SpaceX is expanding the Starship Factory to increase production to one Starship every 72 hours. This would mean production would increase to over 100 per year.
Elon has discussed the need to increase Starship production to over one per day.
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Seems a bit optimistic. Like when Musk predicted reusing rockets “maybe in a matter of hours”, or reducing the cost of launches “maybe 100-fold”, or that Starlink would profit “maybe $30bn-50bn” and “help cover SpaceX and Starship operating costs”, or that Starship launches “could one day cost as little as $10m”, or that people could one day use Starships to travel the Earth.
The rocket turnaround record is 21 days, the cost savings is 20%, StarLink is in the red and burning money, taxpayers are paying for Starship firework shows at somewhere between a quarter and a half bill a pop, and Starship so far is less fit for human rating than the Space Shuttle Challenger. Even ignoring all of that, even if the Starship program doesn’t crash and burn, even if Musk proves it’s possible to make a Starship every 3 days (he won’t), the idea that some day SpaceX will have so much business that it will be using 100 Starships a year is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard. There were ~200 launches total in 2023. I would characterize the predicted ‘demand’ for 100 Starships a year as “insanely optimistic”.
I wish reaction engines were as funded as SpaceX. One stage to orbit is cooler*
Nope. Space exploration and settlement has been held back immensely because things that were “cool” were super expensive to develop from scratch and usually canceled halfway through. All that matters is what works and making it as cheap as possible through mass production like the SpaceX approach.
Well…yes…but….blame the politicians and not the engineers. REACTION ENGINES have the easy solution….just let them get on with it or better still get Elon involved.
Earth based SSTOs are some of the most impractical things ever thought of, for the Moon or Mars SSTOs are great, but Earth just has too much gravity for an SSTO to send any meaningful amount of payload to orbit. They are still very cool nonetheless.