I'm curious who his biggest customers will be?
They are also hoping to provide Earth-to-Earth passenger service to compete with airlines on long distance routes, which would be orders of magnitude more launches than any other use. It seems quite unlikely that they could compete on safety though.
Or you might even just start by launching 20 tons of coffee beans, roasting them in orbit and selling them as "Space Coffee" - it migh still be worth it with the per launch costs they have mentioned.
Besides cost and risk there's nothing preventing this from being used on earth, in fact I've already seen the use case mentioned here on HN.
“A military team is working with SpaceX to flesh out the prospect of shipping routes that pass through space, the head of U.S. Transportation Command said Oct. 7.”
“That group could demonstrate as early as 2021 whether quickly sending cargo around the globe via space is feasible, Army Gen. Stephen R. Lyons said.”
“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said at a National Defense Transportation Association event. “Think about that speed associated with the movement of transportation of cargo and people. There is a lot of potential here.”
https://www.airforcemag.com/dod-spacex-may-soon-prove-the-mi...
As in rapid disassembly?
And the obvious next question: given Musk is happy to take ship names from pop culture and sci-fi, might he name one of the Starship vehicles “Enterprise”, and could the Starship Enterprise land on the USS Enterprise (CVN-80)?
I would be interested to see if some form of portable, quickly constructed landing pad could be deployed, much like the mats used as runways during WWII.
Cost per hour, according to https://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/costly-flight-hours/ is $23.811
So, the one way cost to get a C-17 full of cargo anywhere in the world is about $500,000
1 Million round trip.
I had the cost wrong, I thought it was per vehicle, it's per launch... $2,000,000. If it could fly back, it's only $4,000,000 per round trip.... just 4 times the cost of a C-17 delivery and return.
The engine power needed to launch in Earth gravity, even with a small hop fuel load might be too much for engines so close to the ground & with thick atmosphere preventing the exhaust from dissipating.
A one-hour deployment capability anywhere in the world would revolutionise special forces.
(Not that surprising, considering it was a bipartisan idea that predates Trump.)
Hopefully this can be solved with comparable improvements in monitoring and/or adjustments to second strike capabilities.
So, no, launchers for MIRVs are NOT huge.
Speed may be a differentiator like you originally said, I'm not sure if they need to end up around the same speed anyway for reentry or not (ones targeting high altitude blast for EMP maybe don't need to reentry at all?).