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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

While true, this is insufficient to make the new claim credible. If the proposed satellites only weighed 100kg and remain on orbit for 3 years, to keep a million up requires:

  (150 metric tons/100kg) = 1500 satellites per Starship launch
  1e6/1500 = 666 launches per MTBF (3 years)
  666/(3 years) = 222 Starship launches/year

This is significantly higher than even the current cadence of Falcons.

If the proposed satellites are to be 1 ton, the required launch cadence would be ten times higher.

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They've been approved for 44 Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and are aiming for 160 total launches in 2026. They've recently purchased a giant tract of land in Louisana to build a third starport. 222/year is looking doable.

Approval doesn't mean achievable.

At this point, 160 Starship launches in 2026 would be close to every weekday.

They already have three launch sites for Falcon and can't do 200.

(Also see edit, my first post relied on Apple's autocomplete for maths and it used a short ton, plus point about these numbers corresponding to a mere 100 kg per satellite).

The 160 launches figure includes falcons. Seems like Starship fuels and flight tests faster than Falcon though. And if they manage to reuse second stages, then that eliminates a significant manufacturing bottleneck.

If you're counting Falcons, you are making my point for me: even with those, on three launch sites, they still can't get close to the minimum for an extremely small, to the point of being unreasonable, target satellite mass.

Further, until they actually do solve upper stage reuse, it is an "if" which can kill the economics of the vehicle itself, let alone reach the eventual potential cost reductions necessary for space based data centres to be worthwhile.

I don't see any reason a non-renewable Starship upper stage would kill the economics of the vehicle. No one else has a renewable upper stage yet, so there's no competition in that space until someone else does. Stoke have an interesting design but it hasn't flown yet and is only about the size of Falcon.

If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Starship is much easier to build than Falcon. Welding is simpler and less expensive than the carbon composites used on Falcon upper stages.

The competition isn't other launch providers, it's not going to space at all.

According to Google, the price threshold to make space make more sensible than building on the ground is $200/kg: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468

Without full reusability, the estimated cost for Starship to LEO is kinda hard to find (necessarily, given the design isn't yet finalised), Wikipedia says $100m/launch in expendable mode, and the SpaceX website* says 250 metric tonnes in expendable mode, which is $100e6/250 metric tonnes = $400/kg.

* at least it does at time of writing: https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship

They have launched zero times this year. 160 next year is not even slightly credible.

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