[inevaexisted]

They solved this problem with F9 too, with their ride share program.

Starship will make it even cheaper to deliver small payloads too (you'll likely have to wait for enough payload to get lined up to make sense financially), however with the need to continuously deploy starlink satelites, they'll probably fill loads as required with them to fill starship up.

[jmyeet]

You raise a good point: taking multiple payloads could help bridge this gap. But I still believe it'll take quite awhile to match the economics of an F9 launch (assuming that payload is within the launch parameters).

Falcon Heavy is again evidence of this. We're not seeing ride-sharing on FH. We're seeing large (primarily military) payloads that F9 just can't do.

[ordu]

> Falcon Heavy is again evidence of this.

Not necessarily. I'm not a rocket scientist or economist, but it is possible that FH is less cost-effective per kg on LEO than F9. You need to accelerate three boosters to several thousand km/hour and then to decelerate them to 0 km/hour at ground level. And then to do all the maintaining on those boosters, which takes about a month. Does it allow for 3x payload?

There are other potential issues, like a volume: a payload is not just mass, but a volume too. It needs to fit into fairing. Adding two more boosters doesn't increase available volume.

> I still believe it'll take quite awhile to match the economics of an F9 launch

Musk says that he relies on Starship launches to make it work reliably as expected. And yes, I believe that it will take years. Maybe it will be faster than with F9, but not an order of magnitude faster.

[Retric]

Gravity and atmospheric drag does most of the slowing down of those boosters for free. The first stage uses something like 87% of it’s takeoff weight in fuel to get it and the second stage up to speed, but only 0.5% of it’s takeoff weight in fuel to slow down and land at sea.

[perilunar]

> Does it allow for 3x payload?

Mass to LEO (from the SpaceX site): F9: 22,800 kg; FH: 63,800 kg.

So 2.8 times. Both expend the second stage, so if they recover all the boosters then FH possibly has lower cost per kg, but they're not saying.

[techdragon]

The economic case for Starship is even better for small payload customers. At the moment if your launching a cubesat from anywhere but the Nanoracks ISS deployment facility attached to the Japanese Kibo module, then one of your launch costs is a PPOD which gets thrown away

These deployers can cost $10000, or even more depending on the specific cubesat size. So when Starship allows small payload aggregators like Spaceflight Inc to recover the PPOD/deployment hardware then it’s going to provide even further cost reductions beyond the simple dollars per unit mass lifted to orbit. The reusable nature of Starship will be a big part of how it changes the economics of space related industries.