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Starship is heavy lift / heavy expense. If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper. Or
by OhMeadhbh 2y ago
Starship is heavy lift / heavy expense. If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper. Or you wait until you find 600 other small sat users who want to launch into the same / similar orbit.
The talk I heard was that New Glenn was supposed to be BO's answer to Starship (or more likely Falcon Heavy) that could launch a bunch of Project Kuiper satellites into LEO so Amazon could compete with Starlink and feed Amazon's Ground Station as a Service offering.
If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO, Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons and Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.
I'm not a heavy lift sales-person, but I've been in the room when they discussed what they thought they could sell to govt / mil / commercial customers. So take this with a little bit of salt... Seems to me BO was targeting a slightly smaller launch vehicle than SpaceX was going with so they could decouple schedule with Amazon's Kuiper Project. You don't want to have that cool new rocket you developed dependent on a satellite constellation that gets delayed. So you have a rocket that would be easier to fill with a number of small to medium sized satellites to LEO or (fewer) to GEO.
And like other people on the thread have commented, it seems BO is a decade behind SpaceX, so... yeah... a big rocket that competes with Starship is pretty risky for BO.
And yes, I understand that BO is independent from Amazon, but from what I've seen this is just so they can execute on a schedule that isn't determined by AMZN's board of directors. They seem pretty closely related, just from talking with Kuiper, GSaaS and BO engineers.
I don't work for any of the above mentioned companies and have no insider information. YMMV. Just my guesses from watching some of the personalities involved for the last 30 years.
- starik36 2y agoI am going out on a limb and say that Project Kuiper satellites themselves are nowhere near ready. Amazon is supposed to launch 50% of the constellation of ~6000 into orbit by July 2026 or risk losing frequencies. So you would think there would be some urgency. Amazon purchased pretty much all remaining Atlas 5 launches from ULA. This is a proven rocket and ready to fly. Why aren't the satellites being launched? The only thing I can think of is that they are not ready yet.
- donavanm 2y agoI am unfortunately skeptical. As you say theyve got two test units in orbit and every day the frequency allocations tick closer. Whats the launch schedule look like for 3000 successful units inside 18 months? What about the in house build process. I havent heard anything that reflects the exponential process growth & delivery theyll need. That first real launch also starts the recurring costs ticking on the limited orbit lifetime of that hardware. I havent thought through the numbers in a while, but something like a billion or three per year to maintain the constellation? Swag (an optimistic?) $2m satellite and $2m launch cost and 7 year lifetime, thats an yearly average of $1.7b in “maintenance” to keep the very minimal constellation up there. Easily double if their Im also pretty skeptical of their business. AFAICT its a bunch of ex telecoms and space/defense contractors. So theyre going to try and soak US DoD for connectivity with a more uh, “reliable”, company and a consumer side of “space comcast.” Im pretty skeptical on consumer space “broadband” due to the density problems. And I use comcast as a perjorative for their business & network interop coming from CDN & ISP land. Lastly on a positive note, I dont expect the same employee resignation bloodbath that AMZN at large is going through at the moment. Kuiper (afaik) has been pretty top down “you shall come in to the office” the whole time, so any rto mandate is unlikely to change the existing experience.
- perihelions 2y ago- "If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper." I don't buy this. I think small startups like that can't get the economies of scale that would let them compete on price, for any payload. So long as they are targeting low-value niche markets like one-off smallsats, they won't have the revenue to support that. At what Rocket Labs is currently charging, $7.5 million [0], it's within the realm of possibility you could even launch an entire reusable Starship with a one-cubesat payload for less than that. (The target figure Musk uses is $2 million/launch; take that with the appropriate bucket of salt). How many tens of billions of R&D have gone into SpaceX, and how many launches are they able to amortize that cost over? How many decades have they invested in their manufacturing processes? Do their competitors' engines roll off factory assembly lines? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoI think the $2m per Starship launch is "asperational." As in... they "aspire" to have launch costs that low. I do not believe Starship launches are currently as low as $2m (or $10m, which is the other figure I saw mentioned.) I believe their current launch cost (cost to launch the rocket, not the price they charge people to launch their payload) is considerably higher than $50m. But... yes... if you can re-use your launch vehicle, then per-launch cost SHOULD go down. But at the current time, after 6 launches, only one booster has been snagged by the chop-sticks. The Starships themselves have NOT been re-used. So if you're going to compare Starship with Electron, you should compare costs of Starship after it's fully re-usable with Electron after it's as re-usable as it's intended to be. Rocket Lab claims they're at 7.5m per launch, but again, THAT price may come down as they use re-usable components on subsequent launches. So instead of comparing costs of Starship sometime in the future with Electron now, compare Starship sometime in the future with Electron sometime in the future.
- numpad0 2y agoF9 reusable is like $70M. $7.5M is already changes. Starship at $2M is not an innovation class event, it has to be some side effect of WW3.
- 2y ago
- imtringued 2y ago>If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO Well 45 tons, but this is in a reusable configuration. >Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons This is definitely not a reusable configuration. Maybe 150 tons if they are lucky. >Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be. 60 tons for Falcon Heavy means zero reuse, that is a fully expendable launch. Falcon heavy also hasn't carried payloads heavier than 18 tons so far. So this number is something you can whip out to pretend that New Glenn sucks and yet completely miss the mark.
- dredmorbius 2y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9792046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9792046>
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoI was going off data from the wikipedia, so yeah, it may not be the most current or most accurate. It's in the ballpark, though. And most of what I care about is small-sats, so Falcon Heavy's are more than enough lift for me. But yeah, other people may have have a completely different set of requirements and see the Heavy in a different light.
- IshKebab 2y ago> If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship Why not? Unless you need a custom orbit that nobody else is interested in then Starship will be by far the cheapest way to put a small satellite in orbit, as part of a ride-share mission.
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoWho do I talk to at SpaceX RIGHT NOW to launch my small sat?
- mauvehaus 2y agoSales? Accounts receivable?
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoGive me a phone number. Electron and NanoRacks have phone numbers (email, actually.) I can contact them and get info on dates and costs. SpaceX will give me info on Falcon launches but not Starship launches (and they pick the orbit.)
- IshKebab 2y agorideshare@spacex.com I just googled SpaceX rideshare, it was the very first result.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoI think the cheapest smallsat launches now available are being pushed out of the Japanese airlock on the ISS. It's very popular. Really limits your options in terms of height/inclination but it's been popular enough that they're almost at capacity.
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoAye, NanoRacks is pretty cool. I often bump into some of their people at conferences. They're cool and competent as well.