[androiddrew]

Let me fix your title:

SpaceX wants investors to think that they will be able to launch millions of satellites.

[timschmidt]

SpaceX has consistently launched ~90% of the mass to orbit for the whole planet Earth over the last several years[1][2]. There's no one else who could more credibly make such a claim.

1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...

[toasty228]

They launched a grand total of ~10k starlink satellite, there is a long road between 10k and a million.

Musk would be "the most credible" at claiming he'll have 1000 trillion dollar by 2050, it doesn't mean it's credible at all.

[timschmidt]

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today.

10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

[Zigurd]

> They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit

They seem to have constructed a rocket that consistently gets heavier and more complex and more expensive and farthrt behind schedule and hasn't demonstrated specified payload.

IOW it ain't better than falcon heavy.

[timschmidt]

I checked the publicly released stats over Starship's development, and this is what I found: compared with the initial ~5,000 t / ~73.5 MN concept, the latest V3-class Starship/Super Heavy is trending toward roughly 35%+ more loaded propellant mass and about 40% more maximum liftoff thrust if you use the FAA’s ~103 MN figure. Payload capability has also moved upward from the early 100+ t reusable LEO baseline to SpaceX’s current public claim of up to 150 t fully reusable and 250 t expendable.

When I plug those numbers into https://www.aerovia.org/tools/rocket-equation I get Delta-Vs in the 28k km/hr range right where I'd expect for orbit.

You got a different rocket equation?

[hackernudes]

Pretty sure they mean that Starship is not working reliably yet

[dzhiurgis]

I'd say Starship is already priced in. That's the step to go from 10k (1%) to 10%.

Wonder what will be the next step.

[timschmidt]

Agreed. They're already stretching starship. And there's long been talk of a wider version yet. Starship is already pretty impressive considering it's just about exactly the size of Sea Dragon.

[ben_w]

While true, this is insufficient to make the new claim credible. If the proposed satellites only weighed 100kg and remain on orbit for 3 years, to keep a million up requires:

  (150 metric tons/100kg) = 1500 satellites per Starship launch
  1e6/1500 = 666 launches per MTBF (3 years)
  666/(3 years) = 222 Starship launches/year

This is significantly higher than even the current cadence of Falcons.

If the proposed satellites are to be 1 ton, the required launch cadence would be ten times higher.

[timschmidt]

They've been approved for 44 Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and are aiming for 160 total launches in 2026. They've recently purchased a giant tract of land in Louisana to build a third starport. 222/year is looking doable.

[ben_w]

Approval doesn't mean achievable.

At this point, 160 Starship launches in 2026 would be close to every weekday.

They already have three launch sites for Falcon and can't do 200.

(Also see edit, my first post relied on Apple's autocomplete for maths and it used a short ton, plus point about these numbers corresponding to a mere 100 kg per satellite).

[timschmidt]

The 160 launches figure includes falcons. Seems like Starship fuels and flight tests faster than Falcon though. And if they manage to reuse second stages, then that eliminates a significant manufacturing bottleneck.

[ben_w]

If you're counting Falcons, you are making my point for me: even with those, on three launch sites, they still can't get close to the minimum for an extremely small, to the point of being unreasonable, target satellite mass.

Further, until they actually do solve upper stage reuse, it is an "if" which can kill the economics of the vehicle itself, let alone reach the eventual potential cost reductions necessary for space based data centres to be worthwhile.

[verzali]

They have launched zero times this year. 160 next year is not even slightly credible.

[torginus]

Yeah I remember reading that what killed the space industry in the 90s-2000s other than the collapse of the USSR and cessation of great power competition was the massive move to digital communications, particularly satellite TV - which mean that a smaller number of satellites could serve the expected demand.