Starship to take over Starlink launches

 Here, I talked about how Starlink and Starship were linked: Starlink would provide the cash to help build Starship and Starship would be so big it could launch the thousands of satellites needed to get the Starlink's satellite constellation working.  Prophetic!  Remember, you read it here first (2017).

Now, Musk has announced that Starship will take over Starlink launches, replacing Falcon 9 in this rôle.

Since dedicated Starlink launches began in May 2019, Musk, COO and President Gwynne Shotwell, and a few other SpaceX officials and executives have made it clear that the company would ultimately transition the task of launching and maintaining the Starlink constellation from Falcon 9 to Starship. Barring major surprises, Starship is being designed to be fully and rapidly reusable from the ground up, nominally making the system far cheaper to launch.

After Musk announced a radical redesign that replaced carbon composite structures with simple steel, Starship may even be far cheaper to build than Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy – despite being several times larger, heavier, more powerful, and more capable. Despite its relative shortcomings, though, Falcon 9 has become an extraordinarily reliable and available workhorse for SpaceX and has completed 28 operational Starlink launches – delivering ~1670 satellites to orbit – since November 2019.

However, while Falcon 9 has done and continues to do an extraordinary job of routinely launching satellites and astronauts, Starship promises to blow it out of the water. It might be several years before Starship is deemed safe and reliable enough to launch humans but SpaceX could feasibly start launching Starlink satellites on the rocket almost as soon as it begins orbital flight tests.

Thanks to the low cost of each Starlink satellite, likely now around ~$250,000, it would be surprising if SpaceX didn’t include at least a few dozen satellites in the early phases of orbital Starship flight tests – even if success is far from guaranteed. At some point, though, and perhaps quite quickly, Starship will safely make it to orbit, reenter, and touch down beside a Super Heavy booster a few times in a row, effectively demonstrating fitness to launch (uncrewed) payloads.

It could take a bit more proof to convince paying customers with satellites worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to entrust launch contracts to Starship but SpaceX itself – likely to be the builder and owner of the world’s largest satellite constellation for the indefinite future – has more flexibility to tailor its appetite for caution. With the capabilities Starship could feasibly offer, SpaceX might also be hard-pressed to just sit and wait.

[Read more here]

The first test flight of Starship and Super Heavy will prob'ly take place in July, though SpaceX won't try to land either vessel for re-use--both will splash down into the sea.  Could the first launch of a few Starlink satellites on Starship happen before the end of this year?  At $2 million per launch, Starship will be just 4% of the cost of a Falcon 9 launch, but will be able to launch 400 satellites at a time instead of just 60, cutting the effective launch cost of each satellite by 2 orders of magnitude.

Starlink will provide a truly global high-speed internet service, and it will change the world as well as making SpaceX the sort of cash needed to build an inter-planetary space fleet.  

The plunging cost of lifting a kilogram to orbit won't just change space.  It will change the Earth too.

Source: Neopork