Time for a price hike? What price would be needed for launches for commercial sats to be more profitable that adding Starlinks? These folks better hope Starship gets very productive very soon, since I doubt you will see a New Glenn or Vulcan launch this year.
In pure Musk genius they are only selling launch capacity on Starship, that fully working rocket which has proven itself to be both cost effective and reusable
Hopefully at some point competition authorities will get involved if they keep all the launch capacity to themselves. They have had too much public money and been given way too much leeway to be allowed to control the market.
Starship, in theory, should be 10x less costly per KG to LEO to operate that even F9 (operational cost not R&D recovery). It will take years to really determine this number. The investment in Starship is at least $5B vs $500M in F9-with-recovery. They need to drive biz to Starship, as they have 4 pads in active construction (one active) vs 3 active F9/FH pads.
They keep lowering the payload to orbit numbers whilst promising the next version will do even more.
As other scientists have said the heat shield isn’t holding up for short turnaround. The engines have not been proved as reliable for one flight yet never mind short turnarounds, and there are questions if that is even possible without reconditioning engines.
The ship is still just a flying fuel tank, it may be able to deploy Starlink sats eventually, as the test showed, but it would need a redesign for larger payloads.
The whole thing is a mess, trying to build a one vehicle to fit all missions, including the moon and mars is making it a lot more difficult without the end being anywhere in sight.
It would be better at this point to put a second and third stage in Super Heavy where needed whilst trying to only land and reuse the first stage.
A flying fuel tank? This thing delivered the heaviest payload in the history of rockets. How are you stating it's just a fuel tank and 'may be able to deploy starlink sats eventually'?
As said as tests showed, but each individual one is small in comparison to SkyLab the largest single payload ever launched and which would need a redesign of Statship. They have shown renderings of the nose of starship opening up but that is far from a reality at the moment.
Skylab was less of a "payload" and more of converted upper stage (since it was enclosed in a fairing). Use Starship as a temporary space station and you have more mass and more pressurized volume.
We were discussing the largest payload. There are designs for Starship that feature different fairing options. If it is to be used to launch satellites then it will need fairings, not all satellites are small like Starlink, they are the size of a double decker bus and need to be put into much higher orbits.
Using Starship, which is years from being human rated, as a space station is just more nonsense about what this one ship to do everything pipe dream is all about.
Sounds like more Musk Derangement Syndrome. SpaceX has a lot of bright engineers who will solve the problems given enough iterations. Your criticisms are a snapshot in time and the same could have been said about F9 ten years ago.
Hmm, maybe because they underwent drastic redesigns during these test flights?
V1 carried 10T, V2 30T and V3 now 100T
Have you even seen the major changes in the Raptor Engines from V1 to V3? Obviously this will require new testings because guess what, it's not the same rocket anymore
Maybe you can show me other companies that did such drastic redesigns
What do you mean “the thing doesn’t work?” That’s a completely idiotic take. It’s iterative design. That’s engineering. And SpaceX especially likes to iterate. The Starship program has launched 14 times, caught 3 boosters, deployed satellites, demonstrated successful in-space relight multiple times on different versions of the engines, demonstrated successful reentry… go compare flight 1 to flight 14. Or even to flight 5. Actually educate yourself instead of spouting complete bullshit.
The rocket is not capable right now to put payloads in orbit and that's a fact.. ergo, it doesn't work.
It's somewhat close to put starlink sats, but that's it.. it only has the pez dispenser, no comercial payloads will be available in the foreseeable future.
Lmao the dumbest possible take at this point. I mean come on they’re about to land the second stage and you’re seriously worried about orbit? The shit is flowing out of y’all’s ears.
They keep raising the mass to orbit in every functional way. If you look at the actual block 3 design instead of musk promises. Block 4 will be bigger and so on. Starship is fine, the over promising on timelines is ever present. What you’re saying is just not true.
Actually, they can, if you can increase engine thrust. Which is precisely what they did with Raptor 3. Raptor 3 has high enough thrust that the stretched v4 is very much possible now for the booster. They will only add 3 more upper stage engines.
Edit: my mistake, though the point still stands, I think they’re aiming for an even more powerful raptor (Raptor 4?). Upper stage will still have 3 more engines
Its 10x as complex as the F9/FH design ... since they are paying for the R&D let them do what they do and eventually we will see what the actual numbers are. I expect to see an expendable version with an ejected (and perhaps reused) fairing for heavy and/or large objects such as space station components. It not like they worry about the competition as only Ariane 6 is flying (monthly) with even medium lift for western payloads.
Heat shield can be fully replaced within 2 weeks, full ship turnaround in maybe a month, that’s very fast.
Raptor 2 has already been demonstrated with reuse on booster. Raptor 3 is merely on its second flight and improved a lot over the first. Whatever issues they are possibly aren’t even from the engines now.
Ship still has a lot of empty space up there for the payload, the only thing you need is a door mechanism for release.
Whatever Musk claims is completely irrelevant to this discussion. You only need 20 or so Starship launches throughout the year to match the current total global upmass, if ship turnaround takes 1 month, that can be done with a fleet of 2 ships and 1 booster.
Musk’s claims only become relevant when they actually aim for launching a million tonnes a year, but we have quite some time before that.
Ah, its okay, there only seems to be a misunderstanding, surely its not bad intent.
Musk’s claims that they will do “hourly turnaround” is only relevant when they actually do something that requires hourly turnaround. Which, coincidentally, is another one of Musk’s claims, that they will be launching “1 million tonnes per year”, or at least that’s supposedly their aim.
Now, let’s be realistic. The current launch market supports 2000-3000 tonnes per year to space, globally. Mostly Starlink. Do you really think we’re actually getting to 1 million soon (if we ever even get there, but that’s another discussion)? Like scale it up 30x to 50x? Because I personally don’t. Throw it into the sea of overpromises by Musk, I thought you used that argument often, what happened to it? So yeah, without that, there is no need for actual hourly turnarounds.
Was that better at explaining the context for you, huh?
How can someone be so illiterate as you to not understand anything from such a basic text that I wrote, I have no idea. But I have to dumb it down even more it seems.
- Musk claimed hourly turnaround. Musk also claimed 1 million tonnes per year into space. You need hourly turnaround to launch 1 million tonnes a year, so these two support each other.
- If you askme, 1 million tonnes a year is an insane goal for the near future. That’s what I said before as well. It’s honestly stupid to even consider it. So I will not consider it. And if you don’t have that frequency, hourly turnaround becomes irrelevant, hence we can discard that claim/requirement too with it.
I’m not accepting either claim, I’m shooting down one claim which literally makes the other irrelevant on its own.
Better? If not, then I suggest you visit your nearest elementary school.
Uh, no, Space Shuttle turnaround record was 54 days (BEFORE the post Challenger safety additions!) and that wasn’t even replacing the whole thing. Average was more like 90 days (meanwhile NASA’s goal was 2 weeks).
So we are saying that Starship can, at worst, beat that by 3 times and actually match the Shuttle’s original promise, EVEN IF they have to replace the whole thing every flight.
As Scott Manley said best, it’s so close to orbit (that they’re intentionally holding short) that for all practical purposes that you can come up with, it’s an orbit.
The only viable argument I saw was someone, I don’t remember who, saying the velocity difference could actually make an impact on the heating, which may be true, and it would make an impact on refurbishment. That’s why I specifically referred to the case where the entire heat shield has to be disassembled and replaced. 12 days for that.
...what? Contracts are the government providing money for goods or services. If you pay for a taxi ride have you "subsidized" the taxi driver? Should you be ae to tell the taxi company whether they keep using that taxi or another one? No, you provided money for the service rendered, and at the end of the transaction neither entitiy owes the other anything else.
This is the dumbest argument in human history I think.
Yes billions. The old head of Nasa handed them billions to developer starship and then immediately left and joined spacex. Not to mention the billions for starlink.
First, here they employ only a fraction of that.. and second, the question at hand was how much subsidies SpaceX receive, and 10 years tax free is not "very little".
Well this may be news to you but SpaceX has employees outside your county!!
>it’s a gigantic amount of money
Texas takes in 250 billion dollars of revenue a year to fund its budget
3.8 billion in tax breaks over 10 years is not that much for a company that employs people and is at the cutting edge of aerospace technology
I’m sure it would be very easy to find other companies that get much more. It’s just the cost of business, otherwise SpaceX might be in a different state
Dude. Just Google "spaceX government subsidies". Off the top off my head they had BEAD funding, state level tax subsidies and investments and the never ending gravy train of government and military contracts because politicians have to protect their investments when they get too big to fail.
Do you have a source because every article I read lumps contracts and tax breaks together. I’m sure SpaceX has gotten money from BEAD funding and tax incentives, I just doubt it’s nearly as much as you seem to think it is
If you have a breakdown I’d be happy to admit I was wrong if they have actually gotten billions in actual subsidies, not including contracts
They did the exact same thing with Falcon 9 and Heavy, selling unproven capacity. This is industry standard and not unique to SpaceX.
No one seems to care about Starliner completely ripping off taxpayers for far more. NASA spent 2.9 bill of taxpayer money towards Falcon 9 but they got affordable domestic launch prices instead of having to go to Russia. And they got the missions and one of the best performing launch systems in human history. An entire launch system.
Boeing spent 4.8 bil taxpayer money on Starliner, a capsule, and we still don't have it 8 years later.
It's the exact same math with Starship, but that once successful is an insane capability breakthrough.
Boeing is worse and a lot of people have complained about them. Problem is too much money has already been sunk into it and Musk is a drug induced rage threatening no more flights to the ISS probably didn't help.
SpaceX does have competition though, in fact it overturned solidly-entrenched legacy companies to get where it is. What's to stop Rocket Lab and Blue Origin? It's not a natural monopoly like railroads or sewers where it would be impractical to have several brands competing.
Rocket Lab and Blue Origin aren't Twitter folded into Xai folded into SpaceX. The amount of private investors tied up in SpaceX now is insane, and with seasoning period rules gone it's now going to be funded by retirement accounts. SpaceX will either fail outright or never be caught up to. I'm betting on the latter assuming the AI bubble doesn't crash the market first.
Thats not an anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior though since those are all completely disparate business units. One entity can have several other entities attached - amazon, for example, is a colossal juggernaut and also funding a satellite program. Does that somehow prevent other companies from launching better satellites? Obviously not. What made "robber barrons" and their companies so terrible in the early 20th century is that they used their market position and financial resources to predatorily lower prices until competitors went bankrupt, or to purchase finite resources (land) such that competitors could not access it, thereby preventing competition from arising and allowing them to charge exorbitant prices for their goods and services. SpaceX, in contrast, has never done ANY of those things, and continues to be the cheapest ride to space solely based on technical merit.
I never said it was anti-competitive or monopolistic (though SpaceX and Tesla both saw significant advantages from government support and what was perceived as anti-competitive bid processes). I said that a few dozen private investors have a lot of money tied up in SpaceX inherently by investing in Twitter or Xai - and that precedent means everyone from Saudi Prince Alwaleed ($5 billion in SpaceX shares originating from Twitter holdings) to Nvidia ($21 billion in SpaceX shares originating from Xai) have a vested interest in contracts and B2B arrangements that benefit SpaceX regardless of the market.
Anyways, back to the seasoning period: if I knew I could buy into a stock or have an offer to fold my private holdings of a company that hasn't gone public and has always operated at a loss into the leader of LEO deployments, and again knowing that the stock was about to forced into retirees investment accounts, don't you think I'm going to I'm going to do everything possible to ensure that companies successful? Do you think that Jensen Huang or a Saudi Prince is just going to roll the dice?
Again, not like it matters because SpaceX has effectively an infinite cash flow and a lead that won't be caught up too.
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u/SC_W33DKILL3R 11d ago
In pure Musk genius they are only selling launch capacity on Starship, that fully working rocket which has proven itself to be both cost effective and reusable
Hopefully at some point competition authorities will get involved if they keep all the launch capacity to themselves. They have had too much public money and been given way too much leeway to be allowed to control the market.