[ternnoburn]

Starship will serve a different mission profile. People seem convinced Starship will just "solve" space, 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.

But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than Starship, yeah, that's true.

I suspect the head start in infrastructure spacex has is pretty valuable in developing new programs.

Space is hard. I hope Blue Origin succeeds.

[avmich]

I hope Blue Origin succeeds too, but I'm not sure which mission profiles wouldn't be served best by the Starship in comparison to other launchers. There could be some ultra-light ones, where the cost for the whole launch is less than refueling the Starship, but...

[imtringued]

Obviously any mission that goes beyond LEO that does not aeorbrake at the destination, because that means you're expending an upper stage with aerodynamic surfaces for no reason.

Also anything that does a direct TLI or TMI, because you will have to stop for in-orbit refuelling.

[avmich]

The cost to get to LEO dominates in most, if not all, launches, and it's relatively trivial to add a booster stage which solves additional delta-v problems while being cost preferential to alternatives.

Maybe SpaceX will make those stages, if the market would interest them. Maybe fellow companies like Impulse Space would manage those requests. Starship still looks like a probable winner in the area.

[quotemstr]

Huh? If Starship can cheaply lift 150T to LEO, you can allocate some of that 150T to a propulsion system.

[basementcat]

That means the customer has to buy an additional propulsion stage (plus time for integration testing and insurance in case it damages the launch vehicle, in case it becomes reusable). Also, it is not yet clear what the LEO payload capability of the vehicle is.

[quotemstr]

The cost of an expendable third stage is surely more than made up for the brute force cost savings of being able to launch 150T to LEO for the cost of fuel and a car wash.

[basementcat]

I think it depends on the situation. It is not yet clear if 150T to LEO is real (and even if it is, you're likely sharing it with a bunch of other customers who might not want to fly with another rocket motor unless it has gone through quite a bit of vetting and paperwork; Shuttle banned the use of solid rocket motor 3rd stages after the Challenger accident) and it is not yet clear what the cost for a typical customer is going to be. Rocket engines designed to start in a vacuum are more difficult and expensive to develop and test than engines designed to operate closer to STP.

[sebazzz]

Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I’m not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.

[trollied]

People had doubts about Falcon 9 landing on a barge every time...

[bamboozled]

I think they’re asking the question: “Is there really value in the product” or is it a gimmick like the cyber truck.

[zizee]

Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?

[OhMeadhbh]

Starship is heavy lift / heavy expense. If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper. Or you wait until you find 600 other small sat users who want to launch into the same / similar orbit.

The talk I heard was that New Glenn was supposed to be BO's answer to Starship (or more likely Falcon Heavy) that could launch a bunch of Project Kuiper satellites into LEO so Amazon could compete with Starlink and feed Amazon's Ground Station as a Service offering.

If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO, Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons and Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.

I'm not a heavy lift sales-person, but I've been in the room when they discussed what they thought they could sell to govt / mil / commercial customers. So take this with a little bit of salt... Seems to me BO was targeting a slightly smaller launch vehicle than SpaceX was going with so they could decouple schedule with Amazon's Kuiper Project. You don't want to have that cool new rocket you developed dependent on a satellite constellation that gets delayed. So you have a rocket that would be easier to fill with a number of small to medium sized satellites to LEO or (fewer) to GEO.

And like other people on the thread have commented, it seems BO is a decade behind SpaceX, so... yeah... a big rocket that competes with Starship is pretty risky for BO.

And yes, I understand that BO is independent from Amazon, but from what I've seen this is just so they can execute on a schedule that isn't determined by AMZN's board of directors. They seem pretty closely related, just from talking with Kuiper, GSaaS and BO engineers.

I don't work for any of the above mentioned companies and have no insider information. YMMV. Just my guesses from watching some of the personalities involved for the last 30 years.

[perihelions]

- "If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper."

I don't buy this. I think small startups like that can't get the economies of scale that would let them compete on price, for any payload. So long as they are targeting low-value niche markets like one-off smallsats, they won't have the revenue to support that.

At what Rocket Labs is currently charging, $7.5 million [0], it's within the realm of possibility you could even launch an entire reusable Starship with a one-cubesat payload for less than that. (The target figure Musk uses is $2 million/launch; take that with the appropriate bucket of salt).

How many tens of billions of R&D have gone into SpaceX, and how many launches are they able to amortize that cost over? How many decades have they invested in their manufacturing processes? Do their competitors' engines roll off factory assembly lines?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron

[OhMeadhbh]

I think the $2m per Starship launch is "asperational." As in... they "aspire" to have launch costs that low. I do not believe Starship launches are currently as low as $2m (or $10m, which is the other figure I saw mentioned.) I believe their current launch cost (cost to launch the rocket, not the price they charge people to launch their payload) is considerably higher than $50m.

But... yes... if you can re-use your launch vehicle, then per-launch cost SHOULD go down. But at the current time, after 6 launches, only one booster has been snagged by the chop-sticks. The Starships themselves have NOT been re-used.

So if you're going to compare Starship with Electron, you should compare costs of Starship after it's fully re-usable with Electron after it's as re-usable as it's intended to be.

Rocket Lab claims they're at 7.5m per launch, but again, THAT price may come down as they use re-usable components on subsequent launches. So instead of comparing costs of Starship sometime in the future with Electron now, compare Starship sometime in the future with Electron sometime in the future.

[numpad0]

F9 reusable is like $70M. $7.5M is already changes. Starship at $2M is not an innovation class event, it has to be some side effect of WW3.

[nickfromseattle]

Check out this great tweet on Elon's $2m/launch: https://x.com/Tim_X94/status/1864279927014740327

"As an auditor I review public company financial statements. These financial statements are prepared in Rocket Lab's case based on US GAAP. Adjacent to US GAAP figures companies also provide NON GAAP disclosures for informative purposes. Formally these are not audited, but auditors sanity check them anyway.

Since Adam and Pete are CEO and CFO of a public company, each time they give you a number in interviews / press releases etc., they will be based on US GAAP and if explicitly stated NON-GAAP basis.

Why is this relevant Tim?

Well if Adam and/or Pete give you a number, that number will includes ALL the (estimated) costs in accordance with US GAAP for what it takes to build something. In this case Adam/Pete on numerous ocassions told investors roughly the following:

We aim to have 50% gross margins on Neutron with a similar flight cadence as Electron. Electron has 50% gross margins at roughly 20 annual flights. Adam specifically also said they will probably arrive there even sooner with Neutron since its first stage + fairings reusable and Electron till this date is expendable.

With a $55 million sticker price and a 50% gross margin, the cost of sales under US GAAP will rougly in the $25-30 million ballpark based on a cadence of 20 flights. NOTE: If Neutron launches more then 20 times per year, cost of sales are going to even drop lower to the point where the build costs rougly resemble those of Falcon 9.

But for now let's keep it simple (20+ flights is the bull case scenario) and let's go with the 20 flights base scenario. In this case it costs between $25-$30 million to build/operate one Neutron rocket. Under US GAAP the main cost components to operate a rocket launch include:

Per flight: > Fuel costs for the rocket > Fee to the launch range > Seperation system

Per build: (allocated based on the number of annual launches) > Material costs for building the rocket > Salaries for the factory employee hours > Machine hour costs > Depreciation for factory buildings > Transportation costs

Per launch facility (allocated based on the number of annual launches) > Depreciation for launch infrastructure > Salaries for the launch staff > Security for the launch range etc.

SPB and Adam also said many times, that the per flight costs including material costs to build the rocket are only a FRACTION of the total cost of running a rocket program. The real costs are the fixed ones relating to factories, facilities, employees, depreciation etc (mainly the launch facility and build mentioned in the paragraph above) AKA the JOKE ADAM RUNS IS WE RAISE MONEY TO POUR CONCRETE. Why does he make that joke? Well more then 80% of the total rocket program cost are not related to the LAUNCH VEHICLE ITSELF

Now let's go over to our friends at SpaceX. Remember SpaceX is a private company and in the US there are zero reporting requirements for private companies nor obligations for CEO to quote US GAAP approved figures. Instead since Elon is not bound to any of these regulations, unlike at Tesla for all his SpaceX endavours he employs something what I will going forward refer to as Elon GAAP.

The most important rule of Elon GAAP is that there are NO accounting rules.

Let me illustrate that with this example:

Elon was quoted on multiple occassions about what Starship would cost to build. Basically he said it is the long term goal for a Starship launch is to cost $10 million. This $10 million figure is based on the following assumptions: > A Starship is fully reusable and will assume aircraft like operations. > It takes no refurb between flights between each vehicle, similar like an aircraft. In order for that to happen the heatshield tile issue will need to get solved, but ok let's go with his narrative.

As such if you assume the above Elon then says that the only costs for each flight that you will have mainly relates to fuel costs and if you build 100s-1000s of Starships each build will not cost a lot. Elon estimates this to be $10 million per flight.

Caveat are we really comparing a 20 flight Neutron cadence with a 1000 flight Starship cadence?

Yep we are which is totally insane it itself and non apples to apples comparison, but let's go with the leading narrative on X.

So what your finfluencers and SpaceX fanboys on X do is they compare the Starship $10 million number to Rocket Lab's $25-$30 million number and conclude Rocket Lab's Neutron is way to expensive to build and will run out of business long term.

Why is this not correct then Tim?

Well thats because we are comparing Adam's US GAAP cost to launch with Elon's Elon GAAP cost to launch. Its not an apples to apples comparison.

Why?

Because under Elon GAAP you only have to account for direct rocket material and fuel costs and don't have to account for these costs:

Per flight: > Fee to the launch range (assuming a Cape launch) > Seperation system

Per build: (allocated based on the number of annual launches) > Salaries for the factory employee hours > Machine hour costs > Depreciation for factory buildings > Transportation costs

Per launch facility (allocated based on the number of annual launches) > Depreciation for launch infrastructure > Salaries for the launch staff > Security for the launch range etc.

Why you don't have to account for these costs Tim?

Well you see, under Elon GAAP all the employees and suppliers work for free and buildings and launch infrastructure remains in perfect condition and never has to be replaced.

Well Tim Elon GAAP must be wonderful right?

Yes, it truely is an amazing place.

Especially since a large part of the costs of running a rocket program are not directly related to the rocket itself AKA the largest part of the costs are not included in Elon's 10 million number)

After Adam read this he is probably also going to apply Elon GAAP for the Rocket Lab financial statements. This means he just has to account for material and fuel costs for each Neutron launch and can leave everything else out. Under Elon GAAP a Neutron rocket launch will the same or less then $10 million (assuming a 20 Neutron cadence and 1000 Starship cadence), because Neutron is a significantly smaller vehicle then Starship and as such way cheaper to fill. This is partly offset by fact that the second stage is expendable for Neutron.

So the conclusion of this accounting rant is:

No matter the GAAP (US GAAP or Elon GAAP) Neutron will almost always be cheaper to operate then Starship on a dedicated ride basis. You just have to do an apples to apples comparison. Sure Starship will be the king of price per kg, but Neutron is not in the price per kg business, but in the DEDICATED RIDES BUSINESS. For other this will become more obvious in the years to come, when Neutron will ramp cadence well above 20 flights per year.

Why?

Because Starship is a significantly larger vehicle and rocket program costs don't scale LINEAR, they grow EXPENONENTIALLY with the size of the vehicle. How else can the entire Starship program cost $10 billion (Payload estimate) versus Neutron $300 million?

Also Starship is optimized to go to Mars, Neutron is optimized to require minimal infrastructure (no launch tower and other optimizations due to vehicle size. Remember infrastructure is the largest cost of a rocket program. SPB is very smart and exactly knows what he is doing. So don't let yourself get fooled by finfluencers and fanboys.

Next time you see someone quoting Elon GAAP for rockets, you can refer this post :)

Full disclosure: I love Elon, as a Tesla shareholder, I just don't like Elon GAAP "

[starik36]

I am going out on a limb and say that Project Kuiper satellites themselves are nowhere near ready. Amazon is supposed to launch 50% of the constellation of ~6000 into orbit by July 2026 or risk losing frequencies. So you would think there would be some urgency.

Amazon purchased pretty much all remaining Atlas 5 launches from ULA. This is a proven rocket and ready to fly. Why aren't the satellites being launched? The only thing I can think of is that they are not ready yet.

[donavanm]

I am unfortunately skeptical. As you say theyve got two test units in orbit and every day the frequency allocations tick closer. Whats the launch schedule look like for 3000 successful units inside 18 months? What about the in house build process. I havent heard anything that reflects the exponential process growth & delivery theyll need.

That first real launch also starts the recurring costs ticking on the limited orbit lifetime of that hardware. I havent thought through the numbers in a while, but something like a billion or three per year to maintain the constellation? Swag (an optimistic?) $2m satellite and $2m launch cost and 7 year lifetime, thats an yearly average of $1.7b in “maintenance” to keep the very minimal constellation up there. Easily double if their

Im also pretty skeptical of their business. AFAICT its a bunch of ex telecoms and space/defense contractors. So theyre going to try and soak US DoD for connectivity with a more uh, “reliable”, company and a consumer side of “space comcast.” Im pretty skeptical on consumer space “broadband” due to the density problems. And I use comcast as a perjorative for their business & network interop coming from CDN & ISP land.

Lastly on a positive note, I dont expect the same employee resignation bloodbath that AMZN at large is going through at the moment. Kuiper (afaik) has been pretty top down “you shall come in to the office” the whole time, so any rto mandate is unlikely to change the existing experience.

[imtringued]

>If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO

Well 45 tons, but this is in a reusable configuration.

>Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons

This is definitely not a reusable configuration. Maybe 150 tons if they are lucky.

>Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.

60 tons for Falcon Heavy means zero reuse, that is a fully expendable launch. Falcon heavy also hasn't carried payloads heavier than 18 tons so far. So this number is something you can whip out to pretend that New Glenn sucks and yet completely miss the mark.

[OhMeadhbh]

I was going off data from the wikipedia, so yeah, it may not be the most current or most accurate. It's in the ballpark, though.

And most of what I care about is small-sats, so Falcon Heavy's are more than enough lift for me. But yeah, other people may have have a completely different set of requirements and see the Heavy in a different light.

[dredmorbius]

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9792046>

[extraduder_ire]

I think the cheapest smallsat launches now available are being pushed out of the Japanese airlock on the ISS. It's very popular.

Really limits your options in terms of height/inclination but it's been popular enough that they're almost at capacity.

[OhMeadhbh]

Aye, NanoRacks is pretty cool. I often bump into some of their people at conferences. They're cool and competent as well.

[IshKebab]

> If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship

Why not? Unless you need a custom orbit that nobody else is interested in then Starship will be by far the cheapest way to put a small satellite in orbit, as part of a ride-share mission.

[OhMeadhbh]

Who do I talk to at SpaceX RIGHT NOW to launch my small sat?

[mauvehaus]

Sales? Accounts receivable?

[OhMeadhbh]

Give me a phone number. Electron and NanoRacks have phone numbers (email, actually.) I can contact them and get info on dates and costs. SpaceX will give me info on Falcon launches but not Starship launches (and they pick the orbit.)

[IshKebab]

[e-mail]

I just googled SpaceX rideshare, it was the very first result.

[OhMeadhbh]

Rideshare doesn't give quotes for starship.

[ternnoburn]

Smaller launch to a specific orbit. As an analogy, freight trains are one of the most efficient, cheapest ways to move freight. But moving my laundry to the laundromat is better served by another vehicle.

[zizee]

This changes if SpaceX can get full reusability working, which they have been making very steady progress towards.

[avmich]

Yeah, that's the main proposition Starship has for the market. Going to analogy with laundromat, you need to include the cost of single-use laundry cart and remember that your laundromat is on another end of the same asphalted road which the truck nearby can easily drive on.

Not sure at all if costs - and hassles, of course - of buying a cart are less than some change for the costs of the fuel - the truck is autonomous, of course.

[Retric]

10t to LEO in an unusual orbit.

Being smaller than Starship while still huge isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.

[bryanlarsen]

Starship should be able to put 10t into LEO significantly cheaper than New Glenn can. Why would anybody pay more?

[OhMeadhbh]

I believe this is factually inaccurate. What's your source? Though admittedly, we have to depend on BO's predictions for per-kg launch costs, and those may be a lot higher for the first few missions and gradually ease off.

Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to LEO. I see a blurb that says Musk says Starship launches will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while before it costs $10m to launch a Starship.

This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is. But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal...

[bryanlarsen]

Those Starship costs you quote assume an expended booster and the New Glenn costs assume a recovered booster.

We don't have to use Musk's cost figures for Starship. Starship has been built in the open and can be relatively accurately cost estimated by experts.

[zizee]

Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost. If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves the mission profiles?

An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which will cut costs considerably.

[ternnoburn]

100m is vaporware pricing. It's the $30k Tesla that drives itself. Or any of the numbers on the hyperloop. It's a made up number for the press.

I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do some basic analysis and not just believe everything they hear from that guy!

[Retric]

2 billion at the high end isn’t actually unreasonable when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.

There’s a have a fairly linear relationship between rocket payload and size, and for large structures going big tends to increase cost per pound so ~10x the size resulting in ~20x the cost is just mildly pessimistic.

If and only if they the thing is both rapidly reusable and individual starships are actually used for hundreds of launches do those highly optimistic numbers become vaguely possible. Even just a 0.2% failure rate would represent a massive increase over their optimistic estimates.

[OhMeadhbh]

Yes. An estimate for 2 billion is laughable. I did not say the cost WAS $2 billion, I said the Google AI gave me a range from $100M to $2B. Maybe the total cost of the program for the 1st launch was 2 billion? But you're going to amortize that cost over (hopefully) several launches.

I think you misunderstand my argument. Let me restate it.

Someone, sometime said the Starship launch was $2b. The Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer. Someone, sometime said it was around $100m. The Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer. There is a lot of range between 100m and 2b, which implies there's a lot of data getting thrown around and we don't have good numbers.

If observing that we don't have good numbers is arguing in bad faith... I don't know what to tell you.

Musk at some point said $10m for a Starship launch. I think I found a reference for that in a CNBC interview... I'll look it up later. But my point is... It is unlikely that Starship launches are $10m RIGHT NOW. But sure... maybe they will be in the future. I take Elon with a grain of salt because of his comments regarding Full Self-Driving Mode and Robo-Taxi deployment dates.

I said we should not compare New Glenn estimated launch costs RIGHT NOW with Elon's asperational price target of $10m. We should compare Starship's cost per kg to LEO RIGHT NOW with New Glenn's estimated cost per kg to LEO RIGHT NOW. Or we could compare them at a particular point in the project history. We could compare per-kg costs at first launch or estimated per-kg costs at the 10th launch.

Both companies are saying they want to do a lot of launches, so we'll eventually have MUCH better data.

I'm suggesting we compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges and not apples to oranges.

At the current moment, all Starship launches have been fully disposable (though yes, one booster was caught by the chopsticks so it's probably more accurate to say the whole system is about 1/12th re-usable.) At this point in the program, you have to pay for each vehicle that lands or crashes in the water. I agree with you when you say "100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch." Starship is currently more disposable than it is reusable.

When SpaceX re-uses the boosters and the Starships, then it will not be fully disposable and the price per launch will go down. We are not at that point at the moment. You can tell this because a number of boosters and starships have fallen into the ocean, some crashing, some coming to a controlled stop just over the ocean and then falling over.

But the important part here is that the equipment that wasn't caught by the chopsticks doesn't get to be re-used. So if you want to do another launch, you have to build new equipment. That new equipment will cost money.

So if the current, mostly non-reusable Starship launches cost $100m a pop, that's after several launches. Even though we have someone estimating the first couple of New Glenn launches cost $68m, let's wait until it has 6 launches and THEN compare costs.

[FireBeyond]

> He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025.

He did. He also said it'd be available in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024.

So yeah...

[OhMeadhbh]

Dudes. You don't have to down-vote me 'cause I'm just asking for where you got your numbers. I'm not saying you're a horrible person and that SpaceX sucks. I'm saying I have numbers that don't match yours. Let's compare numbers / sources and see what the most likely values would be near-term and long-term.

[DrBazza]

Non-orbital. But it can do that as well. Just sacrifice the rocket and use the landing fuel for more delta-v.

[baq]

I’m not sure which profiles don’t make sense unless they can’t figure out payload doors. Stage 2 reuse means you can put up 50 tons or so of stage 3 in LEO for approximately free in current payload pricing terms, it’s a crazy number. (Advertised capacity of 100-150 tons is probably pointless and/or volume-limited anyway for a third stage.)

[DrBazza]

Not all profiles end up in orbit. At this point in time, reusuability sacrifices delta-v for fuel. If you want to launch scientific missions you want to escape Earth orbit. If we're going to land on Mars, we're going to need a lot of stuff sent there first.

[baq]

But it doesn’t matter if you can launch 10x the mass for the same price to LEO and light your stage 3 to get anywhere you’d like to be. Stage 3 will have enough delta v and starship’s doesn’t matter as long as it gets you to the parking orbit.

[numpad0]

Is Starship really not following the exact step of N-1 && VentureStar?

[ceejayoz]

Computers and materials came a long way since the N1, as Starship’s successful tests can attest to.

[numpad0]

But they're still losing roughly as many engines as Russians did in N1, so that sounds like a dubious claim.

What about the latter? Are they really not tracing the footsteps of the X-33 program?

[ceejayoz]

What? Flight five didn’t lose any engines. N1 kept blowing up.

X-33 never got to a test flight, let alone a successful one.

[numpad0]

N-1 only flew 4 times. Flight 5 of N-1 was supposed to use upgraded NK-33 engines.

X-33 never got to test flight because the engineer minded NASA director kept pushing an unrealistic technical goal.

Besides, SS still hasn't gotten its payload system working.

Are those that dissimilar to how SS program is going?

[kataklasm]

Yes, they are. Starship has proven multiple novel engineering approaches and technologies. Examples: 1. catching the booster in the air to save on landing gear weight and complexity 2. firing 33 engines simultaneously in a tight cluster 3. the only large scale production and use of CH4-fuelled engines (all other CH4 engines have only been fired a handful of times at most)

[mmustapic]

N-1 failed because of a lack of time/funding, not because the design was inherently flawed.

[kataklasm]

But that wasn't certain until Starship proved it technologically possible.

[bpodgursky]

> 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.

[ternnoburn]

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.

[jiggawatts]

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

[ben-schaaf]

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.

[perihelions]

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...

[ben-schaaf]

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.

[NooneAtAll3]

fuel is cheap

most expensive part are the engines

[timewizard]

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.

[ceejayoz]

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

[OhMeadhbh]

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.

[ternnoburn]

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.

[ChuckMcM]

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

[bryanlarsen]

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.

[ChuckMcM]

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.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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

[grecy]

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.

[OhMeadhbh]

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.)