> Starship is awesome. But we don’t have JUST 757s and 777s. We also have smaller utility aircraft.
This, and the rest of your comment, is quite reasonable.
What it mostly comes down to is $/kg -> orbit. I know Musk constantly over-promises, but there's at least a good chance that Starship/Superheavy will get their total per launch cost below a million dollars. Perhaps well below that. Gwynne Shotwell, someone known for being almost infinitely more realistic than Musk, has stated multiple times that she firmly believes Starship will become a viable on-Earth passenger/cargo carrier.
And that can only happen if a Starship/Superheavy total launch/mission cost is on the order of a long-haul aircraft. That is, well less than a million dollars.
It's also possible that the fundamental physics of Earth surface -> LEO in a fully re-usable way can only be done with large machines. As an analogy: I'm not aware of any 'not large' machines that can transport anything economically across Earth's oceans. The physics, as I understand it, just don't allow it.
Having said all that, I love the hell out of all of the innovation and potential competition coming around in this area. That's the best way to really test the assumptions (many of which I've just stated) that might be holding us back.
An Airbus A380 is the closest comparable aircraft to Starship. It can handle about 82,000 liters of fuel. Until the last 5 years or so, jet fuel fuel was $3/gallon (peaking at $4/gallon) in the US, higher in Europe and Asia. It’d need about 3 or 4 refuelings to travel to the other side of the world and back with about the same payload as Starship. That’s about $1 million worth of fuel.
The rental price to charter an A380 to the other side of the world and back is about $1.3million not counting fuel or the time spent on the ground fueling and going to/from charter location.
So I’d say a couple million per Starship launch would be on the order of a long-haul aircraft price. Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.
> Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.
Upon further reflection, I'm getting more on board with this, with two big relevant factors: first, how quickly can these new companies work out the fully reusable mojo. SpaceX is clearly many years ahead, but having a predecessor company actually demonstrating a technology surely makes it somewhat easier to re-implement. Second: back to the physics. I don't have a good intuition for this, but I do hope that it's physically possible to efficiently do small scale orbital transport.
One way or another, I'm happy as can be that there are smart people (outside of SpaceX/Blue Origin) really pressing into this problem.
Suborbital point-to-point transport using a StarShip does not require a booster. You only need a booster stage if you need to accelerate to orbital velocities. That brings the cost down dramatically.
A major reason the StarShip is going to be more affordable per launch than a Falcon 9 is that the StarShip is (planned to be) 100% reusable. Falcon 9 (and Electron) always disposes of its 2nd stage.
Hopefully other launch companies can provide 100% reusable alternatives to StarShip just in the name of diversity and planetary capacity. Musk points out that larger ships have an advantage here due to volume vs surface area and the fixed weight cost of avionics.
This, and the rest of your comment, is quite reasonable.
What it mostly comes down to is $/kg -> orbit. I know Musk constantly over-promises, but there's at least a good chance that Starship/Superheavy will get their total per launch cost below a million dollars. Perhaps well below that. Gwynne Shotwell, someone known for being almost infinitely more realistic than Musk, has stated multiple times that she firmly believes Starship will become a viable on-Earth passenger/cargo carrier.
And that can only happen if a Starship/Superheavy total launch/mission cost is on the order of a long-haul aircraft. That is, well less than a million dollars.
It's also possible that the fundamental physics of Earth surface -> LEO in a fully re-usable way can only be done with large machines. As an analogy: I'm not aware of any 'not large' machines that can transport anything economically across Earth's oceans. The physics, as I understand it, just don't allow it.
Having said all that, I love the hell out of all of the innovation and potential competition coming around in this area. That's the best way to really test the assumptions (many of which I've just stated) that might be holding us back.