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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

The ISS was built largely with hundreds of space shuttle and Soyuz launches over two decades hence why it's so expensive. Starship will be able to put an entire ISS worth of stuff into orbit in a single launch for 1/50th of the cost.

It's not a zero sum game. The space industry employs a lot of people.

Some of the stuff they put into orbit are satellites that literally save lives.

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Starship can't lift 462 tons to orbit in one launch and that isn't taking into account the volume needed. It would take more than 1 to get an ISS equivalent on orbit.

Ok, so like 5-10. ISS took 40 assembly flights, with 36 being expensive space shuttle flights ($54k/kg).

The pressurized volume of Starship is larger than the pressurized volume of the ISS. I think that was what was intended to be conveyed.

Exactly what I was thinking in my head when I wrote that. Although I really should have written it out properly. To be fair mass is probably way more important.

Definitely not in a single launch, since ISS weighs around 500 tons. And I think designs for space stations in starship era would be different(more heavy, but orders of magnitude cheaper to produce), so something like ISS in a starship era might weigh 1.5-2x more(VERY rough estimate), but nonetheless be much cheaper.

Starship itself has ~1000 cubic meters of payload volume, and ISS has ~900 cubic meters of pressurized volume. It's not too much of a stretch to expect >500 cubic meters of pressurized volume in a crew-capable Starship, in which case two Starships would provide a broadly similar amount of pressurized volume in orbit.

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