[kibwen]

The question is not even whether or not Starship works. Starship is, in theory, designed with the idea of getting many, many payloads to Mars. However, getting payloads to Mars is not currently something that anyone is paying for; even NASA isn't going to focus on Mars for at least another decade (likely more). And in the meantime, it's not like we don't have rockets capable of getting payloads to Mars (the Saturn V was fully capable of doing so in the 60s). Likewise in the meantime, the Artemis plans that look to require a dozen+ launches for a single moonshot aren't painting Starship in a favorable light.

So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.

[mr_toad]

The Saturn V payload to LEO is large, but the payload to the Moon was much smaller (the Eagle lander was less than ten tons on touchdown, with a couple of tons of cargo). Starship might be able to put 100 tons on the Moon, because of orbital refueling, which is the reason they need several Starship launches.

It’s not really sensible to compare a single spacecraft with what is essentially a fleet of ships with an order of magnitude greater cargo capacity. It’s the possibility of refueling that unlocks the ability to push really large payloads beyond LEO, and many of the more audacious plans (like a Moon base) do require a lot of cargo well beyond LEO.

[bpodgursky]

> there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice

Well, they are going to live with multi-customer payloads if Starship can do it for a tenth of the price. There's already a large market for ride-sharing and it's only going to get bigger.

[kibwen]

> There's already a large market for ride-sharing and it's only going to get bigger.

Except that at some point this stops being true. Induced demand is not infinite. There's no telling when we'll reach that point, or indeed if we've already reached it.

[fastball]

> because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice

This is only true because we are so completely beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation with the current status quo. With the $/kg (and payload volume) that Starship would unlock, the entire ELO/GEO/Interplanetary/Deep Space market looks very different.

Labs in space. Hotels in space. Weapons in space. Much more interesting satellites in space. More government science missions. Privately funded science/research missions. etc

[multiplegeorges]

How many space telescopes better than anything we currently have can we put up when launch costs are <$50m?

A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet?

How many private earth observation satellites?

The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.

[kibwen]

The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.

[fastball]

> The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9

What does that even mean? Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower. A very small segment who have payloads that are exactly Falcon 9 sized and want a very particular orbit might still be better served by F9, but maybe not.

Beyond that, much lower cost unlocks previously untenable opportunities that you have not sufficiently imagined, as stated earlier.

[ben_w]

It may not even be cheaper when it works; upper stage reuse still isn't there.

(I'd like it to be, but until it is, it isn't).

[fastball]

The argument was "why do you even need Starship?", not "will it be fully re-usable at the end of the day?"

[daedrdev]

Like imagine how much better the James web could have been with such a large and cheap launch vehicle.

[kibwen]

That's not how this works. The JWST was limited by the size of its faring, but increasing the size of the faring doesn't mean they'd ship a less complex telescope with the same functionality; they'd ship an equally-complex telescope with more functionality. Better for science, yes, but that doesn't translate to more expenditure that could be captured by the launch company. And that still relies on a government that gives a damn about funding science, which is not not the direction that the US is heading in.

[fastball]

> that doesn't translate to more expenditure that could be captured by the launch company.

Of course it does. With Starship, SpaceX could've charged NASA/ESA more to launch a bigger JWST than the cost to launch with Ariane 5, with huge profit margins.

On top of that, with a much larger fairing, you could almost certainly simplify the telescope and increase capability. A significant part of the JWST's complexity is the unfolding sequence, which could be simplified with a fairing that is more than double (triple? quadruple?) the volume.

[mikkupikku]

Weapons in space, yes. Government constellations are SpaceX's best opportunity. As for anything else, the market for anything bigger than Falcon 9 is very small. Elon Musk didn't even want to proceed with Falcon Heavy because there isn't much market for even that, but Shotwell managed to convince him that having Falcon Heavy would actually help sales of Falcon 9, by inducing the government to take SpaceX more seriously.

[kibwen]

Agreed. The real bull case for SpaceX is that the US government will use it to aggressively militarize LEO.