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Why would they do day trips when they plan to do suborbital passenger trips. Not make going into space a bucket list item for the upper middle class, but a rout

Why would they do day trips when they plan to do suborbital passenger trips. Not make going into space a bucket list item for the upper middle class, but a routine A-to-B for business class flyers. The bucket list item would be Mars.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
I would assume free cash flow would be the reason. Let's assume that you could get $20M per seat on a 7 seat dragon with 2 of those seats going to crew and the other 5 going to paying passengers. You, launch them on a re-usable F9 which you currently charge $80M for a non-reusable booster flight into low orbit. Could you clear 25 - 35 million in margin on that? Could you do that for doing "nothing" special other than having the gear ready? Clearly we'd need way more visibility into their operational costs but if you could generate 250 - 300M$ per year that was not from fixed price contracts I think that would be a helpful thing from a money management perspective. They still might not do it, but I don't think the sub-orbital passenger trips are very close. So many "other people" have to get involved before that is real, like treaties with the world about how you regulate overflights, or tariffs, or do air traffic control, or who pays when your rocket augurs into the innocent village, Etc. There are lots of details there, whereas Roscosmos has already done tourist flights to the ISS, and with their own launch facilities most of the variables would be under SpaceX's ability to control.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  You wouldn't use Dragon, you'd use BFR/Starship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
- ShorsHammer 8y ago
  > 2 of those seats going to crew Why exactly do you need crew taking up nearly 30% of the seats on a vessel that can provably operate without them?
  - B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
    Keep order, etc.
neuronexmachina 8y ago
SpaceX actually showed a mock-up of what point-to-point travel might look like in one of their videos.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
- politician 8y ago
  The vomit-comet ICBM video? I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but I think they'll get to Mars before governments on Earth allow that concept to happen. Your passengers do multiple g's to altitude, then go weightless, then go back to taking g-forces on descent. That's the vomit part. Not a great customer experience. Meanwhile, the Starship looks like an ICBM to every early warning radar on the planet. It's only during reentry that it stops looking like an ICBM, but most missile defense strategies call for intervention in the boost phase. Let's suppose that they address those false positive detection issues. If you're a military planner, though, you're probably asking yourself how many MIRV warheads could fit inside a militarized Starship retrofitted for a preemptive strike?
  - politician 8y ago
    Ok, I did some rough math. The W88 has a diameter of 55cm, a length of 175cm, and a blast yield of 475 kilotons. The unpressurized cargo hold of the Starship per Wikipedia is 88m^3, and the diameter of the vehicle is 9m. Let's assume that the unpressurized cargo hold is a cylinder 9m in diameter with a length of 9m. It looks like a hold of that size could fit 15 units per 200cm length, or 60 units, with space for structural rails and deployment gear. For comparison, that's 7.5x the capacity of the Trident II SLBM which was designed to accommodate 8 W88s. In terms of potential, one W88 detonated in an airburst would produce a fireball over 1.56 sq km, an air blast to 5psi overpressure over 91.9 sq km, and 3rd degree burns over 233 sq km. The scale of the human tragedy involved in a first-strike deployment of 60 of these things is too gruesome to write down here, but you can play with it on NukeMap [1] if you're so inclined. Suffice it to say that no sane government on the planet will want Starship to land anywhere nearby unless we're living in a global utopia where this sort of thing is unthinkable. [1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I would assume free cash flow would be the reason. Let's assume that you could get $20M per seat on a 7 seat dragon with 2 of those seats going to crew and the other 5 going to paying passengers. You, launch them on a re-usable F9 which you currently charge $80M for a non-reusable booster flight into low orbit. Could you clear 25 - 35 million in margin on that? Could you do that for doing "nothing" special other than having the gear ready? Clearly we'd need way more visibility into their operational costs but if you could generate 250 - 300M$ per year that was not from fixed price contracts I think that would be a helpful thing from a money management perspective. They still might not do it, but I don't think the sub-orbital passenger trips are very close. So many "other people" have to get involved before that is real, like treaties with the world about how you regulate overflights, or tariffs, or do air traffic control, or who pays when your rocket augurs into the innocent village, Etc. There are lots of details there, whereas Roscosmos has already done tourist flights to the ISS, and with their own launch facilities most of the variables would be under SpaceX's ability to control.

Robotbeat 8y ago
You wouldn't use Dragon, you'd use BFR/Starship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
ShorsHammer 8y ago
> 2 of those seats going to crew Why exactly do you need crew taking up nearly 30% of the seats on a vessel that can provably operate without them?
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  Keep order, etc.

neuronexmachina 8y ago

SpaceX actually showed a mock-up of what point-to-point travel might look like in one of their videos.

Robotbeat 8y ago
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
politician 8y ago
The vomit-comet ICBM video? I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but I think they'll get to Mars before governments on Earth allow that concept to happen. Your passengers do multiple g's to altitude, then go weightless, then go back to taking g-forces on descent. That's the vomit part. Not a great customer experience. Meanwhile, the Starship looks like an ICBM to every early warning radar on the planet. It's only during reentry that it stops looking like an ICBM, but most missile defense strategies call for intervention in the boost phase. Let's suppose that they address those false positive detection issues. If you're a military planner, though, you're probably asking yourself how many MIRV warheads could fit inside a militarized Starship retrofitted for a preemptive strike?
- politician 8y ago
  Ok, I did some rough math. The W88 has a diameter of 55cm, a length of 175cm, and a blast yield of 475 kilotons. The unpressurized cargo hold of the Starship per Wikipedia is 88m^3, and the diameter of the vehicle is 9m. Let's assume that the unpressurized cargo hold is a cylinder 9m in diameter with a length of 9m. It looks like a hold of that size could fit 15 units per 200cm length, or 60 units, with space for structural rails and deployment gear. For comparison, that's 7.5x the capacity of the Trident II SLBM which was designed to accommodate 8 W88s. In terms of potential, one W88 detonated in an airburst would produce a fireball over 1.56 sq km, an air blast to 5psi overpressure over 91.9 sq km, and 3rd degree burns over 233 sq km. The scale of the human tragedy involved in a first-strike deployment of 60 of these things is too gruesome to write down here, but you can play with it on NukeMap [1] if you're so inclined. Suffice it to say that no sane government on the planet will want Starship to land anywhere nearby unless we're living in a global utopia where this sort of thing is unthinkable. [1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/