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I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric to
by treespace8 2y ago
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket.
Thats like a 747 to space.
- Waterluvian 2y agoIs that 150t of payload or total? What’s the cost in fuel alone (let’s ignore maintenance and operations costs for now)? I’m trying to get a feel for the relative scale compared to today’s commercial flight.
- treespace8 2y agoIt was just a quick google. 150t reusable. No idea about the other costs.
- dotnet00 2y agoThey previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs. Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
- pfdietz 2y agoTo put this in perspective: at 150t/launch, if a launch is $1M, then for the cost of an SLS launch (at least $2B) Starship could launch 300,000 tons, about the mass of three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
- Waterluvian 2y agoWe could use a few of those in orbit.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoAmerica funding the literal eye of Sauron 2.0
- pclmulqdq 2y agoNone of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
- cjbillington 2y agoThey've actually been having to dump propellant in order to more accurately test what a Starship in orbit would be like, given they're not flying with a payload that would consume that propellant on ascent, but that they still want to launch with a full tank. The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThat's what they said about the second test flight (and the third), but the webcast recordings looked a lot more like fuel leaks to me, and that is in line with Starship and early Falcon's past issues. I'm going to press X to doubt that the dumping narrative is the truth, since a nice face-saving white lie is in every corporation's handbook.
- starspangled 2y agoThey have, they brought up 10 tonnes on the test before last to do a prop transfer test for NASA.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoHint: With a Musk company, if it's not on video, it didn't happen.
- starspangled 2y agoThat's a weak rebuttal. It's not disputed except by the lunatic fringe - starship has carried a payload (although not quite to orbit, very close to). Whatever that means is what it means, the ship was out of control and I don't know whether or not the mission requiring that payload was successful, but the fact is that it did carry the payload.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoMethane is about 900-1500$ / ton. About 1000 tons is used for the launch in addition to 3600 tons of lox. That should be a bit cheaper than methane per ton. Ballpark, the propellant might cost around 2M$. A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.
- bombcar 2y agoThat's $7 of fuel per pound of payload, that is not bad at all.
- pfdietz 2y agoIndeed. You sometime see an argument that launch to space is expensive because of the propellant and therefore energy required. And as you note this argument is utterly wrong.
- throwaway4aday 2y agonot sure how anyone can miss the "throwing away the airplane" part as being the cost driver.
- pfdietz 2y agoIt's the same cognitive error as thinking nuclear energy must be cheap because the fuel is cheap.
- TMWNN 2y ago>And as you note this argument is utterly wrong. Am I mistaken, or are there distance/payload combinations for which Starship is cheaper per pound on a point-to-point basis than air transport, even setting aside 30 minutes versus 12 hours? Isn't that the non-intuitive outcome of ballistic trajectories?
- adastra22 2y ago
- flaburgan 2y agoSo, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
- kortilla 2y agoSRB and tank were not re-usable. That’s the equivalent of the first stage you just saw getting caught
- throwaway48476 2y agoShuttle SRB segments were fished from the ocean and refilled.
- baq 2y agoYeah but salt water makes it about as difficult as building from scratch.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThen why didn't they stop?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> why didn't they stop? They did [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement
- altcognito 2y agoBeyond the fact that they eventually did quit, the shuttle program was the public face of the US space program, and part of having more than one way to launch military stuff.
- 2y ago
- interludead 2y agoThis opens up immense possibilities for exploration
- le-mark 2y agoI’d love to see a probe catch and examine ʻOumuamua. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua
- k4rli 2y agoWhere is the progress if they're 2 years behind their schedule? In Q1 2025 they should already be launching the HLS according to the timeline.
- Dr4kn 2y agoFalcon 9 is still the most advanced rocket flying real missions to date. The only thing close to it is Blue Origin, which didn't even have their maiden flight yet. Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn't matter. Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship's cargo capacity. If you don't have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.
- pfdietz 2y agoAnd, eventually, if it becomes cheap enough to put people in space for the task, you can plan to actually maintain things there rather than design for extreme reliability.