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Comment by Ottolay | Hacker News Reader

The U2 operated at over 20km, so maybe the altitude is higher.

I suspect the greater issue is vehicle cost, lifetime, and safety. A starlink satellite is much smaller (and as result cheaper) and is rumored to have a 5+ year lifetime. Also, at end of life it burns up in the atmosphere. No worry about pushing the life on a component and having it crash and kill someone as a result.

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I’m a bit puzzled by the economy here. Is creating, lunching and orbiting a satellite really cheaper then flying an airplane? Is it really cheaper to have a decommissioned satellite totally burn up in the atmosphere then reusing parts of an airplane to fix another, recycle unusable parts and put the rest in a landfill?

The economics here just seem wrong.

USD2021$15M per Falcon 9 launch (re-used, assuming first launch was paid for by a customer) [0]

60 Starlink satellites per Falcon 9 launch [1]

= + USD2021$250,000 in launch costs per satellite (+ manufacturing / ops costs)

[0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...

[1] https://space4peace.org/starlink-gears-up-to-launch-nearly-1...

As a reference a new Cessna 172 is $432,000 [1] and that is not a high tech aircraft.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2021/04/28/prices-fo...

This feels like comparing potatoes and pineapples.

A new Cessna vs a used Falcon 9 launch hardly seems like a fair comparison. The cost of the rocket is written off as externalized. The actual satellites are not factored in at all. Really what we are comparing here is the cost of an operation vs the cost of an airplane. The economics still seem dubious.

And a Cessna 172 has to be human safe.

Indeed, and the $432,000 is the price on the consumer market. A mass order of Zephyrs by, say, the British Government is sure to land a much smaller price tag per unit then a lone hobby pilot can expect when buying a single airplane.

On top of this, if Starship is successful ("fully and rapidly reusable") it could bring the launch cost down another order of magnitude.

And because Starlink is building thousands of satellites it has economies of scale that no previous satellite/spacecraft had.

If Airbus is successful, you'd have to compare SpaceX's scale to a similarly massive manufacturing operation of solar-powered aircraft. And you could theoretically make money from multiple sources since the aircraft could carry multiple pieces of equipment. You could make money from being an ISP and from selling imaging services.

Glide based efficiency crafts absolutely need thick atmosphere. They don't have supersonic jets.

The U2 was subsonic. Also, un-powered gliders can get up to impressive altitudes.

https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2018/09/ai...

> The unmanned glider, which is powered by two small propellers,

I’m confused by the article and the above comment. Isn’t a glider by definition unpowered?

Checkout [1]. Easier to say "motor glider" or "powered glider" than "powered airplane with glider like configuration".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_glider

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