[ericd]

Yeah, SpaceX’s reuse is much, much simpler than the shuttle booster refurbishment. At the extreme, Starship is intended to have no refurbishment between flights - refuel and fly again, so that the cost of each flight will be mostly the fuel cost, on the order of single digit millions. Falcon 9 I believe is trickier since its kerosene fuel generates a lot of soot compared to the methane engines of Starship, and can be fouled. If you’ve ever used a camp stove with kerosene vs methane, one leaves your stove covered in black soot.

[bumby]

>Starship is intended to have no refurbishment between flights - refuel and fly again

Surely this entails a host of quality checks between flights? What is that cost estimate at?

[ericd]

This is based on pretty old info, which probably comes from an offhand statement by Musk, so big grain of salt, but I think they’re hoping to get it to be on par with a jetliner, which if I understand correctly is just a maintenance schedule based on # of flight hours. Not sure if that’s going to be feasible given the difference in the violence of the flight profile.

[bumby]

That would be interesting to hear how they come up with those maintenance schedules. Even with the uptick in flights, it doesn't seem like they'd have the dearth of reliability data to make that determination with reasonable accuracy. But maybe they have a lot of internal reliability data we're not privy to.

[Faark]

The reliability data will be collected by inspections. Also from memory, their fleet leaders tended to do Starlink launches. Loosing one of those might suck, but can still be sold as due to pushing boundaries and something that wont happen to customers. They need backup launch equipment, ofc.

[bumby]

The gold standard for reliability studies involves collecting in situ failures though. You can infer a lot from inspections on non-failed components, but it's not as useful as having actual failure data. When I'm referencing their in-house data, I'm referring to failures (whether in situ or as a bench experiment)

[tuatoru]

Just FYI, "dearth" means scarcity. Perhaps you meant wealth.

[bumby]

Thank you.