After Thursday's flight, Starship is the most revolutionary rocket ever built

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/thursdays-starship-flight-provided-a-glimpse-into-a-future-of-abundant-access-to-space/

by vanburen • 2 years ago

47 38 2 years ago

arstechnica.com

tjpnz3• 2 years ago

What impact will this have on the design of future orbital vehicles? I can't imagine everyone needing to launch hundreds of tons into orbit, much in the way that people don't buy a lorry if they just want to pick up their kid from school.

paulsutter• 2 years ago

When you send an envelope by Fedex, it usually flies in and out of Memphis that night. Somehow Fedex manages even though each plane has vastly more capacity than one envelope

Same will apply with Starship

SpaceX will be the biggest Starship customer for the foreseeable future (Starlink launches), so there’s already a critical mass of demand to support many flights

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

FedEx, huh. So what you're saying that SpaceX can now place my satellite into the wrong orbit using a gravity-boost flyby past Ganymede.

tjpnz3• 2 years ago

But FedEx wouldn't send a massive jet out if your goal is to mail that envelope from Brownsville to Boca Chica (of all places).

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

When full reuse really gets going, it will be possible to launch the mass of a battleship into space for the cost of a single SLS launch.

You don't see this as having any effect on vehicle design? It's going to make the tradeoff between vehicle construction cost and vehicle launch cost very different. Spacecraft will become much more like ordinary tech than exotic aerospace devices, more like ships than aircraft.

qayxc2• 2 years ago

You seem to be under the impression that mass is the main restriction - it isn't. Like at all.

Starship as a concept is nothing new - the Soviets developed the Energia in the late 1980s and the second version was supposed to be 100% reusable as well. After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Roskosmos couldn't find any customers for it, though, despite it being able to lift up to 100t to LEO and being super cheap.

The thing is that the larger (and heavier) the payload, the more expensive it usually is. No one is launching dead mass to orbit just for shits and giggles. The bigger the vehicle, the more (expensive!) tech is packed into it. To give you a hint of why Starship wouldn't change the landscape as much as many seem to think: compare the number of launches between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy: the launch cadence of F9 is bi-weekly and rising, whereas FH had 8 launches in 5 years or less than 2 per year.

The main purpose of Starship is to allow for Starlink to continue to exist and similar mega constellations to be launched. Single missions of 100t or more to LEO (Starship cannot go beyond that without refuelling) are usually multi-billion dollar flagship missions that simply don't launch very often.

Klaster_1• 2 years ago

If a price per kg into significantly drops, wouldn't this incentive to design heavier payloads at a lower cost? This could boost the affordability of science done in space or even make in space manufacturing a bit more closer.

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

It will also become much cheaper to put astronauts in space and support them there, so it will make sense to make vehicles maintainable and upgradeable in space, even beyond low earth orbit. For example, I expect we'll see space telescopes in high earth orbit that are more like terrestrial telescopes in that they could be maintained and upgraded rather than discarded after use.

nativeit• 2 years ago

How many reusable Starship launches have to be made before it exceeds the cost of one non-reusable rocket? Because last time I checked they’re going to have to make over a dozen additional launches to enable this one Artemis journey, assuming they ever get to that point.

somenameforme• 2 years ago

Starship's goal is to bring the cost per kg to space down to about $10, or about $4.50 per pound. If they succeed, and it's increasingly looking like they will, this will revolutionize space. The main reason we can't do anything fun in space right now is because costs are simply too high. The Space Shuttle cost about $54,500/kg to send something to orbit. [1] The Falcon 9 brought that way down to $2,720/kg. And the Falcon Heavy then brought it down even lower yet to around the $1400/kg mark. These are all near unbelievably reductions in costs, but the costs started out so astronomical that even at the point of $1400/kg you still just can't do anything too terribly interesting in space. It's just too much money. But at $10/kg? That's suddenly completely swinging open the gates to the mass commercialization and exploitation of space.

The ISS was a massive and global project largely because of the unbelievable costs involved in getting it up into space. But the ISS is actually relatively tiny, and only weighs about 450,000kg. We now may be able to send the combined mass of the ISS up into space for as little as $4.5 million (contrasted against $25 billion on the space shuttle)! This really feels surreal, like somehow I cannot even believe what I'm saying myself. But, to the best of my knowledge, it is all 100% accurate. And if so, we are on the verge of a revolution in human civilization that would be difficult to compare anything in our species' history. Cool time to be alive!

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093

wpm• 2 years ago

$10/kg is cheaper than a lot of long distance flights on an airliner. I weigh 90kg. $900 to go to orbit is the same cost as flying.

sgu999• 2 years ago

much in the way that people don't buy a lorry if they just want to pick up their kid from school

No, they buy multi-tons SUVs for that... and come up with all sorts of arguments to justify it.

I'm sure we'll find many reasons to put a lot of new things in orbit if it's cheap enough.

avmich3• 2 years ago

This website, of all means, talks surprisingly little about startups enabled with significantly reducing the price to get to orbit.

"Masses" sent to orbit roughly split into 3 groups: heavy simple materials - mostly metal structures and fuel, complex devices - mostly electronics, and humans. Significantly and closely human-related things are practically humans (can't have humans in space without those roughly in the same flight).

For the first group, the cost is mostly in delivering them to space, SpaceX mostly covers that. Second and third groups look quite promising. We already see several projects of orbital space stations; maybe more are in order? Also all kinds of in-space manufacturing - we already see profitable biological and high-tech electronics and communications products, but what about energy, satellite and deep space probes assembly and manufacturing, repairs of on-orbit things?

I'm sure we'll find many reasons to put a lot of new things in orbit if it's cheap enough.

I'm sure we will - and hope we'll do it soon.

pfdietz8• 2 years ago

The ultimate limit on # of Starship launches may be from water pollution in the upper atmosphere.

Each Starship launches produces about 600 tons of water (either in the exhaust, or from oxidation of hydrogen in the exhaust). Let's ballpark this and say half is ejected in or above the stratosphere (any ejected above the atmosphere quickly returns to the atmosphere.)

The Feb. 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai injected an estimated 146 million tons of water into the stratosphere. So, under the ballpark assumption this would be equivalent to half a million Starship launches. Beyond that (if even that is acceptable, as the water stays up there for several years) materials in space might have to be obtained from space sources, not by launch from Earth.

EDIT: why was this downvoted?

ben_w5• 2 years ago

4000 ish tons of propellant, half a million launches per year, would be 2 gigatons total propellant per year.

Until the Sabatier process plants are running at scale, that will also release a non-trivial fraction of current global CO2 emissions.

dspillett• 2 years ago

They'd already done revolutions with this launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXiB-Kgqvdk

The latest one was more successful than the previous tests partly due to not revolving.

rayiner• 2 years ago

I used to be a Space X skeptic, pooh-poohing them for re-using RP-1 based rocket engine technology from the 1960s. Clearly, I’m a moron. Starting with known technology and scaling from there worked. Amazing.

codingclaws• 2 years ago

When is the next Starship launch?

tjpnz3• 2 years ago

Ship 29 is going through static fire testing but they're still building the booster. Two months maybe?

hackeraccount• 2 years ago

Musk says 6 more launches this year. That's considered optimistic but - and I'm not saying the progress so far hasn't been amazeballs - if you consider how far they need to go for Artemis and the theoretical Artemis time frame then 6 more this year might be what's what's required.

If you really wanted 6 this year it'd be more like 6 weeks for the next launch?

Hayvok• 2 years ago

What Thursday's revelatory reentry footage promises is a world in which launch is cheap and abundant. No longer will we need to worry so much about mass or volume, which have been tyrannical overlords to mission planners since the inception of spaceflight nearly seven decades ago.

Using the metrics in the article, Starship costs come out to around $300 per kilogram launched.

This is an order of magnitude drop over existing launch costs, which are already lower than ever courtesy of the Falcon rockets.

(Wikipedia estimates Falcon costs are $3,000 per kg. Other providers still significantly higher.)

Any time you change such a fundamental pricing unit in a market, there is going to a huge amount of change in market opportunities.

People dismissing this have their heads in the sand.

avmich3• 2 years ago

Yes, and even $300 per kg on orbit seems rather conservative.

SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.

So, $30m per 100t is $300 kg. If Starship is reusable, the flight could cost closer to $10m. If the payload is 150t, the cost of kg is lower still. And all that is in relatively short term.

DemocracyFTW2• 2 years ago

recommend to watch Thunderf00t's live coverage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfkadv8NHlw

After Thursday's flight, Starship is the most revolutionary rocket ever built

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