A Panamax cargo ship (which is small by today's standards...) can carry ~5100 20-foot containers (TEUs) with a crew of perhaps 20. Sailcargo's under-constructi

A Panamax cargo ship (which is small by today's standards...) can carry ~5100 20-foot containers (TEUs) with a crew of perhaps 20. Sailcargo's under-construction flagship can carry 9 TEUs with a crew of 24. So replacing a single Panamax cargo ship means building around 560 of these ships, which will sail with a crew of 13k people. (Or to put it another way, carrying 9 TEUs might earn you $10k for a trip at current cargo rates. Let's assume you can double that due to charging people a green premium, that's $20k a trip. At traditional sail speeds, you can earn that every 2 months, meaning each ship earns $120k/year, which needs to pay for building the ship, maintenance, food, power, sattelite internet, salaries, etc. With a listed crew of 24 people, that's $5k of revenue per person, per year.) This isn't remotely economic or scalable, but I'm not sure it's even better environmentally. The amount of resources (especially lumber) that would go into making a fleet of almost six hundred, 150ft long sailing vessels is immense. And then youi think about the cost of having 13k people sailing around - the salaries, the food they'd eat, the medical care they'd consume, the waste they'd generate. And all that to replace just one of the smaller cargo ships still operating, out of the thousands and thousands operating. There may well be a lucrative niche here; people will pay money for the damndest things! It's entirely possible you can make good money charging people to LARP as a 19th century sailboat crew, sure, why not? But whatever this is, it's certainly not the future of cargo shipping. (Now the idea of using wind power on cargo ships is potentially promising. Just...not this kind of ship.) Edit: I should emphasise, the ships they're building and planning to build use quite a lot of of very old trees. You're not building these things from radiata pine! Sailcargo stresses they're using lumber from sustainable forestry, which is great, but they're building one schooner, and replacing just a dozen container ships means building maybe 8,000 schooners. If you were hoping to have them operating anytime this decade, you're going to need to start clearcutting. But it's okay, you can use the land you clear to build the training schools needed for the 200,000 new sailors those ships will need. Because there absolutely aren't 200k crew who know how to sail a tall ship just waiting for a call. Oh, and in case anyone was thinking, "well, maybe we should just ship less cargo", shipping freight by sea is actually the most environmentally friendly option. If sending cargo by sea becomes more expensive - and it would have to, given the economics of these ships - cargo will start being sent by land or (even worse) air. That does mean you'd need to build fewer schooners, but unfortunately means the environmental impact would be even more negative on balance. I do love the idea of seeing the the Port of LA swarming with tends of thousands of tall ships. Aesthetically it sounds amazing! But in reality it couldn't possibly work.