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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Aren't you just say "the total addressable market is huge"? That sounds like a good thing for the company trying it.

The size of the market doesn't really matter when your product is not competitive.

As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, shipping a 20ft container from Shenzhen to Los Angeles is about $1200 and takes about 14 days. Assuming you can sail at the same speed, and considering this sail ship has a capacity of about 10 containers, that is a revenue of $24000 / month. In reality you'll only be able to sail 100 to 150 miles a day, so crossing those 6500 miles will take you to 43 to 65 days - or a revenue of $5100-$7800 / month.

How are you going to run your ship for that little, considering you need 12 crew (and 12 additional "guest crew")?

Don't forget that included in that $1200 number there is also the rent of the container, which covers well over that 14 days since you need time to stuff and strip the container with cargo on both sides of the ocean leg.

Sure, given they can compete commercially against containerships. The baseline would be like launching a new containership which is just as good, except it has a couple of thousand crew instead of a dozen.

Uphill battle...

I assume the goal would be to automate the management of the sails so that the crew could still be only a dozen or so large. Replacing crew with computers and electric motors.

Otherwise I would be surprised if you could even make a good faith argument that this will be commercially viable.

Most sailing yachts have this system, and it is generally prone to failure

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