Starship's game-changing launch capabilities

Starship's payload bay opening to release Stralink satellites.
Source: Teslarati

From Teslarati:

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell teased new information detailing the wealth of benefits that the next-generation Starship launch vehicle could bring for the deployment of the company’s Starlink internet satellite constellation.

Beyond Shotwell’s clear confidence that Starlink’s satellite technology is far beyond OneWeb and years ahead of Amazon’s Project Kuiper clone, she also touched on yet another strength: SpaceX’s very own vertically-integrated launch systems. OneWeb plans to launch the vast majority of its Phase 1 constellation on Arianespace’s commercial Soyuz rockets, with the launch contract alone expected to cost more than $1B for ~700 satellites [1.4 million each].

SpaceX, on the other hand, owns, builds, and operates its own rocket factory and high-performance orbital launch vehicles and is the only company on Earth to have successfully fielded reusable rockets. In short, although Starlink’s voracious need for launch capacity will undoubtedly require some major direct investments, a large portion of SpaceX’s Starlink launch costs can be perceived as little more than the cost of propellant, work-hours, and recovery fleet operations. Boosters (and hopefully fairings) can be reused ad nauseum** and so long as SpaceX sticks to its promise to put customer missions first, the practical opportunity cost of each Starlink launch should be close to zero.

In a perfect scenario, the only material cost of Starlink launches should be the satellites themselves and each expendable Falcon upper stage, which SpaceX has no plans to recover. Speaking prior to Starlink’s 60-satellite “v0.9” launch debut, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated that each prototype spacecraft ended up costing more to launch than to build, despite the fact that their first launch flew on a twice-flown Falcon 9 booster.

Musk thus implied that each Starlink satellite likely already costs significantly less than $500,000 even before SpaceX has begun to reap the full benefits of economies of scale. In fact, based on official 2016 figures that estimated the cost of each BFR booster/ship at less than $4M [it will be lower now, with a stainless steel spaceship] and Musk’s estimate that Starship could cut Starlink launch costs by a factor of 5, the cost of Starlink v0.9 production could have actually been as low as ~$350,000 apiece, with launch costs on the order of ~$20M.

Speaking a little over five months after Musk, Shotwell revealed that a single Starship-Super Heavy launch should be able to place at least 400 Starlink satellites in orbit – a combined payload mass of ~120 metric tons (265,000 lb). Even if the cost of a Starship launch remained identical to Starlink v0.9’s flight-proven Falcon 9, packing almost seven times as many Starlink satellites would singlehandedly cut the relative cost of launch per satellite by more than the 5X figure Musk noted.

In light of this new figure of 400 satellites per individual Starship launch, it’s far easier to understand why SpaceX took the otherwise ludicrous step of reserving space for tens of thousands more Starlink satellites. Even if SpaceX arrives at a worst-case-scenario and is only able to launch Starship-Super Heavy once every 4-8 weeks for the first several years, that could translate to 2400-4800 Starlink satellites placed in orbit every year. Given that 120 tons to LEO is well within Starship’s theoretical capabilities without orbital refueling, it’s entirely possible that Starship could surpass Falcon 9’s Starlink mass-to-orbit almost immediately after it completes its first orbital launch and recovery: a single Starship launch would be equivalent to almost 7 Falcon 9 missions.

[Read more here]

I talked about the synergy between Starlink and the BFS/Starship here and here.  It's ironic (and wonderful) that private enterprise will get us to Mars long before governments will, and with minimal government funding*, because the company has invented a new way to bring high-speed internet to every corner of the globe, which will fund the Mars expeditions and will thereby open up the solar system to trade and settlement, but which in turn depends on cheap launches.

The 100-fold-plus decline in costs brought about by SpaceX will also make space stations in Earth, Mars and Lunar orbit possible and practical.   I have no doubt that in 20 years' time, there will be several large privately-owned space stations in orbit round the Earth, at least one in orbit round Mars, and two or three thriving settlements on Mars.  The official timetables don't even have the Mars expedition until 2040.  It'll happen much faster than that, if my projected Mars timetable is kept to.


*I expect NASA, ESA, RosCosmos, and other state space agencies will be happy to buy berths on SpaceX expeditions to Mars at the same rates that private individuals will pay, i.e., something like $240K (or maybe less). On the other hand, NASA's estimate when Congress asked how much a Mars expedition would cost was $15 billion for 5 astronauts.  And we all know the likely final cost would have been double or triple that.  Just look at SLS.

** Actually, ad nauseam—learning Latin at school has some use, after all.