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.
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.
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.
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?]
But at least with SpaceX, they simply gave up and said they were focusing efforts elsewhere.
So it's in version 11 of the beta?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.