My theory is that they aim to disrupt Earth travel (airlines). Elon pointed out that the reliability of Starship would exceed that of commercial airplanes, and the fuel costs are not that different than, say, a 747. Fewer moving parts than an airplane, less human costs, order of magnitude faster...
Concerns about cost per flight aside, how would one go about locating spaceports near enough to urban centers for this concept to be viable? If a fully fueled airliner crashes in an urban area, it’s devastating. Now consider a fully fueled rocket — would the crash be an order of of magnitude worse?
Perhaps I still have the “rockets are inherently dangerous, mitigate bad outcomes by isolating them” mentality. Maybe designs will get the the point where the likelihood of a bad outcome is so remote that it would make sense to locate a spaceport in the same way one locates an airport. Or maybe the spaceport could be way out there and just connected to the urban center with high speed ground transportation. Either way, if spaceports become commercially viable, it’s an interesting thing to consider from an urban planning perspective.
In the presentation he says one of the main problems is that launches are loud, and so would probably need to be 30mi from anything. The plan is lots of sea based launch & landing platforms.
Why not start with replacing loads of trans continental freight cargo? There's no risk of human casualties, you can land away from cities and transport it in. And I'm sure there's plenty of business to be had.
It's also a great way to fund the development of starship.
There are many safety and security issues that must be solved before suborbital passenger flights become viable. Some involve national security. For example, can you imagine a world where the US, Russia, and China keep launching ICBMs at each other all the time?
Others involve more mundane risks that are pretty much guaranteed to occur once in a while. Things like losing cabin pressure or something catching fire. How do you deal with such situations, how quickly can you get the rocket to land safely, and how quickly can you evacuate the passengers?
And SpaceX won a contract to transport cargo: "SpaceX wins $102 million Air Force contract to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world in a rocket"
My understanding is that rockets are good at getting a small mass to move really quickly. They will never win moving a lot of mass within the atmosphere. The fuel costs are radically different.
A 747 can lift and land ~80% of Starship's design cargo but uses something like 7 times less fuel.
Elon thinking is that on long distance flight you increase moved cargo per vehicle per unit of time.
He was saying that flying to the other end of the world will be 20x faster vs. airplane.
So if you move 20x more cargo per unit of time, then cost of cargo per vehicle + static infrastructure are proportionally lower.
But we need to take into account that number of cycles of a rocket engine may not be as good as jet engines, ground / water infrastructure seems a lot more complicated, fuel costs are higher etc. etc.
I doubt the math will close on it taking everything into account, but maybe there will be some limited use cases. USA army seems to be thinking about it. Extremely rapid deployment capability all around the world may be worthwhile for them.
Yeah, I've kept a close but unfortunately deeply skeptical eye on that technology. Seems that all the tolerances are razor thin and all the failure modes catastrophic. Like, water vapour in the pre-cooler tubes? This is waaay out there in engineering terms IMHO.
Reading the recent heat exchanger news [1] the are very careful to talk about Mach 5 airflow temperatures, not velocity. Surely it the product of these two that produce the mind-boggling heat flux that the pre-cooler is tasked with cooling. It feels like they're going to keep carving out smaller and smaller targets until they run out of money.
If you look at the cost the calculated originally for the Skylon, it doesn't actually beat Falcon 9 even.
And when I listened to some presentation with the people involved, it seem they had no real understanding of some of the complexity involved. Their history is mostly in academic and British space industry, and all the project they worked on before are canceled paper studies that were kicked around in Britain.
When asked about the structure of Skylon the answer was vague hand waving about some new materials that might exist. Nothing at all concrete that has even begun being tested for high complexity air frames and high requirements.
Elon himself was asked about this when he presented in Britain. And he answered by saying that investing massive amount of complexity in the easiest part of your flight was counter productive.
Pushing the thrust of your traditional rocket engine a little bit higher, is far, far easier then engines.
And if you are really optimizing to that kind of extreme, doing even more advanced version of second stage engines and structural optimization on the second stage would likely always have a higher pay off per complexity invested.
SpaceX vs Skylon/Sabre, feels a bit like the Henry Ford quote about "faster horses". I do appreciate the scale of the engineering problems and neither is easy, but SpaceX and rocketry just seems like another "faster horse", whereas Skylon/Sabre is something totally new. But I don't have much hope given how long it's taken to get to where we are now. It's the space equivalent of tech - get to market first with something that works, not something that's a tech tour-de-force.
Elon seemed to indicate that it would be stretching to get individual launch costs below $1M. That seems at least 2-3 orders of magnitude out of range for most conventional travel?
I believe that $1M includes the booster stage, and that for suborbital p2p travel you should be able to skip that. The booster consumes the majority of the fuel, has a lot more engines (which require upkeep), and so on.
$1M for an orbital flight strikes me as an insanely aggressive target, but if they can achieve that, they can probably achieve half that, or less, for suborbital hops.
There is no way the cost per trip (airline) is in the $1K - $10K range. The Boeing 787-8 has a fuel capacity of 33,500 gallons. I don't think an intercontinental flight costs significantly less than $1M
In round numbers, airlines’ cost basis is ~$0.15 per available seat mile.
So a trip from NYC to Rome of 4,300 miles in a 777-300ER with 350 passengers would cost in the ballpark of $225k.
LA to Shanghai at 6,500 miles in the same capacity plane would be more like $350k.
$1M wouldn’t make much sense because with 350pax you’d need them to pay $2,900 each leg just to cover the operating costs. So a round trip flight to Shanghai that was completely sold out in both directions would need to have an average ticket price of nearly $6k.
I’m sure they would find their customers. The Concorde from NY to Paris ran about 10k USD round trip. There are many more millionaires now than there were in the 90s.
I think their benchmark is a 100% business/first class ride with every seat having business/first class prices. The idea being they can beat that for long distance. Also time is money arguments as well. As most airlines actually make the majority of their money on business/first class seats for long distance international flights, which is used to subsidize the economy seats. This starts to make long distance flights uneconomic for airlines versus Starship.
That’s a falicy, why would air airline subsidise economy?
Several airlines have tried all business flights. I’ve taken some - Qatar to London for example, Paris-NY I think was all business too when I flew it, and there a London-New York one
But they are rare exceptions. Yes if you can fill a 787 with 100 first class passengers paying 5k each way you can make money, but the demand isn’t there.
Flying from Los Angeles is $1000 round trip, so $500 one way, which is $250k on a 500 passenger airliner. If Starship can carry 1000 people for $1000k, it would be twice the cost per passenger.
I'm not sure that this will ever be viable for the general population. Think about the acceleration at launch and reentry. It's more an amusement park experience than travel by car, ship or plane. There will be people mentally and physically fit for that (past some age and before another one) and people that will never be.
Other problems like cost, time from home to spaceport and boarding can be fixed or be irrelevant (if I live too far away, too bad for me, I'll fly.)
Man If I could fly (rocket?) to AUS from the UK in a handful of hours I'd be all over that vs. the 24+ hour flights + connections. Sure it doesn't make sense for all routes but for super long distance I can see it being competitive for some section of the market.
I'd do that too, but I keep my point that it's not for everyone in the same way that a flight is. Babies, old people, pets. They can fly to space (untested for babies AFAIK) but is it advisable? I think that there will be a market for 27 hours long flights to Australia even after starships. We'll wait and see.
But they didn’t with Concorde. There are more first class seats across the Atlantic (well pre covid) than Concorde, but the latter failed to be as profitable, and super sonic business jets aren’t a thing.
But due to noise protection regulation on both sides of the Atlantic, there where not enough profitable routes available to be able to recoup development costs.
They launched people to the space station ok. The max acceleration isn't actually at launch as the rocket is heavy with fuel then - it increases as it gets lighter.
