Hacker News Reader

what’s the seat-kilometre fuel burn on this compared to sub and supersonic jets?

If passenger density was comparable to a typical airliner, an intercontinental E2E flight should be roughly comparable to a subsonic flight. The supersonic flight would be substantially worse. Rockets have the advantage that they very rapidly get out of the dense part of the atmosphere.

In reality a Starship flight would probably sell few very expensive seats instead; just like Boom's aircraft only has 50 seats. Which would make it worse than subsonic flights in terms of fuel used, but still competitive with supersonic.

Starship's payload volume is around 1000 m ^3, which should be about the same as an A380 interior volume.

For a flight time between 20 (minimum) and 40 minutes (maximum) to anywhere on earth, this volume could comfortably fit 1000 passengers per flight.

At 2 or 3 times the price of a regular ticket, their offer would be a direct competitor against business class tickets, if they can reduce enough the risk, and handle logistics of rapid reuse.

Should be much better, you spend most of the time coasting and most of your acceleration in very thin atmosphere, vs a plane that has to cruise down in the soup.

Also, starship has more pressurized volume than a 747. You can fit a lot of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com