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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

• etrautmann 5y ago
  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?
  • inasio 5y ago
    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
    • mikeyouse 5y ago
      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.
      • jazzyjackson 5y ago
        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.
  • mlindner 5y ago
    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.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      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.
  • omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
    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.
  • gpm 5y ago
    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.
• penisverse 5y ago
  Just like robotaxis would disrupt Uber.
• proggy 5y ago
  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.
  • cookingrobot 5y ago
    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.
  • jltsiren 5y ago
    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?
    • beambot 5y ago
      China is supposedly doing it: "China’s New Winged Rocket Can Soar From New York to Beijing in 1 Hour" https://interestingengineering.com/chinas-new-winged-rocket-can-soar-from-new-york-to-beijing-in-1-hour https://interestingengineering.com/chinas-new-winged-rocket-... 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" https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-wins-air-force-contract-rocket-cargo-humanitarian-aid-world-2022-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-wins-air-force-contra...
• pmontra 5y ago
  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.)
  • londons_explore 5y ago
    You can launch and land with fewer g-forces if you like. It just uses more fuel, reduces payload, and increases costs. But it could be done.
  • deadbunny 5y ago
    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.
    • pmontra 5y ago
      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.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      27 hours of travelling in a first class suite isn’t that bad
      • avmich 5y ago
        8 days of traveling USA to Europe by ship could be nice, but markets largely killed that.
• vanattab 5y ago
  Oh really? Musk said that? Then it's be true...
• verytrivial 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you explain what you are comparing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust-specific_fuel_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust-specific_fuel_consump... 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.
  • DrBazza 5y ago
    > A 747 can lift and land ~80% of Starship's design cargo but uses something like 7 times less fuel. That's why something like the Sabre engine will always be of interest for a proper space plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)
    • verytrivial 5y ago
      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. [1] https://reactionengines.co.uk/reaction-engines-test-programme-fully-validates-precooler-at-hypersonic-heat-conditions/ https://reactionengines.co.uk/reaction-engines-test-programm...
      • panick21_ 5y ago
        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.
• tim333 5y ago
  >reliability of Starship would exceed that of commercial airplanes I don't think he said that. Maybe you're thinking of: >44:31 "so the interesting thing is that the capital efficiency of of a rocket is is is much better than the capital efficiency of a plane for long distance flights"