I love that Superheavy/Starship can be profitable even if they are expendable.
OTOH imagine if a reusable launch of this costs approximately the same as an expendable Atlas 5 in it's most performant configuration and reliability is proven - NASA could launch a Pluto probe like New Horizons, except it'd be able actually make orbit over there.
But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space.
Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
Which is why the rocket has been discontinued.
This is also why Boeing Starliner is dead man walking. Starliner is only certified for Atlas 5, and there are enough spare boosters for the launches NASA contracted with Boeing for, no more. The consensus is that Boeing will fulfill the contract then that'll be the end of Starliner, which is great for Boeing in the sense that it'll finally close that money-leaking wound, but not great for NASA because the whole point of Starliner + Crew Dragon was to have two separate US-owned ways to send people into space.[1] Even if Starship passes every test going forward ahead of schedule and gets man-rated, NASA would prefer to not have one company provide both methods, but I don't know what would be a better alternative. Sierra finally gets that big contract to man-rate Dream Chaser? Blue Origin?
[1] Setting aside how everyone at the time believed that Starliner would be the first one into orbit
That said, right now it's kind of up in the air, since as it stands, Dragon's second crew contract and Starliner's existing contract are likely to cover all remaining ISS launches. So what's needed afterwards depends on the commercial space stations NASA is pushing for.
I'm not certain what is meant by "certified" because it still hasn't made a human flight test yet.
Notwithstanding the retirement of Atlas and Delta, Starliner was intended to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the ULA Atlas V and Delta IV, and the SpaceX Falcon 9
It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it.
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As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted).
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison? Each shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion when including development cost (that is, $200 billion in total spending on the STS program / 135 launches); as your link discusses, the incremental cost per launch was "merely" $450-500 million. The $0.1 billion figure per Falcon Heavy launch is only the incremental cost since we don't know how much Falcon Heavy cost to develop (And how to account for the Falcon 9 development costs that Heavy is heavily based on?). Obviously Falcon 9/Heavy has every potential for launching far more times than the shuttle, further reducing the development cost allocated to each launch (or at least, until Starship gets going I guess). But we ought to be as accurate as possible in comparing Falcon and STS.
SpaceX's 'real' (in the sense you're speaking of) per launch costs are going to be substantially lower than even $700/lb. In the case of Boeing/Lockeed/etc, they didn't have to pay for any of this - as it was all completely taxpayer funded. That should have enabled them to offer prices that would be unbeatable by any company paying for their own operations.
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To put this another way, imagine Boeing et al operated like SpaceX, or frankly most any "normal" company does. They would need to set their launch prices in a fashion such that they'd be able to recoup their tens of billions of dollars in development costs on the Space Shuttle, and then also add a profit margin on top. It's likely their charged cost per launch would have been even higher than $1.6 billion!
Good point. I agree that from the customer's perspective, the flyaway cost is what matters. That said, wouldn't that also mean that for Starlink launches, the development cost would still have to be amortized across them when they are not for other launches? That doesn't feel right to me; surely the flyaway/incremental cost is still what matters.
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Space Shuttle - $54,500/kg to orbit, $93,400/kg to the ISS
Falcon 9 - $2,720/kg to orbit, $23,300/kg to the ISS
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The Falcon Heavy is about $1500/kg to orbit. Note the units as we're swapping between kg and pounds in this thread pretty regularly.
That's about what it costs to fly freight across an ocean.
Fuel usage being the limiter of terminal economics once launch systems are commodified to the degree ships are.
As for the fuel itself, natural gas is much cheaper than jet fuel per unit of combustion energy.
Like what if steel were cheaper than plastic? If there was enough of it around to build a bridge between New York and London? If you could build a ship the size of Manhattan and then a city on top of it to roam the oceans? If you could build entire cities in orbit or city-ships that slowly wandered the solar system.
Returning bulk products to earth might not be viable in the short term, but this could really bootstrap what we do off planet and I'm hopeful it might eventually make space elevators viable which would open a lot of options.
I hope to see in my lifetime a large asteroid brought to Earth orbit, for both mining and as a very large space station.
Think of all the science you could do with asteroids! Peer into the early history of the solar system . . . see what precursors to life existed before Earth was habitable. . . and all people think about is how fast they can strip-mine our extraterrestrial heritage. . . All that belongs in a museum!
/s
Here’s a great place to start: https://www.factoriesinspace.com/
Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem. Planes don't split in two and have half return to the launch site but Starships do. So you could land the upper stage in Tokyo, but then what? How do you get a booster there for the return journey?
Personally I doubt they'll even use these to bring people to orbit anytime soon. I think they're purpose built for launching massive LEO constellations.
IIRC, the suborbital point-to-point transport use case doesn’t use the booster (SuperHeavy), just Starship.
>Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem
You launch them, presumably.
The NFL wants to expand to Europe, Asia, South America badly. Problem is the logistics of Mach-1 air travel won't allow that. Same for the NBA, NHL, and MLB. A true world super league of futbol.
We're talking 10s of billions of dollars in new annual revenue for these sports leagues ... if they could transport a whole team anywhere in the world in 4-5 hours.
It costs a couple hundred thousand per flight for a team? Um, the Super Bowl brought in 600 million in ad revenue and probably another 50-200 million in ticket costs.
That said, having a sports team arrive in town by literally descending from the heavens on a burning rocket sounds badass. Unfortunately I can't really see it happening, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
The Miami Dolphins charter a private 747 with 143 business class seats, 36 economy seats, 26 upper deck business and 10 first class.
Not only do all 55 players need to travel but so do all the people accountable for electronics, medical, gear, coaches and staff, etc.
It's a lot to transport and a lot of risk on one vehicle.
I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.
It's not that customers preferred slower and cheaper flights over Concorde—they didn't, Concorde had very healthy average occupancy rates and operating the flights was very profitable for BA and Air France (they got the planes for free, of course).
It's that you can't fly a 1960s plane forever and you also can't amortize the design and development cost of new models with the only addressable market being first class customers travelling between the East Coast and a couple of European capitals (and this was directly caused by the overland flight restrictions).
Flying Concorde is one of my fondest memories :/
Or, if you're more cynical, because the US' own supersonic airliner failed and they wouldn't let those Euros show them up.
Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.
Realistically, they'd be dropping into an allied base in-theatre with a pad able to support a Starship landing, and then taking conventional means the rest of the way. Of course, I suspect that when it comes to "drop operators from space" vs. "train extra operators who can be forward deployed," the latter is probably going to be way more cost efficient. Would make for a cool movie though.
The fundamental physics involved in suborbital flights mean that you are likely experiencing sustained acceleration of 3+ Gs minimum. That is a lot, something near the max g force of a roller coaster but lasting for minutes. Combine that with the launch/landing zones needing to be many miles from anything, and it isn't really ready for primetime. Just for reference 1.3 Gs is the max sustained load you will feel in a regular airliner, very rarely 1.5 Gs for terrain avoidance.
For cargo, maybe medical stuff like moving organ donations around, but largely I can't imagine a ton of use cases where getting something to an antipode in 3 or 4 hours is that much more valuable than getting it there in 19 hours.
Then again, maybe I lack imagination.
Forces that run out of ammo don't have access to cutting edge ICBMs is a rule that I would bet money on.
Keep in mind we would have to compare it to the ~20M marginal cost of a F9 launch, not the $70M sticker price that a customer would pay.
Falcon9 is estimated to cost about $30M/launch. $20M to build the upper stage, and $10M to launch. Starship is estimated to cost about $100M to build both the booster and the second stage. Add $10M to launch.
So 17t/$30M vs 150t/$110M.