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All this was promised from falcon though. I don't doubt theres potential savings, I'm dubious that we'll see order of magnitude cost reductions. Escaping earth

All this was promised from falcon though. I don't doubt theres potential savings, I'm dubious that we'll see order of magnitude cost reductions. Escaping earth's gravity is always going to be hard.

dotnet00 4y ago
Falcon 9 never promised full reusability, only first stage reuse, and it did cause a large reduction in launch costs, as well as pretty obviously representing a paradigm shift considering all the other reusable rockets in development, the surge in funding for space tech startups and megaconstellations becoming practical for private entities. To emphasize that last point, on the back of Falcon 9, Starlink represents over half of all satellites in orbit and Falcon 9 itself accounts for nearly half of all orbital launches in the past 2-3 years. The lower costs are also evident from the fact that many lower budget NASA missions which would have previously had to rideshare ended up just getting a dedicated F9 for less than the rideshare would've cost.
- mabbo 4y ago
  Falcon 9 had "second stage reusability" the same way that Tesla has full self-driving. That was the plan, but then it turned out to be really hard. But at least with SpaceX, they simply gave up and said they were focusing efforts elsewhere.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - avmich 4y ago
    BFR is more capable than Falcon, it's only natural to invest in projects with better prospects.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dexterdog 4y ago
    > Falcon 9 had "second stage reusability" the same way that Tesla has full self-driving. So it's in version 11 of the beta?
    - 93po 4y ago
      imagine the meme of two button options to press with the dude sweating over which to choose, and one is "tesla released FSD too fast" and the other is "tesla is keeping FSD in beta forever"
  - cubefox 4y ago
    Though it should be mentioned that SpaceX currently no longer pursues Starship upper stage reusability, as the upcoming upper stage prototypes do no longer have a heat shield. Is seems likely that they want to first finalize lower stage reuse, as it is likely much more expensive to produce.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      That just means they're not testing reentry in the next several flights. They have a new heat shield design that will fly later.
    - _kst_ 4y ago
      Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse. Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing version, probably won't need a heat shield, but they'll definitely need shielding on any version meant to bring a crew back to Earth. They're just not bothering with heat shielding for tests that don't need it. (I don't know what kind of shielding the Starship that was supposed to launch today has.)
      - cubefox 4y ago
        Starship launching and landing humans on Earth seems quite far away, if it happens at all. Of course they need the heat shield until then, but the much more immediate benefit of the heat shield comes from reducing cost of cargo flights by allowing for reusability of the upper stage. For ordinary non-human payloads, mainly satellites.
- rdhatt 4y ago
  Second stage reusability was certainly proposed by SpaceX: https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/11/musk-wants-to-make-falcon-9-rocket-fully-reusable/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/11/musk-wants-to-make-fal... https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/this-six-year-old-video-from-spacex-is-both-prescient-and-pure-troll/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/this-six-year-old-vi... https://youtu.be/4rC2Z5El-8E https://youtu.be/4rC2Z5El-8E [Everyday Astronaut - Can SpaceX Reuse a second stage?]
DennisP 4y ago
That was not promised from Falcon. The upper stage is not reusable and is 20% of the hardware cost, so at best Falcon could reduce costs by a factor of five. Plus it runs a dirtier fuel so it needs more refurbishment. What they did expect from Falcon is to be significantly cheaper than any other major launch provider, and they achieved that, but there's only so far you can go when you're building a whole new upper stage for every launch. Orbit is hard but the actual fuel cost is not all that high. If you have a rocket that's cheap to build, and you can amortize that cost over a large number of launches, you're mostly just paying fuel and ground services.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  They did have a fully reusable Falcon program that got cancelled to concentrate on BFR. https://youtu.be/sWFFiubtC3c https://youtu.be/sWFFiubtC3c
  - cubefox 4y ago
    Interesting.
hwillis 4y ago
The Delta Heavy is $12,340 per kg to LEO. Saturn V was ~$8,800 in current costs. Falcon Heavy is $1,411 per kg when reused. For a $10 million launch, Starship would cost $67 per kg. Musk has said costs could come down to 1-2 million, although I would disregard that given the cost of the fuel is ~$1 million. Musk is absolutely utterly dismissive of marginal costs like support and maintenance, but $20-30 million per amortized launch ($134-$200 per kg) does not seem that crazy. The structure and materials of the rocket are absurdly cheaper than the Falcon Heavy, and the cost of getting all that on a pad is pretty much constant. The Heavy has 27 Merlin engines, Starship has 33 Raptor engines. If it really is that much cheaper and that much cheaper to refly, a 10x reduction is definitely possible.
- cubefox 4y ago
  It depends also on how often they can reuse the lower and upper stage, and how large the difference between launch cost and launch price will be. As far as I know, only China is currently developing a rocket comparable to Starship (Long March 9) and it will not compete with Starship for customers. So if there are indeed large internal cost cuts for Starship, large price cuts seem to be wishful thinking.
- benj111 4y ago
  All that assumes a market for a rocket as big as starship though. If you're still stuck launching the same kind of payloads as smaller rockets then the benefit will be smaller. For a rocket like starship to make sense you need an ~ order of magnitude increase in the market which isn't a given. If you look at large jets, that wasn't the future. On the other hand cargo shipping seems to be heading that way, so I'll accept it could go either way, I'm just not convinced. I just have a feeling this is more akin to musk buying Twitter, than musk landing a first stage falcon for the first time.
  - ls612 4y ago
    The market even at $300 per kg (if the starship eventually costs what Falcon costs) is dramatically different from the market today.

All this was promised from falcon though. I don't doubt theres potential savings, I'm dubious that we'll see order of magnitude cost reductions. Escaping earth's gravity is always going to be hard.

dotnet00 4y ago

Falcon 9 never promised full reusability, only first stage reuse, and it did cause a large reduction in launch costs, as well as pretty obviously representing a paradigm shift considering all the other reusable rockets in development, the surge in funding for space tech startups and megaconstellations becoming practical for private entities. To emphasize that last point, on the back of Falcon 9, Starlink represents over half of all satellites in orbit and Falcon 9 itself accounts for nearly half of all orbital launches in the past 2-3 years. The lower costs are also evident from the fact that many lower budget NASA missions which would have previously had to rideshare ended up just getting a dedicated F9 for less than the rideshare would've cost.

mabbo 4y ago
Falcon 9 had "second stage reusability" the same way that Tesla has full self-driving. That was the plan, but then it turned out to be really hard. But at least with SpaceX, they simply gave up and said they were focusing efforts elsewhere.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- avmich 4y ago
  BFR is more capable than Falcon, it's only natural to invest in projects with better prospects.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dexterdog 4y ago
  > Falcon 9 had "second stage reusability" the same way that Tesla has full self-driving. So it's in version 11 of the beta?
  - 93po 4y ago
    imagine the meme of two button options to press with the dude sweating over which to choose, and one is "tesla released FSD too fast" and the other is "tesla is keeping FSD in beta forever"
- cubefox 4y ago
  Though it should be mentioned that SpaceX currently no longer pursues Starship upper stage reusability, as the upcoming upper stage prototypes do no longer have a heat shield. Is seems likely that they want to first finalize lower stage reuse, as it is likely much more expensive to produce.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    That just means they're not testing reentry in the next several flights. They have a new heat shield design that will fly later.
  - _kst_ 4y ago
    Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse. Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing version, probably won't need a heat shield, but they'll definitely need shielding on any version meant to bring a crew back to Earth. They're just not bothering with heat shielding for tests that don't need it. (I don't know what kind of shielding the Starship that was supposed to launch today has.)
    - cubefox 4y ago
      Starship launching and landing humans on Earth seems quite far away, if it happens at all. Of course they need the heat shield until then, but the much more immediate benefit of the heat shield comes from reducing cost of cargo flights by allowing for reusability of the upper stage. For ordinary non-human payloads, mainly satellites.
rdhatt 4y ago
Second stage reusability was certainly proposed by SpaceX: https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/11/musk-wants-to-make-falcon-9-rocket-fully-reusable/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/11/musk-wants-to-make-fal... https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/this-six-year-old-video-from-spacex-is-both-prescient-and-pure-troll/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/this-six-year-old-vi... https://youtu.be/4rC2Z5El-8E https://youtu.be/4rC2Z5El-8E [Everyday Astronaut - Can SpaceX Reuse a second stage?]

DennisP 4y ago

That was not promised from Falcon. The upper stage is not reusable and is 20% of the hardware cost, so at best Falcon could reduce costs by a factor of five. Plus it runs a dirtier fuel so it needs more refurbishment. What they did expect from Falcon is to be significantly cheaper than any other major launch provider, and they achieved that, but there's only so far you can go when you're building a whole new upper stage for every launch. Orbit is hard but the actual fuel cost is not all that high. If you have a rocket that's cheap to build, and you can amortize that cost over a large number of launches, you're mostly just paying fuel and ground services.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
They did have a fully reusable Falcon program that got cancelled to concentrate on BFR. https://youtu.be/sWFFiubtC3c https://youtu.be/sWFFiubtC3c
- cubefox 4y ago
  Interesting.

hwillis 4y ago

The Delta Heavy is $12,340 per kg to LEO. Saturn V was ~$8,800 in current costs. Falcon Heavy is $1,411 per kg when reused. For a $10 million launch, Starship would cost $67 per kg. Musk has said costs could come down to 1-2 million, although I would disregard that given the cost of the fuel is ~$1 million. Musk is absolutely utterly dismissive of marginal costs like support and maintenance, but $20-30 million per amortized launch ($134-$200 per kg) does not seem that crazy. The structure and materials of the rocket are absurdly cheaper than the Falcon Heavy, and the cost of getting all that on a pad is pretty much constant. The Heavy has 27 Merlin engines, Starship has 33 Raptor engines. If it really is that much cheaper and that much cheaper to refly, a 10x reduction is definitely possible.

cubefox 4y ago
It depends also on how often they can reuse the lower and upper stage, and how large the difference between launch cost and launch price will be. As far as I know, only China is currently developing a rocket comparable to Starship (Long March 9) and it will not compete with Starship for customers. So if there are indeed large internal cost cuts for Starship, large price cuts seem to be wishful thinking.
benj111 4y ago
All that assumes a market for a rocket as big as starship though. If you're still stuck launching the same kind of payloads as smaller rockets then the benefit will be smaller. For a rocket like starship to make sense you need an ~ order of magnitude increase in the market which isn't a given. If you look at large jets, that wasn't the future. On the other hand cargo shipping seems to be heading that way, so I'll accept it could go either way, I'm just not convinced. I just have a feeling this is more akin to musk buying Twitter, than musk landing a first stage falcon for the first time.
- ls612 4y ago
  The market even at $300 per kg (if the starship eventually costs what Falcon costs) is dramatically different from the market today.