Starship in its current incomplete form (v3 fully expendable ship and booster) already has the lowest cost to orbit in $/kg of any launch vehicle ever. It's around $400/kg to orbit fully expendable.
Add in booster reuse, which SpaceX has already demonstrated on test flight 9, and the cost to orbit drops to $200/kg.
A fully reusable Starship has a launch cost of around $75m - $90m and the last V3 launch managed 44 tonnes of payload on a sub-orbital flight of not even 200km (Starlink satellites have an orbit of around 550km). That's an optimistic launch cost of $1.700/kg for a rather meaningless altitude and assuming a fully reusable Starship that doesn't keep blowing up.
I have no idea where you pulled your $400/kg number from, but it's complete and utter nonsense. To be economical at all, Starship needs to reach its target capacity of 100 tonnes to orbit, which is simply never going to happen. But even if it somehow does, it's physically impossible for Starship to ever make it further than the moon, at extreme costs, due to the refuelling requirements and fuel boil-off in orbit.
> A fully reusable Starship has a launch cost of around $75m - $90m
No, that's the Starship build cost, i.e. the cost of an expendable Starship. A fully reusable Starship currently does not exist, but reusable launch cost be around $5m/launch (amortized).
> the last V3 launch managed 44 tonnes of payload
Intentional, Starship wasn't fully loaded.
> on a sub-orbital flight
Intentional, test flights are sub-orbital.
> of not even 200km
Intentional, done to target the landing site in the Indian Ocean.
> That's an optimistic launch cost of $1.700/kg
You can do basic math, but you are intentionally using incorrect numbers. Garbage in, garbage out.
> I have no idea where you pulled your $400/kg number from
$80 million / 200 tons = $400/kg to orbit (fully expendable).
This number is already exaggerated, the booster is already proven to be reusable.
If the current Starship is mass produced, this improves to $50 million / 200 tons = $250/kg to orbit (fully expendable).
> To be economical at all, Starship needs to reach its target capacity of 100 tonnes to orbit
You do realize the Starship + Booster stack weighs 5,000 tons, and that a 100 ton payload is only 2% of the rocket mass? And that 2% is an achievable fraction, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have a payload fraction >4%. The Starship upper stage alone weighs 1,600 tons.
> refueling requirements
In terms of problem difficulty, orbital refueling is a minor engineering challenge to solve.
> fuel boil-off in orbit
I hope you are being facetious at this point. How do you think LNG is transported around the world? You realize this problem was solved decades ago?
It was just another marketing stunt to pump the stock price before their terrible earnings report. One "unsupervised" unit, with the supervisor in a follow car, that nobody could actually get and drive around in.
They're declining worldwide and since Musk got the climate change denier elected who did away with CAFE credits at the end of Q3, Tesla is now also no longer a profitable company.
For the last few quarters, Tesla was only profitable due to their selling CAFE credits. With those gone and their sales declining, it's all but certain that Tesla will post a loss for Q4, unless they resort to some very creative accounting tricks.
Tesla was only profitable the last few quarters due to selling their carbon credits to other companies. They'd have lost money otherwise. And since Trump basically did away with that, Tesla is no longer a profitable company now.
Geely owns Volvo Car AB. Volvo Trucks is a different company and part of the Volvo Group, which is not owned by Geely (but they are a big shareholder).
Gah - didn't spot that - this was originally posted 7 days ago, but seems to have been refreshed by dang - if you search 'honey' you'll see it was originally a thread 7 days ago
, and note that some of the comments here are multidays old.
Various mod intercession can cause old submissions to be re-upped. Usually that's through the Second Chance Pool, though this submission doesn't seem to have gone that route.
The traffic limit is outbound only. There is no limit on inbound / internal traffic. So even if they were to hit you with a 5TB / month limit, you'd be just fine.
Starship is a complete and utter failure, as you can read about here, among other places: https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-is-going-nowh...
> It might even take a significant chunk of air freight which is going to be a big deal with rising oil prices.
By being several magnitudes more expensive than an airplane would ever be?
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