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Comment by dwaltrip | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know, Starship is the first fully-reusable orbital rocket.

If they manage to get it working as designed, it would radically change the economics of going to space. You can imagine the savings from not having to rebuild your vehicle after every use.

This would be a paradigm-shift and would likely cause a massive boom in human space activity. Space tourism and in-orbit manufacturing are two commonly discussed use cases that would become far more economical. Existing use cases such as remote sensing and communication would expand.

All this could cause positive feedback loops of innovation, cost reduction, induced demand, and so on. A new era of human space activity. That's what all the hubbub is about.

P.S. Not to mention the slightly more far-fetched possibility of human settlements on Mars…

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I wrote this 5 years ago, but it's still relevant:

The Falcon 9 is $62 million, or $2,719 per kg to LEO. The Falcon Heavy is $2,351 per kg when expendable or $1,411 when reused.

The BFR is supposed to have 2.5x the payload for 8% of the cost: $46 per kilogram. Even fully expendable it's $2,233 per kg. That's INSANE. It's space elevator money:

> [For a space elevator, the cost varies according to the design. Bradley C. Edwards received funding from NIAC from 2001 to 2003 to write a paper,[8] describing a space elevator design. In it he stated that: "The first space elevator would reduce lift costs immediately to $100 per pound" ($220/kg).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics)

If the BFR actually becomes reality it turns a journey to orbit into an airplane ride. A $10,000 airplane ride that will shake your fillings loose, but make no mistake: that completely changes everything about space. It makes putting satellites in orbit around Jupiter as hard as visiting the north pole. Fucking TV hosts will be able to go for a quick jaunt around the moon.

If the BFR happens, we'll have a mars base just because it would be so cheap it's a no-brainer. Building a new ISS would be about as hard as building a new Sealab.

For those who are confused about the acronym, as I was:

BFR was the code-name for Starship, short for Big Falcon Rocket

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_development#...

Yes, the "F" definitely stands for Falcon

It’s also a play on the BFG from Doom, aka Big Fucking Gun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFG_(weapon)

If Starship flies as often as Musk says, one Starship would take one year to bring as much mass into orbit as everything ever launched before. Something like that or so I heard.

"If"

It’s a medium-sized if. So many people said they couldn’t land the Falcon-9 booster.

Ignoring the mars stuff, the vision isn’t that crazy, given their track record.

Biggest questions in my mind are: how rapidly reusable will it actually be (e.g. refurbishment costs), how expensive will it be to scale up the ground systems and launch infrastructure, and what the induced demand will actually look like.

I’m taking for granted that they will be able to land the Super Heavy booster. It doesn’t seem that much of a leap from what they have done before.

I agree with you about the technical aspects; what I'm being skeptical about here is the promised radical (100x+) reduction in cost, multiple launches a day, the usual Muskiana.

All this was promised from falcon though.

I don't doubt theres potential savings, I'm dubious that we'll see order of magnitude cost reductions. Escaping earth's gravity is always going to be hard.

Falcon 9 never promised full reusability, only first stage reuse, and it did cause a large reduction in launch costs, as well as pretty obviously representing a paradigm shift considering all the other reusable rockets in development, the surge in funding for space tech startups and megaconstellations becoming practical for private entities.

To emphasize that last point, on the back of Falcon 9, Starlink represents over half of all satellites in orbit and Falcon 9 itself accounts for nearly half of all orbital launches in the past 2-3 years. The lower costs are also evident from the fact that many lower budget NASA missions which would have previously had to rideshare ended up just getting a dedicated F9 for less than the rideshare would've cost.

Falcon 9 had "second stage reusability" the same way that Tesla has full self-driving. That was the plan, but then it turned out to be really hard.

But at least with SpaceX, they simply gave up and said they were focusing efforts elsewhere.

BFR is more capable than Falcon, it's only natural to invest in projects with better prospects.

> Falcon 9 had "second stage reusability" the same way that Tesla has full self-driving.

So it's in version 11 of the beta?

imagine the meme of two button options to press with the dude sweating over which to choose, and one is "tesla released FSD too fast" and the other is "tesla is keeping FSD in beta forever"

Though it should be mentioned that SpaceX currently no longer pursues Starship upper stage reusability, as the upcoming upper stage prototypes do no longer have a heat shield. Is seems likely that they want to first finalize lower stage reuse, as it is likely much more expensive to produce.

That just means they're not testing reentry in the next several flights. They have a new heat shield design that will fly later.

Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse.

Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing version, probably won't need a heat shield, but they'll definitely need shielding on any version meant to bring a crew back to Earth. They're just not bothering with heat shielding for tests that don't need it.

(I don't know what kind of shielding the Starship that was supposed to launch today has.)

Starship launching and landing humans on Earth seems quite far away, if it happens at all. Of course they need the heat shield until then, but the much more immediate benefit of the heat shield comes from reducing cost of cargo flights by allowing for reusability of the upper stage. For ordinary non-human payloads, mainly satellites.

Second stage reusability was certainly proposed by SpaceX:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/11/musk-wants-to-make-fal...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/this-six-year-old-vi...

https://youtu.be/4rC2Z5El-8E [Everyday Astronaut - Can SpaceX Reuse a second stage?]

That was not promised from Falcon. The upper stage is not reusable and is 20% of the hardware cost, so at best Falcon could reduce costs by a factor of five. Plus it runs a dirtier fuel so it needs more refurbishment. What they did expect from Falcon is to be significantly cheaper than any other major launch provider, and they achieved that, but there's only so far you can go when you're building a whole new upper stage for every launch.

Orbit is hard but the actual fuel cost is not all that high. If you have a rocket that's cheap to build, and you can amortize that cost over a large number of launches, you're mostly just paying fuel and ground services.

They did have a fully reusable Falcon program that got cancelled to concentrate on BFR.

https://youtu.be/sWFFiubtC3c

Interesting.

The Delta Heavy is $12,340 per kg to LEO. Saturn V was ~$8,800 in current costs. Falcon Heavy is $1,411 per kg when reused.

For a $10 million launch, Starship would cost $67 per kg. Musk has said costs could come down to 1-2 million, although I would disregard that given the cost of the fuel is ~$1 million.

Musk is absolutely utterly dismissive of marginal costs like support and maintenance, but $20-30 million per amortized launch ($134-$200 per kg) does not seem that crazy. The structure and materials of the rocket are absurdly cheaper than the Falcon Heavy, and the cost of getting all that on a pad is pretty much constant. The Heavy has 27 Merlin engines, Starship has 33 Raptor engines. If it really is that much cheaper and that much cheaper to refly, a 10x reduction is definitely possible.

It depends also on how often they can reuse the lower and upper stage, and how large the difference between launch cost and launch price will be. As far as I know, only China is currently developing a rocket comparable to Starship (Long March 9) and it will not compete with Starship for customers. So if there are indeed large internal cost cuts for Starship, large price cuts seem to be wishful thinking.

All that assumes a market for a rocket as big as starship though.

If you're still stuck launching the same kind of payloads as smaller rockets then the benefit will be smaller.

For a rocket like starship to make sense you need an ~ order of magnitude increase in the market which isn't a given.

If you look at large jets, that wasn't the future. On the other hand cargo shipping seems to be heading that way, so I'll accept it could go either way, I'm just not convinced.

I just have a feeling this is more akin to musk buying Twitter, than musk landing a first stage falcon for the first time.

The market even at $300 per kg (if the starship eventually costs what Falcon costs) is dramatically different from the market today.

Is that a given?

What's the driver of satellite size? Is it the size of current rockets? Cube says etc would tend to point the other way.

What the total cost of a satellite? Fine sending a 1 tonne satellite to space costs $300k but if it still costs $x million to build the thing you're still looking at a select group who can afford it.

Taking those 2 things together how many organisations will opt for the absolute cheapest option giving up the ability to get a dedicated launch to a given orbit?

What are these new markets? Is asteroid mining going to become economically viable? Is lunar exploration going to be profitable? It's cheap to get to the middle of the Atlantic, it isn't exactly a hive of economic activity though. Yes there's starlink, but that has downsides relative to wired alternatives so the market is always going to be limited. Yes starlink is a massive expansion of the space economy, but that just highlights how small the space economy was and is, which just raises the question of whether such a massive rocket like starship will be able to be supported.

'build it and they will come' sounds nice, but it isn't a given.

Part of the insane costs of satellites comes from the launch cost: If the launch is expensive, the satellite needs to work, and it needs to last. If every kg you launch is $$$, it's worth using much more expensive materials to make it lighter.

If the launch is closer to the price of shipping a parcel internationally, you can cut a lot of corners. No more specially optimized titanium parts where cheap sheet metal will do. No more space-rated parts at 100x markup, launch with off the shelf parts, see what fails, and iterate based on that.

No more designing for super redundancy and quintuple-checking everything, if it fails let it fall out of orbit and send up a new one (LEO satellites deorbit reasonably quickly, so not a major "orbital waste" concern).

Are we still taking Musk's word on... anything? After all that's happened?

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