SpaceX Starship could have significantly faster delivery options (12, 24 and 48 hours) compared to the current express standard of under five days. How much demand could there be for this service?
People could be willing to pay 2X to 4X the price for ultrafast package delivery.
Current express delivery is about 17% of total packages but about 35% of the revenue. Express packages are about a $100 billion per year.
The current volume of express international package shipments over 3,000 miles is approximately 10 to 27 million tons per year Express international shipping rates for small packages are around $20-$30 per kilogram ($24/kg for a 1 kg package via DHL from China to the U.S.), though air freight rates are lower ($3-$7/kg).
Total global air cargo traffic is about 61 million tons annually (IATA, 2019), with express parcels as a subset (estimated 10-27 million tons).
It would be easy to reduce the time of shipment down to 2 days using fast shipments to centralized Starship launch towers on each continent. Packages for each of the other continental regions would be sorted.
Flights would be made every 4, 8, 12 or 24 hours depending upon the activity. Europe-US routes and Multiple Asia to US routes would have high activity.
There could be demand for about 30 to 50 SpaceX Starships flying daily routes if cost targets of $50 per kilogram or $20 per kilogram could be reached.
Once the systems reach about $5 per kilogram then is more about optimizing operations and maximizing revenue than worrying about per kilogram or per flight costs.
Here is some of the costs if the fuel costs are $250,000 per flight and $100,000 of per flight maintenance and amortizing the Starship costs over the reusage of the rocket.
It is more important to bring the cost of the Starship down than it is for more reuses of the rocket at certain levels.
A $300 million cargo plane with 125 tons of capacity, can fly 30,000 times. This means $10,000 per flight. A $5 million SpaceX Starship would need 500 reuses to also match the $10,000 per flight.
SpaceX Starship could achieve the lower cost because 6-9 Raptor engines could reach the $250,000 per engine target. The rest of the rocket is mostly Stainless Steel.
The table below is an approximation for an amortized cost with some fuel and maintenance estimates.
The $20 per kilogram cost is achievable and could require a fleet of 400 or so Starships with daily flights. Starships would fly anywhere in under an hour. Each Starship would be capable of flying back and forth 10 to 20 times per day. The issue would be getting enough packages loaded and to justify a partially loaded flight. Operating with mostly empty Starships would work if the higher tempo of operations enabled faster cycles and fewer hours to delivery.
There would be value in finding some kind of always needed high volume cargo fillers to increase the revenue from operations.
The additional categories of cost (ground handling, insurance) could also impact the cost of SpaceX Starship cargo operations.
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The infrastructure needed to land and re-launch a Starship, for now and probably at least one extra decade, will mean in most situations an airplane that can land in many more places and closer to customs and then to a distribution network will be prefered because it will be cheaper and in the end there won´t be much difference.
If you are able to massively increase the number of sites starship can land and launch from, and reduce the usual MINIMAL time delays (customs, last mile), then for SOME special needs, it might be worth.
But the cost will be MUCH MUCH higher than what you say. 100s of times more expensive.
Why? Because if you are in an HURRY for a part, and need to shave off 24 hours of travel time, it means you can´t wait for other goods to be carried in the same Starship NOR can you afford Starship landing on the other side of the country because most goods its carrying are for there.
Therefore you will be paying ALONE for the whole flight.
Yep, It is the usual vaporware bulls..t.
-Planes MIGHT be more expensive but they can do 10000 flights in their life cycle, so the cost of the machine is spread enormously, and being very reliable assets, even financing the purchase of brand new very expensive planes is not too expensive. Furthermore freight carriers purchase used planes quite often (converting passengers planes into cargo) so the cost of the hardware is even lower.
-But lets be generous and lets assume that cargo companies buy 300M planes and SpaceX will produce starships at 30M USD (veery optimistic) or even at 3M USD a piece (completely unreasonable) if these marvellous 3M spaceships are not able to run at least 100 flights each YOU END UP HAVING HIGHER HARDWARE COSTS WITH SPACEX.
-Then there is the biggest cost factor in the air delivery business, which is not the cost of the plane: FUEL. SpaceX will spend approx 500k USD in methane and another 500k USD in oxydizer, while a full tank A380 airbus will cost you 130k USD, so your fuel expense is 7.7 times higher.
-The third biggest cost is ground infrastructure: and except few major logistic hubs freight companies can leverage efficiently a network of spaces they rent in big passenger hubs and local airports. SpaceX has none of this and their operation model prevents them from building too close to major cities or big industrial complexes (you simply will not find any insurer that is willing to cover the costs of disrupting a major city flight traffic, or destruction of expensive productive infrastructure in case of accidents in take off or landing).
-The only competitive advantage is flight speed, but this is only a fraction of the total travel time from source customer to delivery point: which can be broken down in:
time from receiving point + time for shipping the package to airport or rocket launch hub+ time for vector readiness (fuelling+loading+launching)+FLIGH TIME + unloading + delivery. If spaceX hubs are remote (which will have to be) reaching them will take time, and refuelling, loading and launching rockets takes hours, so, even if the flights of spaceX will be faster, the overall delivery times will be LONGER below a certain distance, and the longer the ground operations will take, the wider will be the radius of the area in which aircraft delivery is still faster.
So:
1) No clear hardware price advantage compared to way more reliable and established alternatives
2) No clear operational cost advantage given higher fuel consumption
3) Absolutely no infrastructure available
4) No speed advantage on short distances, and speed advantages only on very long distances.
Yeah, total bull..t
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I give up, can’t post a comment more than a few words long.
I am looking around to see if there are any settings or problems causing this. Can you type elsewhere and cut and paste into the comments? What browser are you using?
Motzilla firefox, usually, but I’ve had the same problem using Safari and Edge. Seems more dependent on comment length than browser.
“The problem with rocket ports is that Starship sized rockets are so loud as to be life threatening for a considerable range. They need an exclusion zone of about 10 miles radius. You might be able farm much of that zone with hearing protection, but parking and loading docks would have to be outside it. There are also issues with the effect on wildlife.
With a 1 hour flight time, you’re throwing away most of the advantage if you can’t make loading and unloading comparably fast. And it has to start outsize that zone.
I’d suggest running hyperloop right up to the launch tower, and making the point to point Starships so that they can carry densely packed hyperloop pods.”
Hm, writing it in wordpad then pasting it in seemed to do the trick. I wonder why? The wordpad errors I was getting were annoyingly unspecific.
Think replacement organs and critical parts to re-establish a production line where everything is down due to a failure.
Transport of perishable agricultural goods from summer in southern hemispheres to winter in northern hemisphere and vice versa might justify the volume. Salads, fresh fruit, flowers and maybe certain meats like lamb. I remember being taken to a fancy restaurant in California where they flew in fresh lobster from Indonesia and Arctic King Crab every day. So there is clearly a small luxury market. Not sure how much of a premium the general public are willing to pay for out of season produce.
Even in this age of Just In Time manufacturing, I really don’t see manufacturing supply chains being reliant on rockets for supplying goods. Container ships must surely always be more economical than space rockets if you can wait a few months.
I can buy that the starship /super heavy might be able to get anywhere on earth in an hour (theoretically anyway) but where would it land? Doubt if it could use a regular airport it would need a specially made discreet Ianding site.. Said site might be some distance away From the customer necessitating a secondary transportation system; car, truck. whatever that might greatly slow down delivery time.