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Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX's reusable launch technology has become a strategic American national security asset. The U.S. would, in all probability, bail out SpaceX if, for some reason, it was about to fail. SpaceX's success is a Sputnik moment for countries like China and Russia, which are desperately trying to develop reusable rockets of their own.

Also, Gwynne Shotwell deserves as much credit as Elon Musk.

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This is what makes me wonder about the commercial viability of Starship. A single rapidly resuable Starship will lead to a launch capacity glut. Now factor in a fleet of them. And that China and the EU will definitely respond, and Russia too if they can afford it.

Launch prices are going to be driven down brutally. It's not clear to me how any launch provider will make a profit.

They’ll charge the similar prices, just putting cheaper heavier better-fueled robust satellites in orbit

Satellites are super expensive due to weight concerns, demand should go way up with the per-unit cost down

By enabling entirely new applications that aren't remotely economical otherwise. Asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing, all that scifi stuff that we've been talking about for half a century and can't do at thousands of dollars per pound to LEO.

Cheap high-volume launch means you can build things heavier and in some cases mass-produce them, so space hardware doesn't have to cost so much anymore either.

Consider how CPU manufacturing became a bigger industry as the cost per computation plummeted over the past 50 years. When it gets cheaper to do something, demand tends to increase because people start purchasing it for purposes that would have been ridiculous in the past.

Until other cheap lifters show up, SpaceX can dictate the floor on costs. But profit means there must be a demand for Starship, perhaps more than Starlink provides. There are businesses that may flourish in near space given cheap enough access to low orbit.

As for launch providers surviving, nation-states have a vested interest in subsidizing their space programs, even at a loss, until they can bootstrap their own cheap lifters.

Driving down launch costs is the point.

SpaceX a few years ago pretty much completely wiped out their Falcon 9 launch manifest because their launch cadence was so high, and the cost for SpaceX of doing so was so low. They briefly had a dip in launch cadence and it's only now building back up for two reasons:

1. They've dropped launch costs so their customers have new opportunities they can pursue at the new cost basis. 2. They started Starlink to soak up all their spare launch capacity. Hundreds of flights to low-earth orbit launching cheap satellites.

Starship/Super heavy is meant to be the next evolution of this. If the cost of launching heavy payloads massively drops then demand will appear to match it. They hope.

It's hard to make money on infrastructure, which space launches are in a way. But there is a lot of induced demand here: the main costs of satellites are the costs of the launch and the cost of the satellite, and satellites are in no small part expensive because launches are expensive (low weight, high reliability, long lifespan is expensive). If launches become cheaper, a lot more people will want to use them. Entire industries like zero-gravity fabrication, moon mining or space tourism only become viable as launch costs decrease.

I don't think you can assume that launch prices will drop substantially.

The problem is that demand for launches over the next 5 years is fairly static. Almost everything that will be launched in the next 5 years will already be well into the design phase.

SpaceX will keep prices below the competition, but they're already lower than the competition so why would they lower it further?

They want to retire Falcon9, so they do have a bit of a conundrum. They'd rather launch a Falcon9 size payload using Starship than using Falcon9 which puts pressure on them to charge Falcon9 per launch prices for Starship, but since Starship is much more capable than Falcon9, if per launch prices are the same, the Starship price is a lot less per ton.

But they have a way out: Launch as a service as an extension of their current rideshare model to larger payloads. Charge per kg rather than per launch. If you want to launch 17 tonnes into LEO you pay a different price than if you're launching 150 tonnes into LEO, even if both payloads go on a dedicated Starship.

OTOH being a private company they do have the ability to sandbag their profits over the next 5 years in the hope that they'll make up for it in >5 years. If they price at 10% of their current prices their launch profits over the next 5 years will be 10% of what they would be otherwise, but if it enables an asteroid mining startup that will buy hundreds of launches per year in a decade....

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