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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

> but if it works, there's still going to be demand for other mission profiles that it won't make sense to send on Starship

I'm rooting for any and all US launch providers to succeed, but I don't think this is true. Starship at full reusability will be better than any other launcher for every single mission profile imaginable.

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There's simply no way one vehicle will be the best option in every case.

If you have a small satellite you need placed somewhere unique, firing up a huge launch vehicle makes no sense.

It does if it's still cheaper than any other rocket.

Your launch price may somehow be cheaper; although, that's incredibly unlikely. Anyways as your insurance underwriter I'm going to jack up the rate on you so high for that launch it will no longer be cheaper.

Starship’s launch price is highly likely to be cheaper if New Glenn’s second stage isn’t reusable.

It's also a bit of a straw-man to assume people will only fly on the cheapest lift option. Virgin Orbit lasted as long as it did only because there was one (maybe two) customers who were willing to pay a premium for being guinea pigs for a new technology. Their reasoning was something like "if this pans out, it'll be very cool long term" so they were willing to put their small-sats on a largely untested platform.

The same could be said about some of the entrenched players in earth observation. They're willing to pay a bit of a premium for a reasonable amount of time to ensure there's not a monopoly player (which definitely looks like it will be SpaceX.)

How much of a premium they're willing to pay and for how long seems like anyone's guess.

This. If, and it’s a big if, starship can be 100% reusable and less than 24 hours turn around, then it will be the space truck NASA envisioned with the shuttle

Even if it's not 100% reusable it's still likely to be cheaper than New Glenn. New Glenn uses extremely expensive methods of construction. Starship is assembled like a glorified water tank.

I'm not sure I see it that way, I wonder sometimes how much of the expensive construction can be systematized into something less expensive, and how much of Starship's "cheap" construction will remain as they work harder and harder to get to their reuse and turnaround goals. My intuition is that Starship will get more expensive to make over time and New Glenn less expensive but beyond that I can't say if they would meet in the middle or cross.

That said, platform construction costs only dominate when you can't re-use the platform. Anything you can re-use gets amortized over each re-use. That is what had made Falcon 9 so cost effective. Mostly because they get nearly 10 flights per booster.

> ... Falcon 9 ... nearly 10 flights per booster

Just curious: what year is your data from?

> That is what had made Falcon 9 so cost effective. Mostly because they get nearly 10 flights per booster.

You’re way out of date. Multiple boosters have flown over 20, a couple are at 23.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage...

I guess 10 flights per booster is an average over, say, the whole time since the first booster successfully landed. In the list by this link there are ~70 boosters, and I don't think Falcons flew ~700 missions yet, so 10 flights per booster looks on average approximately correct, even though some - even quite a few - boosters flew significantly more that 10 times.

And recently, many payloads had their booster fly exactly once because the payload needed some extra 'oomph' to get into orbit so the booster was going to fast and to high to re-enter. When you are pricing for an average of 10x booster re-use you need boosters to go much more than 10x because one booster going 1x is going to bring your average down quickly.

I'm looking at overall re-use numbers. Yes, boosters are now being certified for more launches which will, over time, bring both the average and the median number of launches per booster up.

In this conversation, I think the relevant point is that as the 'resusability' of the F9 booster has gone up, so has the cost to make a single booster. That's because they've added things and changed how they make them in order to boost re-usability. I expect the same evolution in Starship/Booster which will increase the unit cost in order to make them more reusable which will lower overall cost of launches because you can amortize those costs across multiple flights.

I agree w/ Chuck. It's a BIG IF. I'm hoping for them. I really hope BO turns out to be a good competitor for SpaceX so they're both highly motivated. I've seen the sausage being made at a couple of new space companies (and at least one old space company.) Even more than chip vendors and PC clone manufacturers, Heavy Lift providers are their own worst enemies. If SpaceX fails, it will be because of something they decided to do, not something that was foisted upon them. Ditto for Rocket Lab and Blue Origin. But the cool flip side of that is they're free to do extremely cool/innovative things. The guys who are privately held aren't beholden to a board that wants increasingly dependable revenue and profits (looking at you, ULA.) And this does not seem to be the industry that can tolerate that. I'm bullish on SpaceX, BO and Rocket Lab (assuming Rocket Lab doesn't run out of runway.)

There's no way they're getting rapid turnaround with the damage it's has sustained on the last two tests.

I’m always amazed by statements like this. Starship is currently a test program and is rapidly evolving. They’re improving it as they learn.

What you said is akin to looking at the Wright brothers plane and saying “no way that thing crosses the Atlantic.”

It will improve rapidly until it does.

I don't see how that makes any sense. Starship is 100t dry; simply the fuel costs of a launch will necessarily be higher than disposable alternatives.

fuel is cheap

most expensive part are the engines

Fuel is cheap: it's $900,000 per Starship launch, according to Musk [0]. No disposable rocket comes within even a factor-of-10 of that.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/elon-musk-says-spacexs-sta...

I was perhaps exaggerating a little with the fuel cost comparison, but we've had rockets like Astra R3 and SS-520 fly for under $5M per launch. Rocket Lab's Electron is ~$7.5M. That's all within a factor of 10.

The rocket equation doesn't participate in capitalism -- moving mass to orbit takes delta-v and that takes fuel.

If you are going to imagine a hypothetical future where starship has made technological leaps forward sufficient to be the cheapest possible option despite being significantly heavier and larger aerodynamically, you have to imagine someone else could also improve their rocket. A smaller rocket requires less fuel to fly.

The US is not the only place flying rockets, and spacex has a lead, but if the industry takes off, there will be other contenders. Once rockets start getting more similar as they all start contending with physics, a smaller rocket will necessarily be cheaper.

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