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Comment by Sanzig | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast supersonic flight. You can get almost anywhere on Earth in 36 hours' notice with conventional jet travel relatively cheaply on 1-2 weeks of US median income for a return ticket - that sweet spot of speed and cost is hard to beat.

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I think there is a pretty large market for a trip to space and an hour flight from LA to New Zealand, New York-Sydney, London-Shanghai, etc. for $10-20k. What an amazing combination that would be.

Add a couple hours for the trip between town and pad, security and so on. Still it's 3-4 hours.

I don't think there are many cities that have suitable launch sites near them. It's unlikely they'll ever get approval to launch over populated areas, or even from most populated coastal locations.

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.

> 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?

IIRC, the suborbital point-to-point transport use case doesn’t use the booster (SuperHeavy), just Starship.

You'd probably have to launch from international waters, after taking a boat/helicopter.

>Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem

You launch them, presumably.

You're not truly wealthy until you have boosters staged at your vacation homes.

Or just ship them... with a ship.

Yeah the short term approach for crewed Starship seems likely to involve transporting crew to a Starship once it is already in orbit and vice versa for return.

Off shore platforms. Most large cities are on or near an ocean or large lake.

Think of this market:

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.

A transcontinental flight ranges from low five figures for a long range business jet to upper five/lower six figures for a widebody jetliner. Those are machines purpose built for the job of moving people transcontinental distances. They benefit from decades of heritage building tens of thousands of units leading to extremely aggressive cost optimization. I just can't see Starship getting the cost per flight down into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Not to mention the boring (but important) constraint of trying to insure a team of valuable athletes flying around in a rocket with way less of a safety record than conventional air travel.

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.

I agree it would t work.

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.

sub-orbital military applications would be risky as they'd look like an ICBM launch to other nuclear powers. Commercial rockets depend on advance public disclosure of launch dates to stave off WW3 from itchy trigger fingers.

Watch Elon call it something like Airship and have it be fit for tens to hundreds of people per launch with no need for a pilot (though one may be present). It'd take twenty years to get to market, sure, but hey that's progress.

Getting it to airline-level safety will take at least that much, unless they start flying multiple times a day without any anomalies whatsoever.

Worth noting that flying to the equator can provide a pretty significant increase of payload mass. Just a quick layover to orbit.

>Concorde's commercial failure

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 failed because trading slightly shorter flight time for much higher cost was not worthwhile. Instead, airliners have been optimized for cost reduction and efficiency at high subsonic speeds.

I am aware that airlines today fly slower than 50 years ago, to improve fuel efficiency. That said, all orders except the British and French flag carriers' were canceled because of the overland bans, correspondingly greatly increasing the per-unit cost of those that were sold. I think the NYC-to-London/Paris routes were (slightly) profitable; were there no overland bans, are there really no other routes that Concorde could also have flown?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this was definitely a key factor that made Concorde into a niche product.

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 :/

> I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms.

Or, if you're more cynical, because the US' own supersonic airliner failed and they wouldn't let those Euros show them up.

The American SST was cancelled because of the sonic boom problem.

It was cancelled because Boeing were late and over budget; by the time they started work on a prototype, Concorde was already being shown at airshows, and the US Senate voted to stop throwing more money at them. Sonic booms were at most one contributing factor among many to that senate vote.

Concorde was also late and over budget. And until Congress defunded the 2707, it had more pending orders from more airlines than Concorde did. Sonic booms weren’t the only reason for the cancellation but they were probably the single biggest reason.

Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.

Not just a boom or booms, a continuous boom along its travel.

Half the point of special forces is to be covert, which is made hard when your transportation is a giant rocket streaking through the suborbital zone.

But imagine the PsyOps impact of the enemy looking up and seeing the US raining down literal ODSTs on them ;)

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.

Imagine how much of a sitting duck is a rocket glowing infrared on a ballistic trajectory to the landing site.

Like an aircraft carrier, good at projecting power below a certain threshold of conflict and capability where they turn into a liability.

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