Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

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His E2E Starhip idea is so completely unviable and unrealistic that is is hard to even pick which argument should be used first :) . Everything about this idea is so wrong.

1. Price. Not viable, even using fantasy calculation of 2mil/flight (I suspect it will be at least 5-10 times more). You get 20000$ per ticket assuming full utilisation of 100 passengers. That's first class ticket price, or a seat at the shared business jet. So only rich people can afford it, but it is maybe realistic.

2. Utilisation - you will not find 100 people who simultaneously want to travel from A to B in the same exact hour while planning this trip weeks/months in advance. Planning trips is a vacation mode, business trips happen sporadically and quickly. This automatically throws off item #1 because then your price will skyrocket due to fewer people travelling.

3. Safety for passengers - no comments. Obvious blocker even on its own. Also Gov authorities will demand passengers training etc. (billionaire would go to months long training to save few hours of flight? lolno)

3b. Evacuation requirement. There is no possibility for quick evacuation of the 100 humans in spacesuits on the launchpad, so Gov will ban this idea.

4. G forces. Old and frail billionaires won't be able to fly this due to health concerns.

5. Landing pads. They need to be dozens of kilometers of both start and destination. This will eliminate any fantasies about saving time. And they will introduce immense additional expenses (so no 2mil flights).

6. Countries paranoia. Ballistic missiles of foreign force regularly overflying their countries in their airspace? Won't happen. The Axis of Pissed Contrarian Kids will block their airspace on principle (China, Ruzzia, all middle east, half of the South America etc.).

7. Reliability and reusability is not yet proven at all.

There are probably ten more issues with his plan if someone would sit and carefully analyze it and calculate costs.

tl;dr

Both hyperjets and passenger Starship is the same basic idea - futuristic travel via small but advanced "pods". Where "pods" is whatever futuristic looking vehicle of the day is used, with small capacity and unrealistic use case. Like hyperloop, autonomous cars, monorail cars, flying taxis, private rail vehicles etc. All complete bullshit.

All good points. I think this is why the main customer they are courting for this use case is the US military, which doesn't care about many of those things in peace time, and would care even less in war time.

There is a similar list for the military application, at least in my mind.

I used to love this idea, but when you actually think it through it's just not necessary / borderline plain dumb. Unless I am missing something, I really hope that US tax dollars are not thrown into this boondoggle.

1. This will come up on any ballistic missile radar as a threat. "Oh don't worry nuclear armed enemy, it's just cargo."

2. Unless it's a one-way trip, this would require huge infrastructure investment for "stage zero" and for logistics required for the oxygen and methane tank farms at both ends.

3. The trajectory is much more predictable than the flight path of say a C-17. This would greatly simplify interception.

4. The landing options are hugely limited compared to say a C-17. There is no go-around option. LZ got hot during transit? Too bad, we are landing!

5. I cannot identify the type of cargo that would be better served by the least stealthy delivery method possible, and most fragile landing infrastructure, only to save a dozen or so hours of transit time. Prepositioning the cargo closer to potential trouble zones and using traditional aircraft seems to be a much better idea in all cases that I can imagine.

It could be powerful against non peer adversaries. There are only a few countries that track ballistic launches, and with luck they would be delayed relaying the information to whatever useful fool of theirs the US military is invading until after SpaceForce Starship lands.

But, to attack my point, the utility is very limited - essentially for special ops insertion an hour or so before all the conventional forces show up. A very expensive paratrooper insertion with the possibility of a one way trip.

Even then the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers banging the door down are probably too vulnerable to SAM during the last phase of flight. I guess the hope would be that operators would ignore or be confused by a massive radar blip traveling at high speed before the suicidal burn?

The more realistic case for Starship is shipping lots and lots of military tonnage to orbit. Rods from God are achievable if Starship reuse pans out, and those are truly perfect hour zero weapons before the stealth planes show up.

I will just comment on the cost part. 100 percent Reusable rockets + saving money on food for international flights + passengers in tight pods with no walking room + no astronaut gear + little to no staff + 10 flights per day. Even if you only take 10 passengers a flight, you have a cost a little bit more than business class. If you take the number of hours a person saves and multiply that by executive wages ($200k), the savings are a no Brainer. Of anything, there is upside in raising the price.

Half of what you wrote is either unrealistic or completely unrealistic.

1) fully multi-reusable rocket - not yet proven. It can happen, or can't. No need to imagine anything - Shuttle famously had been marketed and designed as super rapidly and fully reusable. We all know how it really went.

2a) food costs - negligible savings.

2b) inability to eat tasty or even gourmet food, in a normal human position and environment (jet or first class seat) is actually a negative factor. But let's disregard it.

3) passengers in pods ??? - what's a "pod" here? A space suit with a different brand name?

4) passengers without space suit - lolno, won't happen. Maybe it would be some fancy low profile suits, like new SpaceX ones for Dragon use only, without space walks and EVA capabilities. Even then they would still be pressurized airtight suits. This is actually yet another negative factor for my list above. Manufacturing thousands of unused space suits in different sizes, so that on any flight they would have a hundred suits in arbitrary random sizes ready at each start complex is a laughable idea. Just the suits cost 0.5 million dollars each (4 suits = 1 fantasy Starship launch price (fantasy price, not the ship, obviously)). And their maintenance is also not cheap, regular checks, repairs, replacements, cleaning, etc. Costs would be astronomical.

5) little to no staff - doubtful but maybe. 2 pilots would be needed at minimum, and I suspect one or two more aux flight engineers too. No service crew, yes, that would be cost savings. But lets look wider. Maintenance crews for the Starhip - much bigger and much more senior and technical. Dispatchers at the cosmodromes - a lot of people in every location, dozens of people per location. Aircraft can be controlled by a lone dispatcher, maybe with an assistant. And the list goes on. There will be much more people involved per 100 passengers than with any aircraft of any size.

6) 10 flights a day - funnily enough, some industries DO NOT benefit from economies of scale. Like almost at all. Starship is one of them. Regardless of the number of flights per time period, if you will increase number of rockets, their costs would almost wont go down. They will stabilize after first few units and stay constant. Same with all operational costs. If you need to fuel 1 Starship you pay X money. For 10 Starships you pay 10X and no less. If you service 1 flight you pay in aggregate Y human/hours of highly qualified workforce wages. If you service 10 flights, you will pay 10Y for human/hours. The only scalable component here is engine production, but after stabilizing manufacturing at some large number per year, cost drop would also stop.

And finally - 10 passengers per flight is not 20k, it is 200k dollars, which is 2-3 times more than entire top model large business jet rental for the whole flight. And jet is available on demand at the time and destination which YOU decide, airport is conveniently located almost in the city border and there are literally no restrictions of any kind in such flight for rich people. E2E rockets are not viable.

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