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Comment by kklisura | Hacker News Reader

Starship can deliver 100 t payload to LEO. Does space industry really need that payload requirements?

When you look at Falcon Heavy, it can deliver 68 t to LEO, but there was only one launch back in 2019.

It will take the space industry a few years to adapt to the new possibilities, yes.

But already in the beginning, Starship should be able to deliver several hundred Starlink satellites to their orbits, so it could accelerate deployment of the network quite a lot.

> It will take the space industry a few years to adapt to the new possibilities, yes.

There are tons of possibilities; James Web 2 with 10x the diameter, a probe to catch up with Oumaumau, real asteroid prospecting. Oh and orbital hotels. Does anyone know of any concrete projects?

It’s cheap, but not cheap enough to be launching concrete!

There are 4 NASA projects proposed to launch successors to JWST sometime after 2035, doing more foundational (heh) research: Lynx, HabEx, LUVOIR (with variants A and B) and Origins. All still need to get past the initial research phase, and all but Lynx would greatly benefit from a launch vehicle that can cheaply and easily send 10s of tons into L2.

Oh, and don't forget the contract from NASA for landing humans on the moon.

SpaceX has a contract to land people on the moon as part of the Artemis program. Last I checked, their plan includes multiple Starships and orbital refueling. Then there's the dearMoon project, where some artists are planned to be sent around the Moon, because.

Depending on the final cost, and the cost of amenities, SpaceX could probably profitably just launch people on orbital holidays. By some numbers I think you're looking at sort of "trip to Disneyland" pricing in terms of expense.

There is currently probably an almost infinite market of sending middle class people into space to experience true microgravity and LEO, and if that's viable then you're already setting up a secondary market of people who would want more (3 days to orbit moon? At say...$30,000 I'd do it).

Space tourism gets oversold a lot, but in a scenario where prices are accessible to the middle class and you make a little money...it would be a long time before you'd run out of customers.

$30,000/person for a vacation is definitely out of budget for the middle class. $30,000 for a family of four is also out of budget. Hell, I'm not even sure Disney is a less than a once-in-a-lifetime (if that) for middle class families.

Well, the entire middle class isn't flying to the Moon anytime soon. Not even a meaningful fraction thereof. The logistical constraints are enormous.

But I guess 10 thousand people out of the 8 billion that currently inhabit the Earth would be willing to spend 30 thousand bucks to visit the Moon. Getting all of them there and back would actually mean quite a lot of effort.

Sure, 10,000 people may sign up for that. But that's not relevant.

First, in revenue, that's $300MM. A lot of money, but doesn't seem to be a lot of money for the costs of running that number of Starships, let alone the building of them or R&D.

Second, if we assume 1% of people want to go into space, the 10,000 people would be out of the richest million people on earth. That is not the middle class. In fact, those million people will have more wealth than the entire world's middle class.

The possibilities are endless, but the supply chains will have to grow in order to utilize them fully, and that will take some time.

IDK how many engineers qualified in designing space-resistant hardware are out there, but I am almost certain that many more will be needed. Space conditions are pretty brutal on components.

The thing is that it can deliver that 100 tons to LEO at a lower cost than a single Falcon 9 launch. You would see fundamental changes in how the industry behaves. Now you have incredible engineering efforts that are put into weight reduction of payloads since the launches are so expensive. That will come to an end, engineers will focus on delivering more value, rather than maniacally lowering weight. And you will see incredible things that come with this. Private space stations, actual production in space, and many things that you couldn't even think of will come to life. All because of the accessible super-heavy rocket. and I hope that SpaceX wouldn't be the only company that has such a rocket. We need New Glenn and as many other rapidly reusable rockets as possible because nobody wants a monopoly in the form of SpaceX controlling the whole market.

Their goal is to create a ship that‘s up to the task of setting up colonies on Mars. Their estimate is that at least 1 million metric tons of cargo to the surface of Mars are required for that.

Favorable launch windows to Mars are occurring every two years. With a cargo mass capacity of 100t per ship, over a span of 20 years (=10 launch windows) that would still require 1000 launches per launch window in average. Let that sink in…

Since a trip to Mars takes too long, a ship can only go once per launch window. So they would need as many ships as there are launches to Mars in a launch window.

Are there really that few launch windows? I assume it's because this ship is larger than the others we've been launching all this time?

It's all about the proximity of the planets. Not about the size of the ship.

No, it's because the transfer orbit with the largest payload for the thrust is only available in a specific configuration of Mars and Earth, which only happen every 26 months or so.

Note the spacing for launches for Mars missions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

Yes. When you leave is extremely important as its mostly about the relative alignment of the planets. You can trade a massive amount of fuel to get their faster, but waiting a month can sometimes shave 3 months off the travel time.

If you left on August 25 2022, you will arrive in July 2023. If you waited 1 month to leave, and left on September 26 2022 you would arrive in May 2023, months before the people who left earlier.

This is all according to: https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php

I'm not all that familiar with orbital transfers and costs. Given the 20 year time frame and launch quantities needed, is a favorable transfer window always needed (I'm probably asking if it is always cheapest)? Seems like there's going to be stuff being sent up that would be totally fine slowly cruising to Mars in three years instead of one. Receiving a thousand shipments from space sounds approximately as hard as sending them and spacing them out over a longer period might be desired (and given that quantity, let's face it, we're going to crater a few of them into Mars and replacements will need to be sent).

Earth and Mars orbit around the sun. Sometimes they're on the same side of the sun, sometimes they're on opposite sides.

Using extra fuel you can make launch windows larger, but they're going to come every 26 months no matter what you do.

Outside the launch window, you need to spend more fuel, which means less payload. I would imagine sending ships outside the window, even if you can do so at a greater rate, won't help you much in terms of payload, if at all.

Blue Origin can put their entire orbital stage inside the Starship and save money, just like using the post office to deliver Amazon Prime.

> Starship, says Dr Heldmann, could carry a full-sized drilling rig that could bore kilometres deep.

Or we could use the capacity to dig thermal boreholes on Mars, but I’d worry about mind worm attacks.

I thought Mars was dead cold inside.

Its not mass to orbit (though it helps) - it's $ per kg to orbit.

If Starship hits its mark, it will have a lower $ per kg to orbit then any other rocket in history.

And that's big: most technological innovation happens when we cross economies of scale in the price of some underlying service - or in availability. The existence of computers revolutionized a lot of things - but putting one on every office desk, and then in every home, and then in every pocket - that's what's led to a lot of other capabilities now being viable.

Orbital access is the same trajectory: we probably can't even conceive of the types of business models that will happen once certain cost/availability thresholds are breached. You see this every day in your home - really sit down and think about the logistical chain that means you can use aluminium foil the way you do. The type of resources and logistics which make that possible - all of which didn't have the goal of making home aluminium foil readily available, but who the existence of solves problems without us even thinking out.

Just to nitpick, there were two Falcon Heavy missions in 2019 - Arabsat and a DoD one. That's after the successful demo launch, which was in 2018.

There are also some number scheduled for this year - I doubt we will actually see five Falcon Heavy launches, but there will be a few.

Falcon Heavy was a victim of Falcon 9's success, but it probably can't do the same thing in turn to Starship, it's just too expensive.

The increased volume is probably more useful than the mass.

Not for low earth orbit sure, but for space travel and colonizing other planets or moons.

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