21 ms·

What impact will this have on the design of future orbital vehicles? I can't imagine everyone needing to launch hundreds of tons into orbit, much in the way tha

by tjpnz 3y ago

What impact will this have on the design of future orbital vehicles? I can't imagine everyone needing to launch hundreds of tons into orbit, much in the way that people don't buy a lorry if they just want to pick up their kid from school.

paulsutter 3y ago
When you send an envelope by Fedex, it usually flies in and out of Memphis that night. Somehow Fedex manages even though each plane has vastly more capacity than one envelope Same will apply with Starship SpaceX will be the biggest Starship customer for the foreseeable future (Starlink launches), so there’s already a critical mass of demand to support many flights
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  FedEx, huh. So what you're saying that SpaceX can now place my satellite into the wrong orbit using a gravity-boost flyby past Ganymede.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  But FedEx wouldn't send a massive jet out if your goal is to mail that envelope from Brownsville to Boca Chica (of all places).
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Yes, and? Are you saying the whole planet by air looks like 40 km by road, so there's no point having other means of transport? Or something else?
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    a massive jet doesn’t need to pass through boca chica from brownsville, everything needs to pass through the atmosphere to get to space - it’s all on the way
pfdietz 3y ago
When full reuse really gets going, it will be possible to launch the mass of a battleship into space for the cost of a single SLS launch. You don't see this as having any effect on vehicle design? It's going to make the tradeoff between vehicle construction cost and vehicle launch cost very different. Spacecraft will become much more like ordinary tech than exotic aerospace devices, more like ships than aircraft.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- qayxc 3y ago
  You seem to be under the impression that mass is the main restriction - it isn't. Like at all. Starship as a concept is nothing new - the Soviets developed the Energia in the late 1980s and the second version was supposed to be 100% reusable as well. After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Roskosmos couldn't find any customers for it, though, despite it being able to lift up to 100t to LEO and being super cheap. The thing is that the larger (and heavier) the payload, the more expensive it usually is. No one is launching dead mass to orbit just for shits and giggles. The bigger the vehicle, the more (expensive!) tech is packed into it. To give you a hint of why Starship wouldn't change the landscape as much as many seem to think: compare the number of launches between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy: the launch cadence of F9 is bi-weekly and rising, whereas FH had 8 launches in 5 years or less than 2 per year. The main purpose of Starship is to allow for Starlink to continue to exist and similar mega constellations to be launched. Single missions of 100t or more to LEO (Starship cannot go beyond that without refuelling) are usually multi-billion dollar flagship missions that simply don't launch very often.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    You are assuming the cost/mass of a spacecraft is somehow a constant of nature. It's not, not at all. Reduce the cost of launch and there's enormous benefit of reducing the cost of the spacecraft, since that cost now dominates. Use cheaper (if heavier) materials, use higher margins to reduce design and testing costs. Use COTS technology and spend mass (shielding, pressure vessel) to make it work in space. Perhaps most importantly: launch large numbers of spacecraft with the same design to amortize design cost over more vehicles. Reduce design cost by hardware-rich development where problems are found by testing in space, not exhaustive preliminary analysis.
Klaster_1 3y ago
If a price per kg into significantly drops, wouldn't this incentive to design heavier payloads at a lower cost? This could boost the affordability of science done in space or even make in space manufacturing a bit more closer.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  It will also become much cheaper to put astronauts in space and support them there, so it will make sense to make vehicles maintainable and upgradeable in space, even beyond low earth orbit. For example, I expect we'll see space telescopes in high earth orbit that are more like terrestrial telescopes in that they could be maintained and upgraded rather than discarded after use.
- nativeit 3y ago
  How many reusable Starship launches have to be made before it exceeds the cost of one non-reusable rocket? Because last time I checked they’re going to have to make over a dozen additional launches to enable this one Artemis journey, assuming they ever get to that point.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    IIRC, so far the total dev cost including three full test launches and 28 test vehicles has cost about the same as the price per launch of the SLS… So it's still cheaper even without being reusable.
somenameforme 3y ago
Starship's goal is to bring the cost per kg to space down to about $10, or about $4.50 per pound. If they succeed, and it's increasingly looking like they will, this will revolutionize space. The main reason we can't do anything fun in space right now is because costs are simply too high. The Space Shuttle cost about $54,500/kg to send something to orbit. [1] The Falcon 9 brought that way down to $2,720/kg. And the Falcon Heavy then brought it down even lower yet to around the $1400/kg mark. These are all near unbelievably reductions in costs, but the costs started out so astronomical that even at the point of $1400/kg you still just can't do anything too terribly interesting in space. It's just too much money. But at $10/kg? That's suddenly completely swinging open the gates to the mass commercialization and exploitation of space. The ISS was a massive and global project largely because of the unbelievable costs involved in getting it up into space. But the ISS is actually relatively tiny, and only weighs about 450,000kg. We now may be able to send the combined mass of the ISS up into space for as little as $4.5 million (contrasted against $25 billion on the space shuttle)! This really feels surreal, like somehow I cannot even believe what I'm saying myself. But, to the best of my knowledge, it is all 100% accurate. And if so, we are on the verge of a revolution in human civilization that would be difficult to compare anything in our species' history. Cool time to be alive! [1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093
- wpm 3y ago
  $10/kg is cheaper than a lot of long distance flights on an airliner. I weigh 90kg. $900 to go to orbit is the same cost as flying.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    $10 is cost target. Price will likely be significantly higher.
sgu999 3y ago
> much in the way that people don't buy a lorry if they just want to pick up their kid from school No, they buy multi-tons SUVs for that... and come up with all sorts of arguments to justify it. I'm sure we'll find many reasons to put a lot of new things in orbit if it's cheap enough.
- avmich 3y ago
  This website, of all means, talks surprisingly little about startups enabled with significantly reducing the price to get to orbit. "Masses" sent to orbit roughly split into 3 groups: heavy simple materials - mostly metal structures and fuel, complex devices - mostly electronics, and humans. Significantly and closely human-related things are practically humans (can't have humans in space without those roughly in the same flight). For the first group, the cost is mostly in delivering them to space, SpaceX mostly covers that. Second and third groups look quite promising. We already see several projects of orbital space stations; maybe more are in order? Also all kinds of in-space manufacturing - we already see profitable biological and high-tech electronics and communications products, but what about energy, satellite and deep space probes assembly and manufacturing, repairs of on-orbit things? > I'm sure we'll find many reasons to put a lot of new things in orbit if it's cheap enough. I'm sure we will - and hope we'll do it soon.
pfdietz 3y ago
The ultimate limit on # of Starship launches may be from water pollution in the upper atmosphere. Each Starship launches produces about 600 tons of water (either in the exhaust, or from oxidation of hydrogen in the exhaust). Let's ballpark this and say half is ejected in or above the stratosphere (any ejected above the atmosphere quickly returns to the atmosphere.) The Feb. 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai injected an estimated 146 million tons of water into the stratosphere. So, under the ballpark assumption this would be equivalent to half a million Starship launches. Beyond that (if even that is acceptable, as the water stays up there for several years) materials in space might have to be obtained from space sources, not by launch from Earth. EDIT: why was this downvoted?
- ben_w 3y ago
  4000 ish tons of propellant, half a million launches per year, would be 2 gigatons total propellant per year. Until the Sabatier process plants are running at scale, that will also release a non-trivial fraction of current global CO2 emissions.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    I got something wrong in the first post. I misread the propellant mass and was only looking at the second stage. So, multiply the water production by a factor of 4. Not half a million launches, but 1/4 of that. So the water constraint on launches is even worse than I was saying (this is likely what led to the downvote?)
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Re: downvotes — I never ask when I get them, and I didn't vote either way. (I think even asking that is frowned on?)
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Well, I've never been dinged for it, but I'll stop if that's the case. It would have been more useful to get a critique there; I could even have corrected the post before the edit window ended.

by tjpnz 3y ago

paulsutter 3y ago

When you send an envelope by Fedex, it usually flies in and out of Memphis that night. Somehow Fedex manages even though each plane has vastly more capacity than one envelope Same will apply with Starship SpaceX will be the biggest Starship customer for the foreseeable future (Starlink launches), so there’s already a critical mass of demand to support many flights

CamperBob2 3y ago
FedEx, huh. So what you're saying that SpaceX can now place my satellite into the wrong orbit using a gravity-boost flyby past Ganymede.
tjpnz 3y ago
But FedEx wouldn't send a massive jet out if your goal is to mail that envelope from Brownsville to Boca Chica (of all places).
- ben_w 3y ago
  Yes, and? Are you saying the whole planet by air looks like 40 km by road, so there's no point having other means of transport? Or something else?
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  a massive jet doesn’t need to pass through boca chica from brownsville, everything needs to pass through the atmosphere to get to space - it’s all on the way

pfdietz 3y ago

When full reuse really gets going, it will be possible to launch the mass of a battleship into space for the cost of a single SLS launch. You don't see this as having any effect on vehicle design? It's going to make the tradeoff between vehicle construction cost and vehicle launch cost very different. Spacecraft will become much more like ordinary tech than exotic aerospace devices, more like ships than aircraft.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
qayxc 3y ago
You seem to be under the impression that mass is the main restriction - it isn't. Like at all. Starship as a concept is nothing new - the Soviets developed the Energia in the late 1980s and the second version was supposed to be 100% reusable as well. After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Roskosmos couldn't find any customers for it, though, despite it being able to lift up to 100t to LEO and being super cheap. The thing is that the larger (and heavier) the payload, the more expensive it usually is. No one is launching dead mass to orbit just for shits and giggles. The bigger the vehicle, the more (expensive!) tech is packed into it. To give you a hint of why Starship wouldn't change the landscape as much as many seem to think: compare the number of launches between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy: the launch cadence of F9 is bi-weekly and rising, whereas FH had 8 launches in 5 years or less than 2 per year. The main purpose of Starship is to allow for Starlink to continue to exist and similar mega constellations to be launched. Single missions of 100t or more to LEO (Starship cannot go beyond that without refuelling) are usually multi-billion dollar flagship missions that simply don't launch very often.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  You are assuming the cost/mass of a spacecraft is somehow a constant of nature. It's not, not at all. Reduce the cost of launch and there's enormous benefit of reducing the cost of the spacecraft, since that cost now dominates. Use cheaper (if heavier) materials, use higher margins to reduce design and testing costs. Use COTS technology and spend mass (shielding, pressure vessel) to make it work in space. Perhaps most importantly: launch large numbers of spacecraft with the same design to amortize design cost over more vehicles. Reduce design cost by hardware-rich development where problems are found by testing in space, not exhaustive preliminary analysis.

Klaster_1 3y ago

If a price per kg into significantly drops, wouldn't this incentive to design heavier payloads at a lower cost? This could boost the affordability of science done in space or even make in space manufacturing a bit more closer.

pfdietz 3y ago
It will also become much cheaper to put astronauts in space and support them there, so it will make sense to make vehicles maintainable and upgradeable in space, even beyond low earth orbit. For example, I expect we'll see space telescopes in high earth orbit that are more like terrestrial telescopes in that they could be maintained and upgraded rather than discarded after use.
nativeit 3y ago
How many reusable Starship launches have to be made before it exceeds the cost of one non-reusable rocket? Because last time I checked they’re going to have to make over a dozen additional launches to enable this one Artemis journey, assuming they ever get to that point.
- ben_w 3y ago
  IIRC, so far the total dev cost including three full test launches and 28 test vehicles has cost about the same as the price per launch of the SLS… So it's still cheaper even without being reusable.

somenameforme 3y ago

Starship's goal is to bring the cost per kg to space down to about $10, or about $4.50 per pound. If they succeed, and it's increasingly looking like they will, this will revolutionize space. The main reason we can't do anything fun in space right now is because costs are simply too high. The Space Shuttle cost about $54,500/kg to send something to orbit. [1] The Falcon 9 brought that way down to $2,720/kg. And the Falcon Heavy then brought it down even lower yet to around the $1400/kg mark. These are all near unbelievably reductions in costs, but the costs started out so astronomical that even at the point of $1400/kg you still just can't do anything too terribly interesting in space. It's just too much money. But at $10/kg? That's suddenly completely swinging open the gates to the mass commercialization and exploitation of space. The ISS was a massive and global project largely because of the unbelievable costs involved in getting it up into space. But the ISS is actually relatively tiny, and only weighs about 450,000kg. We now may be able to send the combined mass of the ISS up into space for as little as $4.5 million (contrasted against $25 billion on the space shuttle)! This really feels surreal, like somehow I cannot even believe what I'm saying myself. But, to the best of my knowledge, it is all 100% accurate. And if so, we are on the verge of a revolution in human civilization that would be difficult to compare anything in our species' history. Cool time to be alive! [1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093

wpm 3y ago
$10/kg is cheaper than a lot of long distance flights on an airliner. I weigh 90kg. $900 to go to orbit is the same cost as flying.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  $10 is cost target. Price will likely be significantly higher.

sgu999 3y ago

> much in the way that people don't buy a lorry if they just want to pick up their kid from school No, they buy multi-tons SUVs for that... and come up with all sorts of arguments to justify it. I'm sure we'll find many reasons to put a lot of new things in orbit if it's cheap enough.

avmich 3y ago
This website, of all means, talks surprisingly little about startups enabled with significantly reducing the price to get to orbit. "Masses" sent to orbit roughly split into 3 groups: heavy simple materials - mostly metal structures and fuel, complex devices - mostly electronics, and humans. Significantly and closely human-related things are practically humans (can't have humans in space without those roughly in the same flight). For the first group, the cost is mostly in delivering them to space, SpaceX mostly covers that. Second and third groups look quite promising. We already see several projects of orbital space stations; maybe more are in order? Also all kinds of in-space manufacturing - we already see profitable biological and high-tech electronics and communications products, but what about energy, satellite and deep space probes assembly and manufacturing, repairs of on-orbit things? > I'm sure we'll find many reasons to put a lot of new things in orbit if it's cheap enough. I'm sure we will - and hope we'll do it soon.

pfdietz 3y ago

The ultimate limit on # of Starship launches may be from water pollution in the upper atmosphere. Each Starship launches produces about 600 tons of water (either in the exhaust, or from oxidation of hydrogen in the exhaust). Let's ballpark this and say half is ejected in or above the stratosphere (any ejected above the atmosphere quickly returns to the atmosphere.) The Feb. 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai injected an estimated 146 million tons of water into the stratosphere. So, under the ballpark assumption this would be equivalent to half a million Starship launches. Beyond that (if even that is acceptable, as the water stays up there for several years) materials in space might have to be obtained from space sources, not by launch from Earth. EDIT: why was this downvoted?

ben_w 3y ago
4000 ish tons of propellant, half a million launches per year, would be 2 gigatons total propellant per year. Until the Sabatier process plants are running at scale, that will also release a non-trivial fraction of current global CO2 emissions.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  I got something wrong in the first post. I misread the propellant mass and was only looking at the second stage. So, multiply the water production by a factor of 4. Not half a million launches, but 1/4 of that. So the water constraint on launches is even worse than I was saying (this is likely what led to the downvote?)
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Re: downvotes — I never ask when I get them, and I didn't vote either way. (I think even asking that is frowned on?)
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Well, I've never been dinged for it, but I'll stop if that's the case. It would have been more useful to get a critique there; I could even have corrected the post before the edit window ended.