I think the cargo starship will come in around $100/ton to orbit. Pad it a few multiples once you add in life support and everything else a person needs, but just hauling my ass to orbit would be $10,000. I know SpaceX thinks that when the system is mature that amount will be on the lower end of between $1000-10,000, including life support. The additional energy to a Mars insertion isn't really that much. Hopefully by that time there will be an Aldrin cycler (maybe made out of an assembly of Starships socked together) that would have all the power generation, food production, light manufacturing, rooms, and entertainment needed for a comfortable trip. The same starship that's carrying 100+ people packed in tight for $5000 a seat would be able to dock with the cycler for the trip to Mars, and then you'd get back on the passenger ship for Mars EDL. Actual cost to ship a person to Mars at scale could be under $10k. You could literally take a few years or decades and "work from home" on Mars and earn enough money to live comfortably importing supplies from Earth at $100-300/kg for shipping (that's not far off from how much it costs to ship internationally with UPS) (not really, but it feels like it).
The SpaceX Thread
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From what I recall, StarShield will be owned and operated by the US DoD. SpaceX will supply launch and the satellite bus, other (US MIC Space) contractors are also involved. Who is providing which of various capabilities on that satellite bus is unclear
That would be very cool, but is pure science fiction at this point. $100/ton is cheaper than what it costs to ship bulk commodities 1000 miles by rail in the US (that averages $160 per ton.) $10,000 per ton is extremely optimistic - that's $1.5MM per Starship launch. Consumables, range safety fees, control personnel, site operations personnel, cargo handling, and capital amortization for all of it. $1.5MM is conceivable but a huge stretch for the foreseeable future.
$100/ton is $15,000 per launch. I don't think that would even buy the fuel.
First of all, I think you mean $100/kg, but let's take $100/ton.
This is very far-future wishful thinking. Generally, if we go by my favorite source of information on this kind of stuff, namely scifi spacefaring forums, you can theoretically go down to about high thousands of dollars on chemical rockets. The reasoning is roughly like so:
LEO is the lowest you HAVE to go to get something into space and keep it there for a reasonable amount of time. All the rest you can do with non-rocket propulsion. The rough upper limit of rocket mass is thousands of tons, maybe low tens of thousands (10X starship). Starship is already in the order of magnitude of the largest thing you want to launch for dozens of reasons. A 2/3/4-stage rocket weighing 10 000 tons can put about 250 tons into LEO and is close to optimum efficiency in that regard. Rounding up, that's 10 000 tons of fuel and the cheapest you can go right now is CH4+LOX which has never been lower than about $200/MT (at nearly free methane prices and LOX at energy input prices). Barring massive changes in the economy and fueling economics, that's $2M in just fuel and oxidizer. Even if you design a perfect rocket (cigar rocket, i.e. an infinite-stage rocket that perfectly adheres to the integral rocket equation) you don't get lower than about ~5000 tons of fuel for 250 tons of payload. So fuel, no other costs at all, that's $2M/250~$8000/ton.
This assumes the rocket and operations are free, which they aren't. SpaceX is still a tens-of-billions-per-year-operation even if they build zero rockets. All that needs to be paid, and they don't launch that many tons into orbit. Just ops adds tens of thousands of dollars per ton, not even mentioning the rocket itself. So as long as we use chemical rockets anywhere in the chain, anything below like $100-150k/ton is basically impossible. And the absolute floor is at around $10k/ton in a world where only fuel is considered (the only truly non-reusable part)
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Before we get into cheap spaceflight, what is the true bottom of the market right now?
SpaceX has carried about 8000 tons to orbit and let's say invested about $40B to get there (we don't know for sure, but it's at least in the ballpark). That implies they have at least charged on average $50M/ton to survive so far. Without hard evidence it's hard to verify, but given the awarded contracts they surely must be cheaper by this point, maybe as low as $20M/ton on average.
The cheapest recent launches have been well below that, but that's... like, I get how you can sort of say you can launch a Falcon for $20M (implied <$1M/ton), but if all SpaceX did was launch $20M Falcon missions, they'd go bankrupt. That doesn't actually cover the costs. That's more like a marginal cost estimate, but they are clearly subsidizing this with specialty missions, military launches, etc.
But it's clear that marginal launch costs are going to inch below $1M/ton. If we assume no big space infrastructure projects are going to happen anytime soon, that's about the end of it. To do it cheaper requires more scale-up that doesn't have a market right now.
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How can we get cheaper? Well, space infrastructure! 10k tons to orbit sounds like a lot to you? What about 100k tons just in fuel? That's the kind of launch quota you need to even start about thinking to put a robot-operated moon base in place. Another 100k tons just in materials per year to service it. And that's, also, roughly the limit of chemical rockets. At that point, you're able to put so much stuff into space that cheaper launch methods start becoming viable. For instance, mountain-based mass drivers are totally doable for ~$10-100B and have a 'fuel' cost of about 30kWh/kg - even with expensive electricity that's maybe $10/kg in fuel and at 100k tons per year, that's something you can pay off with hundreds of dollars per ton in repayments - orders of magnitude cheaper than chemical rockets. You still need some additional launch tech to insert something into orbit and do transfers, but that's something rockets can do very cheaply if they're stationed in orbit and don't need to get out of the gravity well to begin with. Altogether, maybe $20k/ton is possible that way.
Want to get to $10/kg? One of the first problems is that you need more than $10/kg in energy to begin with. This requires some kind of significant breakthrough in energy technology, something like nuclear fusion (the scifi kind, not the real kind) or megastructure renewables (orbital solar, etc.). Then you also need to be able to construct something that efficiently puts you into orbit but doesn't cost much, which is impossible as even the amount of concrete and steel you need for a launch loop or skyhook or space elevator is humongous. This is 100+ years out, if we ever get there.
These numbers are highly suspect for reasons demultiplexer has already outlined, but there's a lot else wrong with this picture. Living sustainably on Mars is going to be harder than everything else put together, because even if none of the individual pieces is that bad, figuring out the whole is expensive and more importantly time consuming. Ever wonder why nuclear never goes anywhere? Most of the reason is because you can build whole renewable industries in less than the time it takes to build one reactor of an existing design. You can't try it and iterate quickly. And you can't do that with any sort of Mars habitat concept either, for many reasons, the most important of which is that it takes months to get a payload there. And it requires doing something on Mars that has never been done on Earth, including some spectacular failures, like Biosphere 2. The fact there hasn't been a full scale life support demonstrator on Earth from SpaceX is a pretty good indication it's not a serious plan. I think in all likelihood it primarily serves as a means for Elon to pump Tesla stock, in that he can talk about it to take over a press cycle with no expectations of any concrete short term deliverables.
And all of that still needs an economic incentive. The only alternative is for human civilization to get so wealthy that we can indulge the trillions that expanded deep space infrastructure would take out of surplus global GDP, like how the US funds NASA. Just a pure science/exploration money sink.
Got to come up with something that provides ROI - I just have no idea what that would be. Mining is a classic example (numerous science fiction stories about hardscrabble belt miners), but I cant' think of anything you couldn't mine much cheaper terrestrially, unless you brought back so much in volume that you cratered the market.
Musk seems pretty focused on trying to get at least an experimental one-shot Starship to Mars at the end of 2026, but that's obviously a stretch. They could get the ship there and maybe give a try at getting it back, but just ferrying up the fuel, storing it, and fueling up a Starship for the run is going to take a lot of time and work.
Got to come up with something that provides ROI - I just have no idea what that would be. Mining is a classic example (numerous science fiction stories about hardscrabble belt miners), but I cant' think of anything you couldn't mine much cheaper terrestrially, unless you brought back so much in volume that you cratered the market.
Musk seems pretty focused on trying to get at least an experimental one-shot Starship to Mars at the end of 2026, but that's obviously a stretch. They could get the ship there and maybe give a try at getting it back, but just ferrying up the fuel, storing it, and fueling up a Starship for the run is going to take a lot of time and work.
https://www.space.com/spacex-pause-launches-crew-9-falcon-9-issue
Yeesh. This is the third launch pause in the last three months - the Starlink batch that S2 RUDed on relight in July, B1062 died during landing in August, and this S2 anomaly in September.
Three in three months seems like the beginning of a trend - I wonder if/when FAA keeps F9 grounded for more than the few days they sat in July/August.
Yeesh. This is the third launch pause in the last three months - the Starlink batch that S2 RUDed on relight in July, B1062 died during landing in August, and this S2 anomaly in September.
Three in three months seems like the beginning of a trend - I wonder if/when FAA keeps F9 grounded for more than the few days they sat in July/August.
I was thinking that maybe SpaceX was reaching the limits of reusing boosters too much, but the current crop of issues is about the Merlin engines on the second stage, and those are always brand new. Quality Control issues maybe?
It's interesting that issues with Falcon 9 have tended to be with the second stage for quite a long time. Certainly supports the hypothesis that it's really helpful to get rockets back post-flight and do some hands-on inspection and analysis.
I don't think I've seen an actual story, but I think I remember some comments about SpaceX trying to find some efficiencies in the S2 build. I think in connection with the Starlink mission failure in July. Can't help but think there could be a connection if there's any truth to that rumor.
The first stage 2 failure (Starlink 9-3, July 12) was from a sensor component added in a design change for particular government customer data analysis demands. There was obviously an engineering design/analysis failure in not correcting the fixture, but that's not an ongoing quality problem - they just reverted to the previous better analyzed, better validated design without the added sensor and line. Presumably, they're going to revisit any other changes that have been made outside their normal design processes, to see if anything else has concrete issues, or even just missing verification steps.
I think to some extent, SpaceX is showing its strength in its regulatory affairs, in that they've been able to very quickly analyze the relevant data and present it to the FAA quickly to fulfill the agency's mandates and expectations. This most recent failed deorbit burn may stress that, since its off-target re-entry impinges on the 'public safety' case that allowed return-to-flight following the previous two incidents.
I think to some extent, SpaceX is showing its strength in its regulatory affairs, in that they've been able to very quickly analyze the relevant data and present it to the FAA quickly to fulfill the agency's mandates and expectations. This most recent failed deorbit burn may stress that, since its off-target re-entry impinges on the 'public safety' case that allowed return-to-flight following the previous two incidents.
That's only a problem if it's more expensive than current disposable launches, which it won't be. It will be cheaper to launch a mostly empty Starship than a Falcon 9, much less the ridiculously expensive ULA and foreign rockets. If nothing else SpaceX will switch entirely to Starship because they won't have to keep making second stages and engines and discarding them.
Starship will only be cheaper if they can produce and launch it at a cadence that makes it cheaper, though. It's not an intrinsically cheaper craft.
That's what people (like me) are so worried about in this space race to nowhere: you kind of run out of things to launch pretty quick if there's no wars to wage or planets to visit. Launch costs can be anything, a satellite just by itself is still a 20-year, 100-million dollar project.
Starship launch cost per kilo is already 40% less than F9, and the goal is to reduce it to a tenth of that.
With permanent RTLS for the booster, and (if it manages it) catch on landing the cycle time on turnaround for the 1st stage alone should be a big win on F9. Operating ocean going sea craft is expensive, that it is worth it for F9 shows how stupidly expensive rockets are.
If nothing else, the fact that they won't be bottlenecked by building second stages and engines means they can launch when they have payloads instead of when their production line catches up. Even if somehow there's not a huge amount of new interest in putting things in space (I think there will be though), the demand from just all of the people who have payloads right now but can't quite afford it or have to plan for launching in years not months should keep them busy for quite a while. Frankly, the US military alone could easily support the whole Starship infrastructure with their needs and pocket change.
Starship IFT5 has been cleared by the FAA and it sounds like they're launching tomorrow morning.
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Per: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-5
30 minute Launch Window opens at 7AM CT.
"Starship's fifth flight test is targeted to launch on Sunday, October 13. The 30-minute launch window opens at 7 a.m. CT.
A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 35 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. You can also watch the webcast on the new X TV app. The launch window will open as early as 7:00 a.m. CT. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our X account for updates.
Flight 4 was a tremendous success. A fully successful ascent was followed by the first ever booster soft-landing in the Gulf of Mexico and Starship making it through a brilliant reentry, before its own landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The fifth flight test of Starship will aim to take another step towards full and rapid reusability. The primary objectives will be attempting the first ever return to launch site and catch of the Super Heavy booster and another Starship reentry and landing burn, aiming for an on-target splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.
Ready to catch a booster? starshipthegame.spacex.com
Extensive upgrades ahead of this flight test have been made to hardware and software across Super Heavy, Starship, and the launch and catch tower infrastructure at Starbase. SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success. We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and the return will only be attempted if conditions are right.
Thousands of distinct vehicle and pad criteria must be met prior to a return and catch attempt of the Super Heavy booster, which will require healthy systems on the booster and tower and a manual command from the mission’s Flight Director. If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The returning booster will slow down from supersonic speeds, resulting in audible sonic booms in the area around the landing zone. Generally, the only impact to those in the surrounding area of a sonic boom is the brief thunder-like noise with variables like weather and distance from the return site determining the magnitude experienced by observers.
Starship will fly a similar trajectory as the previous flight test with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean. This flight path does not require a deorbit burn for reentry, maximizing public safety while still providing the opportunity to meet our primary objective of a controlled reentry and soft water landing of Starship.
One of the key upgrades on Starship ahead of flight was a complete rework of its heatshield, with SpaceX technicians spending more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with newer-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer, and additional protections between the flap structures. This massive effort, along with updates to the ship’s operations and software for reentry and landing burn, will look to improve upon the previous flight and bring Starship to a soft splashdown at the target area in the Indian Ocean.
With each flight building on the learnings from the last, testing improvements in hardware and operations across every facet of Starship, we’re on the verge of demonstrating techniques fundamental to Starship’s fully and rapidly reusable design. By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we’ll rapidly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space."
30 minute Launch Window opens at 7AM CT.
"Starship's fifth flight test is targeted to launch on Sunday, October 13. The 30-minute launch window opens at 7 a.m. CT.
A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 35 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. You can also watch the webcast on the new X TV app. The launch window will open as early as 7:00 a.m. CT. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our X account for updates.
Flight 4 was a tremendous success. A fully successful ascent was followed by the first ever booster soft-landing in the Gulf of Mexico and Starship making it through a brilliant reentry, before its own landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The fifth flight test of Starship will aim to take another step towards full and rapid reusability. The primary objectives will be attempting the first ever return to launch site and catch of the Super Heavy booster and another Starship reentry and landing burn, aiming for an on-target splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.
Ready to catch a booster? starshipthegame.spacex.com
Extensive upgrades ahead of this flight test have been made to hardware and software across Super Heavy, Starship, and the launch and catch tower infrastructure at Starbase. SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success. We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and the return will only be attempted if conditions are right.
Thousands of distinct vehicle and pad criteria must be met prior to a return and catch attempt of the Super Heavy booster, which will require healthy systems on the booster and tower and a manual command from the mission’s Flight Director. If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The returning booster will slow down from supersonic speeds, resulting in audible sonic booms in the area around the landing zone. Generally, the only impact to those in the surrounding area of a sonic boom is the brief thunder-like noise with variables like weather and distance from the return site determining the magnitude experienced by observers.
Starship will fly a similar trajectory as the previous flight test with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean. This flight path does not require a deorbit burn for reentry, maximizing public safety while still providing the opportunity to meet our primary objective of a controlled reentry and soft water landing of Starship.
One of the key upgrades on Starship ahead of flight was a complete rework of its heatshield, with SpaceX technicians spending more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with newer-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer, and additional protections between the flap structures. This massive effort, along with updates to the ship’s operations and software for reentry and landing burn, will look to improve upon the previous flight and bring Starship to a soft splashdown at the target area in the Indian Ocean.
With each flight building on the learnings from the last, testing improvements in hardware and operations across every facet of Starship, we’re on the verge of demonstrating techniques fundamental to Starship’s fully and rapidly reusable design. By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we’ll rapidly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space."
Looks like if they're launching today, it's a few minutes from the end of the launch window.
When you know the size of that booster, you realize the re-entry shot and catch success are extraordinary. Well done!
Only slightly on fire too.
Good job SpaceX!
I was a bit concerned at how late the relight felt from the external angles. Not sure if the landing burn was chucky style or not. Looks forward to watching some replays and seeing the after action photos
Good job SpaceX!
I was a bit concerned at how late the relight felt from the external angles. Not sure if the landing burn was chucky style or not. Looks forward to watching some replays and seeing the after action photos
Yeah, a couple of the YouTube streams had alternate angles which didn't look as dicey as the main SpaceX one did.
Starship just splashed down and it looked like a controlled soft landing. The onboards were hard to see much in because it was dark, but they had a camera on a buoy which showed a brief shot of it exploding as it sank.
We didn't get a repeat of "the little flap that could" this time, everything looked ok as it came in through the atmosphere (to these layman's eyes, anyway.)
They definitely had burn through at the hinges. Much later and less severe though. Next ship version has different flap shapes which might reduce the hotspots.
EDDIT: Also if you stuck to the end of the X stream they had a cartoon Mechazilla moonwalking in a Michael Jackson hat
You could see some burnthrough on at least one of the flaps. Definitely not as bad as IFT-4, but still probably not good enough for serial production.
It was interesting seeing the shot looking down Ship with the hot spots at the forward edge of the flap faring and the tip of the flap. I think those were glowing, and not just very reflective spots.
I hope they got that footage and share it - how many units did they have out there, or were they just that accurate with splashdown to have one that looked like it was a few hundred meters away?
The flaps seemed to hold up better - it was more golden sparks coming from them this time rather than a plasma cutter from the prior launch.
Still amazed we get launch to splashdown continuous footage thanks to Starlink.
It looks like the thermal protection takes a beating on reentry. Long term what are the options there that would enable rapid reuse (not replacing thousands of tiles per launch)?
Future versions should hold together better but they have planned on being able to replace tiles
Unlike Shuttle where a large number of tiles were custom fit, Starship uses a relatively small number of tile shapes. Many of them just lock into metal studs without requiring glue
I doubt they lost thousands on this landing test
There's apparently more than 10,000 tiles, so if they're going to replace less than 1000 per flight that means each ablative tile has to have more 10x the minimum mass for one flight. That seems like a lot of extra mass, although I wonder if they can optimize it through less reliance on ablation?
I'm not sure they are really loosing many ablatively
Some pop out due to launch acoustics. The hinge burn throughs are more to flap geometry which they expected and already designed a fix into ship V2
Have they given any indication of how many more throwaway tests till they at least try and deliver a batch of Starlink sats with Starship?
Not that I've seen
They have one more V1 Starship but they might skip it straight to the first V2 article
They have one more V1 Starship but they might skip it straight to the first V2 article