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Comment by Ballu | Hacker News Reader

"The cargo version can also be used for rapid point-to-point Earth transport."

Why no one is talking about this. This will be game changer if can be done with bigger payload. There are models created earlier that using rocket technology/mechanism, LA-HK can be reached in 2 hours. This can have huge impact on avionics esp with trade.

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Ask yourself -- what object would be so massive and heavy and yet needed with such immediacy that a company would be willing to pay millions -- perhaps beyond the cost of the object itself -- to ship in a sub-orbital manner? Large and critical infrastructure components like generators, large piping and ducts, etc. are already transported at a fraction of the cost by the likes of the AN-225 Mirya within a matter of hours. What would shaving 15-24 hours in shipping times do for a project?

Military definitely. Commercial passenger travel possibly.

This could be a case of supply creating its own demand.

I mean there's not _no_ market, but I agree it's specialized. I could see this capability making sense for high-value, time-sensitive construction projects, such as oil rigs or wind turbines.

Also, the "global" nature may lend itself to container ship salvage or search and rescue. Esp. if the Starship doesn't need to turn around immediately, I can see a market for that.

All of these seem like they will need special-purpose custom Starships operated by a non SpaceX entity.

You are concentrating only on speed and possibly cost. But there is another thing to consider.

For military use, the fact that you do not need consent of third states to use their infrastructure and can support operations on the other side of the globe directly, is golden.

Remember the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Everyone who helped Israel was subject to Arab oil embargo, AFAIK including countries that just allowed American Israel-bound planes to land and refuel.

Similar things may happen again somewhere around South China Sea.

Consent isn't a problem for the US. It's either allied with a nation or able to bully them into doing whatever.

power station transformers? not sure if they are too heavy for starship, but loosing enough of those can take hundreds of millions of households offline for a long time.

also, in a much darker turn of events: organs for billionaires and political leaders.

reply to self: I wanted to write hundreds of thousands first and then changed my opinion to millions. hundreds of millions is probably hyperbole except for a solar storm or a global nuclear war.

https://warisboring.com/space-marines-with-jetpacks/

> what object would be so massive and heavy and yet needed with such immediacy that a company would be willing to pay millions -- perhaps beyond the cost of the object itself -- to ship in a sub-orbital manner?

The human ego. Rich people.

weapons/munitions in a war?

Disaster Recovery/Rescue. Some major ecological disaster where what you need is on the wrong ocean

That seems very expensive and inefficient compared to planes or ships. What's the use case you're imagining where a plane is just too slow?

The only thing I can think of is if some service like FedEx can amortize the cost of the launch across a very large number of low-mass items and charge a premium for fast delivery.

Still, I'd assume that this would use vastly more fuel per mass of cargo moved than a plane, and should probably be avoided for CO2 emission reasons even if it works out economically. Is my assumption wrong?

SpaceX's goal[1] is to be able to ship people for around the cost of a business-class ticket[2] to the same destination.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dar8P3r7GYA

Sometimes it isn't speed. Sometimes it's about not having to go through everything in between.

The last time I remember seeing calculations on this, it worked out that it does use more fuel per kilogram than a cargo plane, but only about 1.5x as much - the reason being that the starship spends most of its flight coasting with nearly zero drag, which an airplane has to fight drag in the atmosphere the whole way to its destination.

Huh, that's interesting and completely at odds with my intuition. If it works out like that maybe it is an economically and (sort of) environmentally viable option.

For cargo I don't really see how it could have that much on an impact. Using aircraft we can already transport large volumes of items fairly quickly around the world, yet most freight is still transported by sea because it's cheaper.

A standard '96" pallet' on aircraft is 317cm x 244cm x 244cm (125" x 96" x 96") and can hold 6,804 kg (15,000lb). Specialised aircraft can carry even more - some aircraft can transport trains!

The only place where I could see needing to ship stuff quicker - that could actually afford it as I'm guessing it won't be cheap - would be the military. I'm not sure that's nessasarily a good thing though...

Starship carries 100 metric tons, a C-17 only about 70, but can get there in 90 minutes, which could be critical for the military.

But does that include the load-out time? I'd imaging the process for loading a C-17 and getting it in the air is much quicker than for this Starship.

I'd expect loading+unloading to be similar in duration once the program has developed far enough.

The limiting factor that I think is prohibitively limiting starship from dropshipping cargo, is the need for a landing (and launch!) site, an optional SH booster for the return flight and 1200 tons of methalox fuel to get the ship back to base for reuse (4800 with SH booster). So it'd need the rocket equivalent of an airplane carrier, which has not been developed yet.

Pretty sure it would be much faster than 2 hours (at least of flight time).

If it's not cheaper than overseas shipping or cargo aircraft, it won't work. It's basic economics.

That doesn't take into account the speed of delivery. There may be some customer out there that doesn't know when they need something delivered, but once they know, they'd be willing to pay an extravagant amount of money to have whatever it is there in 30 minutes.

The most immediate thing I can think of is a bomb, which is pretty much exactly that need :) But there may be other use cases with similar required delivery times.

Amazon Prime Now, but for shipping cars and anywhere on the planet? :)

This is SpaceX, they have literally shipped cars _off_ of the planet as well :P

Man, people have been citing "basic economics" at musk for over a decade. You can't break into the US automotive industry with an independent startup, you can't cut launch costs by an order of magnitude, there's no market for a global constellation of LEO networking satellites, you can't double the number of sattelites in orbit in 5 years, the list goes on.

I don't bet against Elon Musk anymore.

If you've ever paid more for quicker shipping, there's a market for this.

To be fair, SpaceX hasn't cut costs by an order of magnitude. They've made things significantly cheaper, but the list price for a barebones Falcon 9 is about $50-60m, while an Atlas V is around $100-120m.

Well, they’re targeting launching much more mass than F9 for a much lower cost with Starship (<$10M). So not done yet, but it seems like they have a good shot at it. And if they pull off orbital refueling, then they can take those huge amounts of mass to geo and beyond.

Correct, but that's a forward-looking statement. The comment I was replying to was written in the past-tense.

Yeah, you're right, I put some "haven't quite happened yet" stuff in there, but the point I was making was that there was a time when discounting the man was the rational thing to do, at this point I think he's proven his ability to do what he says he's going to do, and the ones I stretched a little are well on their way to happening.

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