SpaceX Starship Production Needs to Be 300 Per Year

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The super heavy booster can be used more frequently than the ship, as it returns in about ~6 minutes and can theoretically be ready for reflght in an hour.

The ship needs to complete at least one orbit, but often several to have the ground track line back up with the launch site, so reuse may only be daily.

This means that ship production needs to be roughly an order of magnitude higher than booster production.

To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year.

This will go along with one Super Heavy Booster built per week.

SpaceX just completed static fires of the Super Heavy Booster 10 and Starship 28 for the third orbital Starship launch.

32 thoughts on “SpaceX Starship Production Needs to Be 300 Per Year”

  1. The Elon will solve the tank sloshing problem and thousands of Starship launches and landings will be successful.

  2. We went to the moon over 50 years ago and never went back. No particular commercial advantage for being there. I suspect Mars will suffer a similar fate once the novelty of getting there first wears off. Makes little sense squandering vast sums of money keeping scientists happy absent some form of useful benefit for the average citizen.
    Seems to me Elon Musk’s objective is not pure science and the expansion of government,, but rather innovation for the purpose of making money. That is why he runs afoul of oxygen wasting bureaucrats.

    • You have no idea of money. Do you know how much is the debt of the US govrnment? What is the deficit the US is runing with China? What money Musk uses to further humankind, is a drop in that ocean; and it is his money.

  3. For Mars colony purposes it’s extremely unlikely, IMO, that very many of the ships sent will ever return. Their return requires extensive fuel production at the far end of a LONG logistics chain. It would be more efficient to just leave them on Mars and manufacture more, since the ships will be highly useful on Mars. As living space, and to disassemble for materials and parts.

    “Mars Needs Junkyards!”, IOW.

    The return traffic will likely be restricted to sample return, and valuable personnel who don’t mean to be colonists.

  4. I think the bigger problem will be the logistics of trying to launch these rockets several times a day. Where are they going to put several hundred starships and their boosters? How are the going to get fuel to them? Those tanker trucks are not going to cut it. Where are they going to get the tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people to maintain these rockets. Where are you going to put the cargo that goes up and maybe comes back?

  5. Does SpaceX have to pay a gas guzzler tax? How are they exempt from the green crap we all have to deal with for our personal transportation? Does SpaceX have a plastic bag exemption? Does a falcon heavy inject diesel exhaust fluid to minimize particulate pollution as it rolls coal into space?

    • Government has yet to consider handicapping US access to space via carbon taxes. Please don’t give them ideas as they are not smart enough to come up with this on their own.

      I am secretly in love with the idea of a F9 variant that uses a slurry of coal and propane to get to orbit.

  6. “To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year.”

    I am 100% sure that we won’t be producing and using Starship for Mars colonization during the next 30 years. Tech progress is accelerating. Every futurist know this. Current Starship tech will be ancient tech by 2030. There will be new kinds of ships, propulsion systems.

    So yeah, Starship may do some job during 2020’s, but it will be replaced by something else post 2030 or even earlier. And it will not necessarily be SpaceX tech, it may be disrupted by some new startup with new idea/tech which will be developed quickly(because we will be more adcanced in the future).

    My point is, in current era (post 2022) it’s not possible to predict tech long term and it’s kinda pointless.

    • You know that Vulcan, New Glenn and Ariane 6 have been in development longer than the years we’ve left to the 2030’s and will be outperformed by Starship even so? And that there’s no new existing physics or even early practical test models of propulsion around that would lead to something dramatically more efficient than starship to get stuff to orbit? At best, we get some kind of fission/fusion based transport from earth orbit to mars orbit

      • Beamed power could be more efficient, cheaper and safer when it comes to access to LEO. You need to invest in a significant ground based infrastructure but all the expensive bits are on the ground where you can easily maintain them, build redundancy, etc and this dovetails well with ongoing developments in solid state laser improvements.

        Yeah Starship will be dominant for at least a decade.

        • [ 15GWh for ~300s (visible contact to rocket?) would require an average of ~50MW at a rocket’s energy collector with ~50% optimized efficiency for lasers would require at least ~100MW (‘continuous’) laser power for a launch pad (?) ]

          • [ correction: sorry, forgot factor 3600 for MWh to MWs,

            so it’s about 191000MW at rocket and ~380GW (for ~50% efficiency laser), what’s ~4/5 of US average electricity provision and ~1/3 of North American nameplate grid capacity for ~290times a ~300s rocket launch (theoretical) continuously for 24h
            (while myself getting suspicious of that previous number with being about the power of 2x a F35 engine’s output power, ~one Starship&Booster ~5500 F35 engines on afterburner mode)(?) ]

    • We’re much more advanced in a technological sense, (Though outsourcing has caused the US specifically to lose some important capacities.) But we have suffered serious regression on the regulatory front: We know how to do more, we are permitted to do less.

      We’ve become a lower trust society, too: People are reluctant to make major investments in many fields because a change of government may result in the investment being rendered a dead loss.

      If Musk had it to do over, would he have started Spacex in the US, knowing what he does now? His development program has been set back a couple years now just out of political pique! He might have been better off starting Spacex in some equatorial country where the government could be placated with simple bribes.

      Most of the plausible advances beyond rocketry for space access require the sort of major long term investment you’d have to be mad to try in the US.

      • Yes, I am accelerationist and I am not a fan of regulations. China, although country which even as recently as late 1990’s was in the 10 bottom countries in GDP per capita ranking, is now high income country ($23K per capita in 2023). Next year projection for China is ~25K(not bad). It may seem low for Americans that are now above 80K and you were around 25K level around 1990/91.

        Important fact is that they have more than 4x larger workforce and being at this per capita level means their REAL economy is already bigger, which means they have more money for tech development (assuming they invest the same % of output on tech). And now (data from 2022) shows that in fact they are spending more on R&D – close to 3,1% of GDP.

        sorce:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_research_and_development_spending

        Keep in mind that in this table they are calculating in nominal dollars, in real economy (PPP) China is at $33T, so they are spending way more(because they are spending in their currency not dollars, so nominal for China is irrelevant). It’s only relevant for small countries, which are buying tech from USA and need to exchange their currency into $ to do it. China is not, exports of hi-tech are banned and they are forced to develop everything alone.

        So their real R&D budget is equivalent of 1T dollars and if you follow China tech developments, you see it.

        But at the same time they are less developed on average, so they are less regulated (I think that regulations tend to accumulate in “old” developed countries). Less developed places like China are only now writing/figuring out some regulations which were written in US decades ago.

        China is of course only serious competitor for the West/USA, that’s why I am focusing on them and like to research them and write about them.

        I am for this kind of competition because ultimately it’s accelerating progress, so it’s good.

        But, if US won’t “chill” with regulations and cancel many of them and also won’t increase R&D budget to at least 6% of GDP, it’s probably over. West will stop becoming tech leader. For how long? Who knows, maybe even for centuries.

        Even “poor” countries (compared to US, in overall size of gdp and per capita) like Korea and Israel are investing 2x more.

        Korea- 5% of GDP
        Israel – 6% of GDP
        USA – only 2,6%

        USA being at >80K should invest at least 6 or 7%. Imagine how powerful and advanced would US become if budget would more than double. It would be insane.

        1000’s of more projects like Webb Telescope, DARPA type experiments with new types of rockets, money for 1 zettaflop supercomputer, money for 10x larger space station, money for huge base on the Moon etc. All that would be way cheaper than $700B and we are talking only about additional money for one year.

        This is why, it’s so important issue and we should be fighting with “decels” and safetyists.

        • India will solve its corruption problems and become a power in a few decades. They already have the best math and computer software/engineering minds (look at the heads of Microsoft and Google).

          Additionally, the US needs to quit policing the world and require other nations to step up. Korea, Japan, and Europe have been getting free protection for decades. It drains our resources, capital, and humanity.

          As far as technology development goes, the US, Korea, Japan, and Europe are just as capable of industrial espionage as China and other repressive governments. Israel is masterful at industrial espionage. (I say that as a compliment, by the way.)

        • Good analysis as far as it goes, but you forgot abut the absurd amount of money going into the military, also DARPA which is innovation but mostly weapons. We defend or attack the world, and that saps money elsewhere.
          Also, way too much rent-seeking here, draining the economy of useful productive capacity.

        • My theory is that, once a society passes a certain level of wealth, the local elites become more concerned with retaining their relative advantage, than with increasing their personal wealth. So they start slamming the brakes, slowing technological innovation that might result in some innovator displacing them.

          China, being a totalitarian state, is not so subject to this, because the elites are not maintaining their relative position by wealth, but instead by violence, and innovation just leads to more wealth they can steal.

          But, of course, totalitarian states have other problems, so lacking this particular problem hardly guarantees their dominance.

          • Given the choice between societal prosperity and societal control most governments will chose control. Governments can enrich themselves even when society is poor (e.g. DPRK). Control enshrines government’s ability to enrich itself and caters to the innate laziness of government as it is easier to dictate than it is to persuade.

            • [ therefore parts favor the idea of ‘uninformed/less intelligent’ elites/government?
              What’s the outcome for democracies then or otherwise? Seems there’s lack (given that’s pretty much generalized, neglecting all individual support to society that’s on lower visibilty, considering public mass media) for ‘positive’ role model/examples? ]

        • [ once done an interrupting scientific advance or innovation, most will loose this to violent society domination parts/elements/’elites’ ?

          e.g. most famous example could be the nuclear explosion weapon, that was no more accessible to inventors/developer/scientists once built and given to military (possibly politically controlled) society parts. Yes, trust (and structures of control), within a society are a need for democratic development and societies progress (not only ‘financial’, or wrt to ‘money earns(/produces?) money’) ]

      • Yes Musk would do it again in the US. Access to technical expertise, capital, gov launch contracts (NASA and DoD) is too compelling.

      • $10 trillion question:

        To what extent can US regulatory agencies regulate SpaceX outside of LEO? It SpaceX wants to test a molten chloride reactor on the far side of the moon can they launch it there and test it as they please?

    • Totally agree. Chemical rockets will start being phased out for long journeys by 2030, sooner if they have to refuel like Starship. This is a much bigger problem than Musk will admit because of reliability issues and the severe consequences of things if they go Boom and scatter debris all over. Yes, we do need to regulate falling multi-ton steel parts landing on people and buildings.
      Nuclear rockets are close to being practical and are being worked on by private companies and NASA, probably the Chinese too.
      Musk’s tech in general is quickly becoming out of date, much more so than his fans are willing to admit.

      • Hasn’t been the case with space travel, prove your hypothesis. Apollo 11 was over half a century ago and we’re struggling to get back to the moon with Artemis. I agree with the generalized “technology” term but not for rocket/space tech as it it’s severally reliant on the government. Capitalized markets can’t currently propell this industry , like it can for GPUs and cell phones.

        • Capitalized markets are what motivates SpaceX to pursue full reuse so that they can build Starlink.

          Capitalized markets drive efficiency in ways that governments won’t (because they are indifferent to efficiency). I don’t think people realize how much a reusable and reliable Starship will change access to LEO, the moon, and several years later Mars.

          If it was up to Government we would have Artemis by 2030 and Boeing would still be doing as little as possible to put a capsule in LEO.

          • SpaceX created Starlink because there wasn’t enough demand for their rocket business. Satellite internet and rocket technology had been around for decades, but innovation had mostly stagnated.
            Elon does not found companies because he is some entrepreneurial capitalist motivated by greed. He has certain goals he wants to achieve and he works very hard to fulfill them.
            SpaceX could be pulling in way more money by jacking up Falcon 9 launch prices. They could halt the starship development process and save over a billion a year. The free market is not what’s driving Elon, which is why (in my opinion) comparing SpaceX to NASA as an example of free-market success is a bad idea.
            The free market never asked for Mr. Musk, and he will have to figure out even more ways to create demand for starship when it is complete. There are no guarantees that there’s significant economic interest in exploring/colonizing either the moon or mars. SpaceX wasn’t created in response to such a demand, so I hope Elon will be able to create a market for starship so it can be economically viable.

            • [ yes, technically.
              But if it’s about a decision, feed databases or feed the world, how do people prioritize with sufficient income? ]

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