[mulmen]

Starship is intended to be human-rated. It’s possible to get anywhere on Earth in an hour. One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes. Rapid reusability becomes very important in that situation.

For Mars and Moon missions multiple Starships have to launch to refuel the Starship that will actually take the trip. Like, a dozen or more. Again, rapid reusability of the booster is appealing in this situation.

[dlisboa]

The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes, if ever. Maybe in the US because Musk is the government now. Just risk aversion will inhibit it, plus the economics for it will never make sense either.

Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.

[LeroyRaz]

How is a starship in anyway like an ICBM?

ICBMs are weapons, and are dangerous because you target them at specific targets and they explode.

How is starship coming down significantly more dangerous than a plane? If they can demonstrate similar levels or reliability (a huge ask), then I don't see a problem.

[lazide]

ICBM’s take a payload (warhead) and deliver it from the launch point to somewhere on the earth very far away (on another continent).

If you don’t see how earth to earth starship use couldn’t be construed as a type of ICBM, I suspect you’re thinking branding means a lot more than capability.

[mulmen]

The B-2 famously bombed Afghanistan from Missouri. That doesn’t make the 747 a weapon.

[lazide]

If you don’t think a 747 should be considered a potential weapon, then…. 9/11. Literally.

Same as trucks/cars and carbombs.

For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.

[mulmen]

> If you don’t think a 747 should be considered a potential weapon, then…. 9/11. Literally.

Yet we still have airplanes, boats, cars, sports equipment, lawn tools, and kitchen utensils. Nothing about Starship makes it more likely to be weaponized than anything else we already account for in our daily lives.

> For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.

Is “potential weapon” really the way countries view vehicles crossing borders? I have never gotten that impression. Border crossings maintain some healthy skepticism but not because a Camry is similar to an M1 Abrams if you squint really hard.

[samatman]

Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive.

Trucks have blown up buildings. Anything is a weapon if you arm it.

Conversely...

[mulmen]

> Two paratroopers and some electronics can turn a passenger jet into a bomb carrying many kilotons of conventional explosive.

A fully fueled 747 only carries about 190 tons of fuel and 140 tons of cargo. How do electronics turn that into kilotons of explosives?

[samatman]

Centitons of explosive then. Much like a Starship.

[Aaargh20318]

> The Starship Earth-to-Earth idea is a complete non-starter. Landing what amounts to an ICBM anywhere near a populated area is not something that’ll be allowed for multiple lifetimes

The US military actually has a contract with SpaceX to develop this to enable cargo drops, and in a later stadium even personnel, in 1 hour anywhere on the planet.

I suspect that if you're at the point where the US military intents to drop cargo or soldiers into your country within an hour, they're not going to be too concerned with asking for permission.

[JacobThreeThree]

Just setup oil-rig style landing terminals in the various oceans.

He's already landing Starships in oceans.

People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.

[tsimionescu]

1st class is 18h of extreme comfort. Starship would be a few hours of extreme discomfort. It's very likely much of the target audience wouldn't even survive the accelerations if they were allowed to attempt it.

[hparadiz]

It's 60 minutes to any point on the planet. 100 people fitting comfortably with a lot more room than a current airliner. The G forces are meant for humans. Very different considerations. No need to bring food or have bathrooms when the flight is that quick.

[tsimionescu]

The G forces are meant for astronauts, not for regular people rich enough to buy this flight. And the whole point of first class is that you pay for luxury. The duration of the flight barely matters, the luxury is the point, and a rocket just can't offer that. There are very few situations where rich people would be willing to put up with the discomfort for a shorter trip.

Especially given that the total trip time will likely be much longer than the flight itself. Consider that you can't take off or land Starship anywhere near a densely populated area, it has to be at least a few hours away by car from anywhere that people actually live.

So you can take a chauffeur to the airport, go trough priority and special luxuries as a first class passenger until your flight for say 1h total, board your 15h flight spent in luxury, and then a limo waits to take you to your destination 30m away from the landing airport.

Or, you can get driven for 3 hours out to the Starship launch site, board the rocket, probably in a special life support suit, wait some hours on the ship for it to be filled (humans are never allowed to approach an already full rocket), fly for one hour in an extremely bare bones flight that literally feels like a roller-coaster (so forget any kind of phone access, you'll be lucky not to puke while just holding on). Then you'll arrive at your destination landing area, ready for some limo to take you on another three hour trip back to civilization.

So you've saved maybe 8-10 hours, being extremely generous and only for the longest haul flights possible, but got none of the luxuries you'd expect. And you get to pay much more for the whole deal.

Remember that the Concorde halved or less the Paris-New York trip, and gave all the luxury you could want, and still went out of business.

[fragmede]

Concorde stopped flying for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that BA was the only one flying them by the end. In a different world, had there been a robust cargo program (and a reason for one), it would not have been on British Airways to run the program by themselves and the program would have continued. This is hypothetical, of course, but the rockets are flying to deliver cargo (and people) to space anyway, so there's a lot of expertise being built up that doesn't depend on a passenger service.

I don't know if rocket passenger service will ever happen or become routine, but there's just so much to the Concorde story that simplifying it like that isn't a good case study that does the program justice.

[hparadiz]

Have you actually bothered to look it up? I have.

https://preview.redd.it/b9f14da6y0ac1.png?width=1105&format=...

You only experience anything over 1.5 Gs for 180 seconds.

Please stop making stuff up and look at the data.

[mulmen]

Starship is to an ICBM what a 747 is to an F/A 18.

Noise is a major concern for sure. But when the competition takes 18 hours you can put the launch and landing sites in very remote places where that’s less of a concern then feed them with planes or trains.

Regardless of how practical you think this is it is the reason SpaceX is pushing rapid reusability.

[whaaaaat]

> One possible use of Starship is to compete with long-haul aircraft routes.

The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.

Then you'd need the infrastructure to actually operate the rockets. That includes refurbishment, grounds crews, basically a whole Kennedy Space Center operating to launch these things.

And on top of that, you'd need an urban area willing to deal with constant sonic booms. Even one launch/landing cycle from these rockets is multiple sonic booms. The noise would be unbelievable. No urban center is going to allow regular starship launches out of it, so you'd have to go a loooong ways out. Which then means either a long boat ride or a short flight back to the city center. Which entails baggage transfer and potentially significant delays.

On top of that, space flight is not easy on the body. You can't just put grandma on a rocket and trust that it'd be a comfortable experience. Both the exit, zero-g, and re-entry portions of spaceflight are significant w.r.t. the forces they exert on the body.

It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.

[mulmen]

> The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.

That’s the case today but they’re essentially all disposable so far. If it meets expectations the cost will be much lower, approaching the cost of fuel.

According to Quora (yuck, I know) fully fueling a Starship snd Super Heavy costs about $1m [1] and a 747 is about $200k [2]. If Starship can carry 1,000 people that’s $1,000 per passenger in fuel. A 747-8 can carry up to about 600 people for $333.00 per passenger.

3x the price in fuel is something but Starship can get to orbit on that fuel load which means anywhere on earth. The 747-8 can “only” go about a third of the way around the earth on a full tank. So it’s within the realm of economic possibility especially considering the enormous time savings.

If all we cared about was fuel efficiency we’d use trains and boats for long distance travel. Time is money.

> It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.

Correct. The difference is more like an airplane vs an ocean liner or train.

I agree it is impractical but it is a reason for rapid reusability.

A smaller version of something like Starship could be more practical for earth-to-earth service.

It’s already the case that some people can’t fly for health reasons. Space travel won’t be for everyone but the fact is availability will continue to expand.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-cost-to-fully-fuel-a-Spac...

[2]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fill-a-747-je...

[imtringued]

Great, now we can subject millions of people to hearing loss for the benefit of billionaires being too petty for international flights.

[mulmen]

The ticket price would be more like first class airfare so not limited to billionaires.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting operating Starship anywhere near populated areas so hearing loss also isn’t a concern.

[verzali]

If you don't operate it near populated areas then that negates the faster transport. People don't pay a lot of money to fly to the middle of nowhere, they pay a lot of money to go between populated areas. If Starship has to land 200km from its destination city, then you need to plan for several hours of onward travel.

[mulmen]

It doesn’t negate the faster transport because it’s 18x faster. That leaves time to take a short flight on both sides.

[wasmitnetzen]

Starbase is like 10km/6mi from Port Isabel (5 000 people) and 30km/18mi from Brownsville/Matamoros (700 000 people). That's not that far.