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FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year agoThey're also limited by the volume of space within the fairing, which is the same for a Falcon 9 and a Falcon 9 Heavy. They already fill the fairing with Starlinks for the regular Falcon 9, so they'd need to design a new fairing to make use of the extra weight capacity of the Heavy.
The long-term plan for Starship is for a launch to cost on the order of $1 million, as opposed to the current $67 million for a Falcon 9. Starship's payload to LEO will be about 150 tons, compared to Falcon 9's 23 tons. So it's going to be a lot cheaper. Though they'll be launching the somewhat larger Starlink V2 satellites, so the numbers aren't straightforwardly scaled.
zoe@infosec.pub 1 year ago
interesting! so 150/22=6.8 ; 67/1=67 ; 67*6.8=455.6 . i know this is stupid math but Starship is apparently expected to reduce the cost of launch to LEO by a factor of 455! thats really high for expectations to be set. Yea, heavier Starlinks would reduce this factor maybe to 400 or something, but nonetheless, the weight changes shouldn’t affect the launch costs much at this point
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
Yeah, it's going to be quite dramatic. Even if the $1 million goal isn't reached, just getting within an order of magnitude of it is still a 40 times saving over Falcon 9 - which is already the dominant launcher for being so cheap and high-volume. It's been kind of fun watching Starship's development and thinking about how for once we're able to see the "oncoming storm" that's going to drastically disrupt the launch market in the years to come. Once Starship's up and running basically everything flying today will be hopelessly obsolete.
Assuming no unexpected insurmountable obstacles come along. But I just can't think of anything plausible at this point - the only things that I can think of would just involve relatively minor hindrances. If the "chopstick" landing doesn't work out, the design could fall back to landing legs. If the upper stage's heat shield doesn't work then maybe something heavier will be needed, or in the extreme perhaps the upper stage can be expendable until something better gets sorted out. Difficulties with on-orbit refuelling only interfere with beyond-LEO operations, not with shipping satellites to LEO. These can add a few millions of dollars or shave a few tens of tons off of the launch capacity, which still doesn't make the end result less than revolutionary.
zoe@infosec.pub 1 year ago
does that imply that the latter method costs more fuel ? if by chopstick u mean the way Starship lands in the animation video, grabbed by the crane, to be mated with the already fueled first stage ? cause that lookd like straight sci-fi :D man landing legs are already awesome
exactly, no more price gauging,penny-pinching (like Ryannair that uses reverse thrusters at landing to save brakepads lol), weight limiting (airlines would board an obese person while prohibiting another from boarding with weight limit exceeding bagage) and maltreatring airlines like Delta. Tbh Elon needs to have a dedicated airline service, powered by Starlink wifi, at least he’s worthy of gov subsidies and he’s among the few who in fact did save the taxpayer a lot of money
this thread got too specific, haha! it reminisces me of the days when i used to read spacenews.com all the time, but i had to limit my internet’s usage and cut on SLS delay news. If the launch cost gets low enough spaceX could spin a telescope manufacturing subsidiary and launch telescopes beyond earth atmosphere and charge per hour subscriptions where u could point out the telescope where u want, that way it could finally silence the telescope amateur community that keeps complaining about how bad Starlink is at ruining their space observation, but again, just daydreaming.