Bellik Ozan talked to Ellie in Space about SpaceX Starship costs.
Bellik makes the case that SpaceX could modify the Super Heavy Starship for the same reuse as the Falcon 9. Throw away the upper stage with three Raptor engines instead of one Merlin engine in the Falcon 9 second stage. This would enable SpaceX to launch 200 tons to low earth orbit. This would be up to twelve times the launch payload to orbit. This would be less than $20 million for a partially expendable Starship.
There is path to low single million digit launch costs for fully reusable Starship.
Eventually, launch prices will reach low single digit millions when some level of competition arrives to make SpaceX lower its margins on launch.
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.
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Aside from communications and maybe beamed power to earth, what money making business is there in space that can support such launch rates?
Tourism is limited, mining seems pretty marginal given low cost of minerals on earth, unless perhaps go to Saturn and pull out one part per million He3 for future fusion power. (could be worth a few $million per kg). More darkly; military market could be significant.
Beyond hobbiest and passionate dreamers what is going to pay for it all?
Plenty of He3 in lunar regolith which is much easier to get at. There’s also a massive amount in Jupiter which again is closer and easier to reach than Saturn.
As launch costs drop all sorts of things that are impractical to seriously contemplate today become feasible.
Just a few off the top of my head after StarLink and Cuiper are all built out there are many manufacturing processes that may see enough benefit to warrant an orbital factory. Crystal growth for the pharmaceutical industry is one that I remember hearing about since the early 90’s. Semiconductor fabrication could also benefit greatly from a microgravity environment. Heck orbital laboratory space where you have the option of sending your experiment to be run or to bring your own people up as well would fill seats and cargo space as soon as they become available especially when prices get down to 5 or 6 digits for the former and high 6 to low 7 figures for the latter. Pretty much any chemical process which oxygen interferes with could be a candidate. I can only dream of the quality and strength of composites manufactured sans atmosphere.
Yes, in total there’s a lot of He3 in the surface of the Moon. The energy density there, though? I’m not so sure about that. You have to process an absurd amount of regolith to get a gram of He3 on the Moon.
We did not fuse D/T yet. Aneutronic fusion with He3 is signifficant harder to achieve.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/zna-2014-0134/html?lang=de#:~:text=The%20D%E2%80%933He%20fusion,T%20%5B5%2C%206%5D.
The He3 story is still propaganda to feed the discussion about a material space industry. Until tody there is only one product profitabel in space – information. Either because it has no weight. Or because you can only get the information out of the orbit.
What will be profitable from space and has a mass different from zero? Don´t get me wrong, space exploration makes sense. Visiting the solar system will be a good thing. But that brings us back to the point that we only get information from space. Anything else is cheaper from our planet.
But may be we (or TAE) get that He3 burning, than there is still no need for 1.000 Starships/a. Just because the energy density of He3 is to high.
Tourism will not be limited when it’s cheap and safe to launch both people and hotels into orbit, and later, to the moon. There will be serious demand from middle class people looking for new destinations and unique experiences.
People said the same about flying back before jet commercial airliners, but fast, cheap travel caused a massive uptick in demand.
Boeing 787 Dreamliners are $275-300M each.
If SpaceX can do the same kind of size and complexity as airliners for 90% less cost, they should expand into adjacent industries.
>$10 Billion to certify a passenger jet, more if it’s highly novel. They have to fit existing airport infrastructure, conform to existing loading and unloading requirements, be incredibly safe/reliable and biggest cost of ownership is fuel so it’s efficiency uber alles. Not an easy market to innovate in. In fact nearly impossible from an economic and regulatory standpoint.
The payload isn’t getting to orbit w/o the 2nd stage. Rather than expend fuel to de-orbit & destroy, instead kick it up into a 500 yr orbit & hang a For Sale sign on it.
Seems like there should be some kind of hybrid rocket system for point to point travel.
Fully reusable rocket system for launching, glide or powered flight to a runway land at the destination. Flight power requirements are much much lower than for takeoff. Boeing and Airbus are ripe for disruption. Insane costs, significant safety issues.
A fully rocket system seems pretty far from being practical.
There isn’t currently an external demand for a thousand Starship launches annually. SpaceX needs a large sales team.
There’s no such demand because launch to LEO costs over $1000/kg. Drop that by a factor of ten and we’ll see a lot more demand, and even more if they can reuse the upper stage.
It’s not just the direct cost savings from launch, even though that’s huge. By having cheap launch, you can also use cheaper hardware: heavier, more robust gear that doesn’t have to last as long because it’s cheaper to replace.
Instead of just launching satellites we can start doing the really cool stuff we’ve been dreaming about for a century, because it will finally be affordable.
There is currently an external demand for a thousand Starship launches annually. SpaceX needs a large sales team.
Throw away the upper stage?
Wait, wasn´t the whole deal about Starship being the cheapest launch vehicle ever, about RE-USING all stages?
Reusing all stages is the ultimate for sure. But it’s pretty interesting that they could get down to $100/kg even while throwing away the upper stage. Just that would be way cheaper than anything in the market today, and there’s no question they could do it. Reusing the upper is the hard part.
SpaceX is going to be using a lot of liquid methane and oxygen.
Are they making their own?
Buying fuel from a third party is expensive; they need to cut every penny from launch expenses and fuel is the most expensive part of launching reusable rocket.
Fuel runs to orbiting storage facilities needs to be very common for a future of inter-planetary flights.
By my rough calculation, the 1000t of LNG consumed by a fully stacked Starship/Super Heavy, would only cost around $200k at gross liquified cost, and maybe twice that at bunker rates. I don’t think the LNG is going to be the dominant launch cost for them for a long time.
Are you serious? Below 5 Mio. per launch? Come one – how will that ever happen? SpaceX has about 13.000 employess. They earn between 42.000 to 180.000 $/a. Say that an average salary is about 60.000 $/a, and there will be one launch each day – that will be 2.28 Mio USD per launch. But for sure, SpaceX will need far more people to bring those launch numbers.
Full reuse with no maintenance between launches (like an airplane, land and launch again after refueling) More launches per year and more launches for lifetime of the rocket, then only costs are fuel and overhead. At 100,000 launches per year from a fleet of 1000 rockets then $10 billion per year in costs becomes $100k per launch. $30B per year is $300k per launch. Fuel costs can be $200k for just upper stage and $1M including the booster. Fuel costs can be reduced by producing liquid oxygen and then the methane on site with large amounts of solar and other power.
“Fuel costs can be reduced by producing liquid oxygen and then the methane on site with large amounts of solar and other power.”
I see two problems here:
1) Opportunity costs – LNG has a transparent market price. In case Mr. Musk would produce “artificial” LNG by using solar power, he will loose money in fueling his rokets, and not selling cheap LNG with profit to the market. The world wide LNG market is a bit more worth than all Elon Musks activities together. So why not rolling the LNG market in case SpaceX has any possibillity to produce “artificial” LNG below market prices?
2) To assume that SpaceX will produce LNG below international market prices for fossil methane is absurd. The implication would be that Mr. Musk had already solved the Green House Problem.
And there is a hidden third point. In case SpaceX has the capabillity to produce “artiffical” LNG, it would be a great problem for the US. The fossil fuel industry would die within a few years. Why should one buy expensive fossil energy, when Elon Musk could supply sustainable LNG for cheap?
And the very last hidden point – why should I buy an expensive BEV from Elon Musk when I could fuel my car with cheap LPG from SpaceX?
I´m a chemist from Germany, our petrochemical industry is starving. Without cheap methane Germany is not competitive. We had this sitation already when the first period of cheap US Fracking Gas came up. That was when Germany startet to contract russian natural gas. The idea of producing methane with sustainable energy and no Green House Effect would be a game changer for the industry. The Philosophers Stone! I´ve my doubts.
> why should I buy an expensive BEV from Elon Musk when I could fuel my car with cheap LPG from SpaceX
Well that’s an easy one. BEVs are about to be cheaper than fuel-burning cars. Plus there’s no vehicle refueling infrastructure for LNG.
Still, I’m not optimistic that SpaceX will make LNG cheaper than fossil anytime soon. But it doesn’t matter, the cost of fuel for rocket launches is pretty low so it wouldn’t hurt them much to be green. And since SpaceX is a private company and Elon owns >50%, he’s completely free to do it if he wants to.
Come on, Brian. Sure, they can reduce costs by producing LOX on site. But methane?
There’s no way synthetic methane is cost competitive with the stuff coming out of holes in the ground, unless the latter is just made artificially expensive by government fiat, and your power source is hugely subsidized.
I believe Musk might try making it on site anyway, but it sure as heck won’t be as a cost saving measure. It would be as a PR move, to try to buy off the Greens.
And he’ll rapidly find out you can’t buy off the Greens, it’s not even worth trying.
Musk might not be a “Green” with everything that implies, but he is someone who cares about the climate. And the fuel cost of rocket launches is low enough that he can afford to pay extra to be carbon neutral, especially since it’s tech he needs for Mars anyway.
Some of those employees work on Starlink which brings its own revenue.
And when they really scale up, some of the “employees” doing routine work will be robots.
[ think on all together, without ’employees’ there are no ‘customers’ (robots have less needs, ~maybe maintenance and upgrading) and produce less ‘drama'(&history&feelings), but ‘instant’ revenue (~once) (?)
(this without developed, progressing, inclusive society concepts) ]
Starkicker was to be similar?