[haspok]

Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket).

It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than Starlink, of course.

[Denvercoder9]

> this project is funded by NASA

Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.

That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.

[throwaway4aday]

With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding. The sunshield (21.2 m by 14.2m) would only need to fold along one axis and the mirror (6.6 m) could be monolithic instead of having to fold, probably only requiring the mounting points for the primary and secondary to be hinged. This shouldn't be discounted because it makes telescope design much simpler and less expensive.

It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.

Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.

The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.

All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.

[foobarian]

> With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding.

Of course, that means you could also fit a James Webb-folded telescope except make it a lot bigger :-)

[Earw0rm]

Probably need on-orbit refueling to work for that to happen, but they're working on it.

[jvm___]

Just park the starship as the sun shield. Or two starship, or an origami starship that unfolds for more surface area, your own personal sun umbrella made from a starship.

[throwaway4aday]

Yes! that too.

[throw4950sh06]

> It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.

My favorite related thing is that the Starship itself could serve as a large space or moon station.

[bryanlarsen]

> but this project is funded by NASA

About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.

[cryptonector]

The Artemis money could evaporate and Starship would still make commercial sense and likely be a successful product.

[mensetmanusman]

The federal government smartly invested in SpaceX after being sued by SpaceX to fix rigging (things what the system working looks like).

Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.

[throwaway48476]

The problem is that launch costs went down fast but satellite costs haven't gone down as fast and still have long development timelines. The other problem is the market for satellite services hasn't developed as fast as anticipated, except for starlink.

[baq]

Starlink for all intents and purposes is the market for satellites now. All the other launches are nice to have extras.

Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.

[XorNot]

Having enough lift capacity to take a shot at putting a pair of telescopes out far enough to exploit solar gravitational lensing to resolve exo-planet surfaces would be a hell of a thing. Orbital refueling would mean we could reasonably build something big enough to be able to boost out that far (would still take decades to arrive).

[cryptonector]

Isn't that 500 AU out?

[XorNot]

Yes, but the trick with getting there is building the vehicle. Time takes care of the rest (you'd do it using ion thrusters).

[ufmace]

The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.

[oceanplexian]

Starlink is predicted to have something like 6.6B in revenue. SpaceX isn't a rocket company they are an ISP that launches rockets.

[varjag]

Is that long term or this year? Because honestly 6.6B is not a lot for their scale of operations.

[cdash]

That is projections for this year only with a target closer to 10 billion revenue next year.

[adastra22]

SpaceX is profitable from that income alone, even allowing for starship development costs.

[mhandley]

Things can only be cheap if you mass produce them. That tends to require standardization of components, and inevitably standardized components are a compromise between requirements, where up until now, saving mass was a critical requirement. If you don't have to care nearly so much about mass and volume, then that opens up many avenues for much cheaper standard satellite components.

[tuatoru]

I'm disappointed that you still can't order ten cubesats from Shenzen Satellite Supply Co via AliExpress.

[ben_w]

> Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer.

So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.

[zitterbewegung]

The purpose of funding SpaceX with taxpayer money is to make competitors that can launch rockets to space so that it is cheaper.

[mempko]

Exactly. Private companies like space X would not exist if NASA didn't deliberately make the market for Private space companies. That's what governments do, make markets.

[cryptonector]

Elon founded SpaceX w/o an expectation of subsidies.

[mempko]

How do you know he didn't lobby for them?

[mmustapic]

And yet, without the funding for CRS from NASA Spacex would’ve gone broke or at least wouldn have built F9 much much later.