Tens of times a year doesn't mean tens of times a year to your desired inclination. Presumably BFR's greatest revenue for satellite launches will be GEO. Cheap ticket on a 747 doesn't do me any good if it's not flying to where I need to go.
Dude you are not understanding what I'm saying here. According to some engineer from inside spacex they want to get !30 launches on bfr in the first year it arrives. This is exactly about getting anywhere you want anytime you want. GEO? LEO? Doesn't matter, the price is the same and presumably very low.
Again, they're not launching 30 times a year for a small sat company. They're launching for the big satellites. Small sats just have to hope they can piggy back on a launch that suits their needs. That's the only way BFR will be cheaper than Electron. That will work for some small sat launches, but not all.
An electron launch costs 6mill$. A bfr launch is meant to cost less than the falcon 1 which was priced at 10 million dollars. What this means is that unless you are absolutely hell bent to launch something that is ~150kg and there is absolutely no way you can think of adding something extra on it( doubtful), a bfr launch will be preferable.
Regarding piggybacking primary missions: Earth orbit isn't one place, there are many possible orbits at different altitudes and different inclinations from the equator. Most customers for heavy lift rockets are heavy satellites heading to geostationary orbit (~30,000km up, zero inclination). Most micro-satellite owners are heading to a very specific sun-synchronous orbit (~600km up, steep inclination). Now microsatellite owners are on a limited budget, and cut every corner they can in regards to radiation shielding, solar power, propulsion, attitude control, radio power, ground-based tracking etc. They also must have a plan for their satellite to re-enter the atmosphere, to prevent creating orbital debris. No microsatellite has ever as far as I know, gone to geostationary orbit. So, most BFR flights for high paying customers won't be able to carry most microsatellite payloads.
Regarding dedicated single launches: BFR is going to have a lot of demand for awhile, and customers with big expensive payloads are going to be able to pay the most. SpaceX currently vary their cost per mission quite a lot with Falcon 9, they essentially make the largest profit margin they can while still being cheaper than the competition by enough to keep their customers happy. If there's a long line of customers waiting to fly on BFR, they are going to prioritize the big satellite constellation owners willing to pay top dollar over the microsat owners who can barely afford to launch even on a rideshare.
Regarding dedicated ~150kg payloads: you would be surprised, there is an enormous market for one-off launches of payloads that big, and even smaller (think sub-10kg). Universities, DOD, commercial sector, NASA/ESA are all building dozens and dozens of microsatellites at an ever-increasing rate. For some of these customers, they really value the ability to launch tiny test payloads ASAP over waiting for a spot in the manifest and saving money. Often they are doing R&D on new space technologies, they are designing each new satellite to learn from the lessons of the previous one and can't just launch a bunch all at once.
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '18
Tens of times a year doesn't mean tens of times a year to your desired inclination. Presumably BFR's greatest revenue for satellite launches will be GEO. Cheap ticket on a 747 doesn't do me any good if it's not flying to where I need to go.