per Starship,
Gwynne Shotwell said that their business plan for using Starship to compete with long-distance airliners involved making about a dozen trips per day per Starship.
Gwynne Shotwell said that their business plan for using Starship to compete with long-distance airliners involved making about a dozen trips per day per Starship.
Gagarin flew for around 108 minutes, so orbital velocity allows longest trip between two points on Earth in about 54 minutes. Shorter trips could be less, but liftoff-landing take roughly a fixed amount of time.
Twelve trips per day is 2 hours per trip. Taking 40 minutes of flight, there are 1 hour 20 minutes to get onboard, to get off board, to handle luggage (if needed?), to refuel and check systems. Wonder how does it look from airlines operation prospective.
My uneducated guess would be that refueling of a starship alone is likely to take a long time if you're pumping in 1,200 tons of fuel.
1. https://your.heathrow.com/happens-aircraft-turn-around-briti...
Flights that want to orbit over the poles take off aiming perpendicular to the rotation instead. A few satellites have been launched backwards intentionally.
P2P sub orbital hops are either direction, 30-40 minutes, maybe 25 for shorter trips like London to New York.
Low sun synchronous orbits are approximately the same as polar oribts, more perpendicular than retrograde. I'm not sure if we use high sun synchronous orbits for anything?
Majority of LEO sats are sun sync
However, satellites heading to polar orbits of course launch north or south, and famously Israel launches things into retrograde orbits, due west, because of lack of suitable launching locations that head east.
In the case of suborbital hops, it doesn't matter, because your target isn't orbital speed, and what you lose in free speed you gain back in your target coming towards you as you hop.
Safety/redundancy of rockets (including SpaceX's) compared to airliners is abysmal—about five orders of magnitude worse.
With passenger manifests in the hundreds (necessary for the economics to work), and with any failure being catastrophic, you'll be seeing multiple Tenerife disasters [1] per year.
You also can't launch a rocket (especially one that big) anywhere near a major city for sound and safety reasons, which means at best you are building an offshore spaceport, which is terrible for the logistics and economics. But that's still nothing compared to the safety problem.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
What about landing in a 2000 foot deep hole in the ground?
Humans can build walls 1km high or more without much difficulty, and by the time the rocket is 1km up, it is already moving pretty fast, and is already much further away.
Near the rocket, the loudness is over 200dB, which the essentially the loudest sound that can be experienced at sea level, because the pressure is fluctuating between two atmospheres and zero. That sound level is enough to melt concrete.[1] Ground crews would have to be at considerable distance to avoid serious danger from the sound alone.
I don't know how you got the idea that a 1km wall is "easy", but a 13 mile wall is out of the question, let alone a rocket-resistant one.
The tallest structure in the world is 0.83km high. The second tallest is 0.63km, and most of the structures in the 0.6km height range are guyed masts and not free-standing structures.
At that height, the only effective structures are tubular systems and guyed systems, to resist the lateral loads of wind at altitude. Turning that into a wall is going to be difficult, especially one that is designed to resist the massive forces of the pressure wave with rocket launch.
If I could catch a "flight" to Australia (from the UK) in the time it takes to fly to New York it would be game changing. Hell even 4 hours to LA would be preferable to the 11 hour flight time + 2 hours either side it takes now.
But assuming 100 passengers and assuming they get the launch cost down to $5MM (as proposed in the article) that is $5000/seat which is easily comparable to a first class ticket.
Further (optimistic) extrapolating with more and more Starships available, the tech becoming cheaper/more reliable as time goes on I could see that price dropping over the decades. Just as air travel changed over the years from being out of most people's reach to being routine I could see something like this supplanting planes for those ultra long haul routes.
I'd imagine that a Starship would be orders of magnitude louder and once in the air, nothing would stop the low rumbling noise.
It would be a fun math exercise to calculate an acceptable distance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
(And to make this fast enough, probably want those electric seaplane taxis that Harbour Air is getting.)
That said, I imagine that ground effect helps a lot at low heights (like during the landing, and early ascent phase). It could probably help much more by deploying some sort of sleeve/skirt for the booster.
And I guess that if you just want to move your rocket a few hundred meters and don't care for the ground, you could leverage it as well.
Going back to the sleeve idea (which would be like a nozzle for the rocket, a chute or a flying saucer), I would like someone to run the numbers on that. And I always wondered if firing current rockets inside a cannon (or just a trench) would help with initial acceleration (as there is a pressure differential that helps, just like the ground effect).