The US military will need to build hundreds of Mechazilla launch towers by 2030.
The US military is planning to get to thousands of SpaceX flights per year and this will mean that the US military will need hundreds of Mechazilla launch towers.
As of February 2023, SpaceX’s Mechazilla launch towers are estimated to cost less than $100 million each. This cost did not go up that much with the water deluge system. The metal launch tower segments are not expensive, and the towers have robotic arms and the power to operate them. The US military is clearly eyeing thousands of flights per year using SpaceX Starship and hundreds of Mechazilla launch facilities. One hundred Mechazilla launch tower bases would cost about $10 billion.
The US military is worried about China building many more space launch facilities. The US military has about 700-850 military bases around the world. This definition of military base is based upon where US military presence is located.
Here is a github source of US troop deployments.
Many lists of US bases do not include places like Tower 22 in Jordan. Approximately 3,000 US troops are currently stationed in Jordan. The United States military has used the Tower 22 outpost, which was initially established as a Jordanian border outpost, since 2015 in an “advise and assist” mission, initially training rebels fighting the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and later aiding Kurds fighting the Islamic State.
US military base sites fall under two main categories:
Large bases or “Bases”: Defined as military installations larger than 4 hectares (10 acres) or worth more than $10 million. These bases typically have in excess of 200 US military personnel. 439 or 60 percent of the US’s foreign bases fall under this category.
Small bases or “Lily Pads”: These bases are smaller than 4 hectares(10 acres) or have a value of less than $10 million. These include cooperative security locations and forward operating sites. The remaining 40 percent of US foreign bases fall under this category.
Just connecting the largest military bases would need about 90 launch towers. IF they are flying each Starship twice per day for cargo, then a twenty Starship fleet would be 40 flights per day would be about 14000 flights per year. Twenty Starships would need about 120 SpaceX Raptor engines. IF the Starships could only fly 100 times before a major refit or replacement then they would need replacement or refit every two months.
Mass produced Starship with $250,000 per engine would cost about $4 to 10 million each. As of January 2022, the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III military jet costs around $340 million. $24 to $60 million per year for refit or replaced Starships would be still be cheaper and faster than the C-17 Globemaster III. The C-17 costs about $22000 per hour to operate and has 85 tons of payload capacity. The SpaceX Starship can have two to three times the payload capacity and would fly fifteen to thirty times faster than the C-17. This would mean the SpaceX Starship could do 40 to eighty times what the Globemaster does in an hour. This would justify up to $800k per hour for a SpaceX Starship transportation system.
Proof that US Military is Thinking about Thousands of SpaceX Starship per Year
If the US military is going to get to thousands of SpaceX flights per year, then the US military will need a hundred Mechazilla launch towers.
The Space Mobility Conference held by the Space Force at the Orange County Convention Center earlier this month revealed the SpaceX and military planning.
“Rocket cargo point-to-point is not the reason we’re building Starship,” said SpaceX senior adviser Gary Henry. “We’re building Starship to get to Mars.” [But] “what we’re finding is it’s a system we’re putting together that has profound impacts for national security, and one of them just happens to be rocket point-to-point.”
The big driver of that is the potential the military could use the rocket to send supplies, and perhaps even troops in the future, to anywhere in the world in less than an hour. Defense department officials began looking at the idea two decades ago but only recently has it come closer to reality.
“Envision a number of containers sitting in a warehouse down in [Cape] Canaveral, we go to an alert level, we pull them up, you start putting them on the rocket,” said Gregory Spanjers, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab. “At each successive alert level, your time to launch shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, and we can we get it down to one hour.
Spanjers said teams have already been making mockups of Starship’s cargo bay figuring out how to take advantage of a quick supply run.
Speed is the obvious draw, but the cost is dropping and getting closer to existing expenses for moving supplies.
Henry said SpaceX’s current fleet of Falcon 9 rockets with boosters originally designed to fly 10 times, but with future boosters that might go up as many as 40 times, have brought the price of flying payloads from about $4,500 per pound to about $900 per pound.
The Falcon 9’s have a capacity of 44,000 pounds to 132,000 pounds.
“But Starship is a very different animal,” he said. “Starship is fundamentally meant to be rapidly reusable … We designed the vehicle from the outset to fly 100 times, not 10 times, and it’s going to deliver [220,000 to 250,000 pounds] 100 to 115 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.”
He said Starship would bring the cost trajectory down to a starting point of $90 per pound. Musk has said he could see that dropping even more to $9 a pound down the road.
Henry said these are prices close to what one gets using a C-17 cargo plane transport, the supply workhorse of the military, but with flights that take hours instead of minutes.
“In a few years, we will be launching Starships hundreds, and soon thereafter, thousands of times a year,” he said. “And if just assuming you have a rapidly reusable system that could let’s say launch twice a day, from a single launch base, you’re going to find very, very quickly, we’re going to run out of places to launch.”
To meet its launch plans, it will need multiple launch towers from its existing launch sites at KSC, Texas and California, but SpaceX could spread its footprint to new launch sites down the line as well, and that could feed into point-to-point plans the military is interested in, Henry said.
“I think the answer is we’re going to need both as a company, but also as a nation, to fully leverage Starship,” he said. “We’re going to need a proliferation of launch sites [within the continental U.S.] and maybe even globally to fully capture this.”
Nextbigfuture discussed the clear value of SpaceX for Air Cargo over a year ago in a few videos.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Far less expensive, and far more deployable to modify the design to include landing legs.
If your landing in a remote location, use “strap-on” legs that are left behind at relaunch.
Ground support would still be required for fuel and such, so the legs could be loaded up and trucked out.
This would be more effective for disaster relief, even allowing for transport of casualties.
It’d allow for landing on specialized support ships, too.
If you’re landing at a base with no launch tower — simply unload, fuel up, take off with or without the legs, as required.
I knew this post would generate a lot of discussion.
Well done, Brian.
I see this development as a major driver of commercial activity in the future. The military will develop it first, but then the commercial opportunities are staggering.
It will take a few decades to build out these spaceports. In the meantime, keep an eye out for investment opportunites when the government and/or spacex purchase large chunks of land near major metropolitan areas. Just as large airports require decades of planning, land acquisition, and construction – so too, will these spaceports.
In the past, I was skeptical. Now I believe it is inevitable. Unfortunately, I’ll be long gone from this world by the time it comes to fruition.
Maybe my grandkids will be able to honeymoon in LEO hotels at a reasonable cost. Or even go to the moon…
Other space x competitors will try to stop this. Politicians do what’s right for them not the country
It would make more sense to biuld a “drop plane” that would fit in the rocket.
In space the rocket releases the plane and lands back where it took off.
The drop plane re enters the atmosphere, uses atmospheric jets to land.
Unload and re fuel the jet and send it back to base to go again.
100 Mechazillas ?
That payload is for the superheavy booster taking off with Starship on top. Both Starship and the booster are supposed to be empty when landing and they can’t land at the same tower and stay there. (I think)
A typical site needs two launch towers and mobile transport stands to get the vehicles in position. There is also the oxygen, methane, liquid nitrogen and water. Add a megabay for service etc.
I guess we are talking about 100 x “Starbase” situated by some body of water.
Certainly doable but a lot more complicated and expensive.
You are right about SuperHeavy. But StarShip is designed for Mars colonisation, landing with cargo is part of the design.
1) That’s a lot of combustion in the atmosphere, which is not factored into the cost here. C-130’s don’t pollute the atmosphere the way a rocket launch does, so regular use of this transport method – especially for mundane resupply – will meet stiff opposition not just here but around the world. (No doubt some of it will come from foreign adversary-funded front groups.)
2) If the Russians try a denial strategy in the theater of space filing orbits with junk, this will cause economic carnage across the world. Like China and America, Russia is large, filled with vulnerable infrastructure and difficult to defend. Ukraine hasn’t done much to hit Putin’s soft underbelly for some reason, but this type of escalation could lead to reprisals from a number of actors that America doesn’t control. Whatever Russia does, debris can’t be spread throughout the upper atmosphere. With cheap drones, some of these lost satellite functions can be replaced with craft in atmosphere. SpaceX rockets might also be able to fly in atmosphere too, albeit less efficiently. So I’m not sure how effective this Russian doomsday weapon will be.
3) Talking about the hypersonic launch capacity of SpaceX rockets in terms of nuclear war strategy is destabilizing by increasing first strike incentives. From launch to detonation, the period for an enemy to decide on a counterstrike shrinks considerably and the time needed to correct errors in judgment falls proportionately, increasing the odds that a false signal results in nuclear war.
Consider recent events that have encouraged nuclear proliferation. America told Iraq to abandon its WMD, which it did and then we followed through on our threat to invade anyway. Libya gave up its primitive nuclear weapons and NATO attacked anyway, deposed Ghaddafi and created a terrorist petri dish basket case worse than before. Iran agreed to pause its nuclear weapons development and Trump reneged on America’s obligations. Why would any nation sign an agreement to limit nuclear weapons development with our recent track record of breaking our word?
To use language Russia will understand, Russia is not “agreement-capable” either. To get Ukraine to surrender its nuclear ICBMs – then pointed at us – Russia asked us to extend security guarantees to Ukraine and defend them if they were ever attacked back in the 1990s. Russia offered those same guarantees – and then attacked, abandoning its obligations to protect Ukraine. No neighbor will sign anything with Russia. They will all want their own nuclear umbrellas to deter Putin’s new imperialism.
Trump is openly stating he’ll withdraw America’s nuclear umbrella from NATO – while encouraging Russia to attack in a shakedown scheme. This is massively destabilizing too. Both Russia and China have blindly sought to destabilize the American international order by funding nuclear proliferation from North Korea (directly) to Iran (indirectly).
In short, we’re looking at a future where more and more small/medium size nations have incentives to develop nukes (whether they can easily deliver the warheads or not). Once they get these weapons, their neighbors will want them, setting up an arms race. More bombs = greater likelihood of use. That numbers game is bad enough, but most of these nations are strategically shallow, easily overrun by land forces and thus trigger-happy. But wait. It gets worse. Many have governments that are corrupt and have primitive, unprofessional administrations (making the corrupt Trump clan look enlightened). In short, their nuclear arsenals and fissile materials are far more likely to leak to sub-national terrorist organizations.
Know any countries that have launched bloody attacks against “terrorist” forces in the last few decades that might want revenge? Besides our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan (now Gaza), Russia has brutally crushed separatists in Chechnya/Inigushetia and China in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong (and maybe soon Taiwan, not to mention Falun Gong – and let’s not forget their neoimperial encroachment into Vietnamese and Philippine territory). The big three big powers have generated plenty of enemies and have lots of vulnerable infrastructure soft spots spread out across a huge geography with a labor shortage.
Then there’s the damn digital hacking issue to consider. All of this launch capacity will be wired together with horribly insecure software infrastructure.
Another heaping course of nuclear arms racing with a first-strike chaser is a truly absurd game to revive. The fact is our populations are going to decline rapidly going forward. Our problem is not too many people and not enough land but rather the opposite. We should be paying families to have kids and not defense contractors to build more bombs.
But as long as China and Russia remain on this revanchist course, I don’t see a way out. Russia and China have both been humiliated by the West in the past, but that West no longer exists and power has diffused throughout the world. Giving the rest of that world destabilizing incentives to acquire these weapons is unwise.
The trends you describe are real and are there without Starship acting as what DOD was calling a “Third Offset” a few years ago. Without Starship to hand the U.S. a new technological edge for global military dominance, they are much larger problems.
China has gotten along fine with a small mostly land based nuclear deterrent force that has always been vulnerable to a first strike. Only greater wealth and ambition is driving any change from that, not strategic necessity.
The more the U.S. can afford to operate as the dominant global military power, the longer the global order it created after World War Two can be maintained. Starship can make that affordable again and arrest the decline.
” … If the Russians try a denial strategy in the theater of space filing orbits with junk, this will cause economic carnage across the world. …”
That would infuriate Beijing, which would likely then be inclined, for starters, to take back Outer Manchuria. Sino-Russian relations would get … interesting.
I don’t want to spoil the space cadet fuzzy feelings, but this is more of a reason for Russia to develop a salted Earth approach towards LEO weapons.
If they feel as if they are losing the space arms race, they have very few incentives to not develop a nuclear satellite disabler or a Kessler syndrome weapon.
Yeah, M.A.D. and what not. The crux of it is the cost of said weapons (relatively low) and how badly they will be losing at space development soon. Eventually theymight just feel the USA won’t go nuclear just because Elon Musk lost his LEO toys or because the USA will be without LEO access for a while. Companies can scream bloody murder, but on the ground things might never reach nuke exchanges over LEO being lost for a short (or long) while.
Would a fleet designed for point to point operations be starships or have a different optimal design?
Would military actions in a world with cheap space access need much rapid point to point deliveries? Seems like the side with better space access would just drop things on the other side’s bases, boats, and planes.
Right, I don’t think it’s at all feasible to land a Starship in hostile territory, at least not if you expect it to ever take off again. It may be steel, but it’s not armored.
You’d have to have a payload capsule that can be ejected as you go over, and then land the Starship someplace safe on the far side of the delivery zone. Meanwhile the payload capsule manages the landing itself.
SpaceX is, of course, famously good at retro-propulsive landings. I could see them coming up with a sort of standard shipping container with built in solid rocket boosters having just enough delta V to take it from free fall to zero velocity just as it hits the ground.
I don’t know. When was the last time that we needed cargo there immediately that we hadn’t pre-positioned? Take Ukraine for example. We saw the Russian build-up weeks in advance. We didn’t need to deliver cargo immediately. Tanks and F-16s have been more of a political hinderance rather than a logistical problem.
And when was the last time that we had to send troops immediately? Even with Osama Bin Laden, we knew about his location for weeks to months and had plenty of time to prepare Seal Team Six at a neighboring base. It sounds like a lot of spending the a capability that isn’t obviously needed. Maybe I am wrong but I would need better reasons. Now, if it’s cheaper to send cargo via Starship compared to ship and rail, that is one thing.
Where does the massive quantities of O2 and CH3 come from to supply starship at all of these bases?
Not just O2 – it has to be LIQUID O2. Currently, there is a very limited supply of LOX across the world.
Keep an eye on Linde and its modular LOX production units. If you see big orders and can ascertain where these units will be installed, you have a golden investment opportunity.
Think bigger. Space Force is not going to use 100 Starships just to move cargo around, it will use them to build orbital defense platforms. It will use them to replace and recover satellites. And a biggie – free up huge amounts of budget by getting rid of all of our ICBMs and bombers. This is ultra-MIRV. Put 200 reentry vehicles on top of a Starship and drop them on the target when you fly by and then go get more. You get an instant 200 hypersonic missiles raining down, and you have 100 Starships! Keep the boomer subs as a first strike deterrent.
Yes, they are vulnerable during taking off and landing but so is the B2. Military bases can deal with that.
I profoundly doubt the US will ever revert to cryogenic liquid fuelled ICBMs. They are solid fuelled for a reason.
The launch towers may cost $100 million each, but what about all the other infrastructure required to support it? My guess is it would be closer to $1 billion to have a complete useable launch facility.
There will be plenty of money to be made by support structures around the launch sites.
Think how much money is made by airports across the world – the take-off and landing strips were expensive to build. But the terminals, landing fees, fuel infrastructure, and large warehouses have kicked off thousands of times the money invested in the airstrips.
It’s worth remembering that overseas Military Bases are based on deals and just because they are big doesn´t mean they can receive or even are ABLE to receive Starships.
We would have to consider Air Force bases and even there, deals would need to be REWRITTEN to receive rockets, as the deals probably limitate what can land on the bases.
There are no US bases in Brazil.
There was a Marines Detachment base in São Paulo… some 80 km from the coast and at 1000 meters altitude… which is weird to me, since MARINE comes from MAR for SEA.
It was re-activated in 2008 and closed again in 2017.
The number of military bases… lol… no wonder the US deficit is so huge. That’s a lot of money every year.
Wikipedia however gives a much smaller number of bases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations
There are no US bases in Canada either. The graphic above shows 3. Obviously this information is wrong. So definitely less than 850.
No Starship/super heavy has landed without incident (SN15 which did land was on fire for an hour afterwards), so isn’t it a bit premature to be talking about it as if it is operational yet? Anyway a shoulder launched SAM would blown it out of the sky
There’s a reason this site is called Next Big *Future*.
A shoulder launched SAM could blow a C17 cargo plane out of the sky, especially at takeoff and landing. But the SAM go up to amach 2.5. A Starship would get up to mach 15-16 and at altitudes of 60 miles or so. Flying from New York to Shanghai in about 39 minutes. Average speeds of abou 12000 mph. Shoulder launched ASM can reach up to 2.3 miles of altitude. A Starship would be beyond this altitude in about 40-60 seconds after launch.
SAM-5 has an altitude of 100,000 feet or 19 miles, range of 155 miles.
No US bases in Ireland either