A SpaceX director says the company’s next-generation, fully reusable Starship rocket has already secured several commercial launch contracts.
Set to debut early (NET) the first quarter of 2022 with a semi-orbital launch aiming to send Starship around 85% of the way around the Earth, Starship has a way to go before it’s ready to routinely launch payload. Nevertheless, SpaceX is confident enough of Starship’s ultimate success to have effectively made it the basis of every single one of the company’s future goals – both in the short and long term. As of today, SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have become a spectacularly successful revolution in cost-effective launching, including through reusability and vertical integration.
Thanks to unprecedented affordability, SpaceX has been able to accelerate the implementation of its Starlink Internet constellation by launching more than 1,800 satellites and becoming the largest satellite operator in history in less than two and a half years. Where competition is possible, Falcon 9 dominates the global commercial launch market for both small and large satellites. Despite its dizzying success, however, the Falcon 9 is still at least one or two sizes too expensive and too limited in performance to realize SpaceX’s greater ambitions.
These overall goals are simple enough and directly related. First, SpaceX – through Starlink – aims to cover the Earth’s surface with high-quality, affordable satellite internet that is either indistinguishable from or better than terrestrial alternatives, and ultimately connects tens of thousands or even hundreds of millions of people to the Internet. Second, SpaceX’s fundamental goal has always been to make humanity a multiplanetary species by enabling the creation of one or more permanent, self-supporting cities on Mars. To the latter end, Starship or a fully recyclable rocket as it has always been crucial – without which it would be prohibitively expensive to launch the vast mass and amount of supplies needed to build a city on another world.
Recently, if one is to believe SpaceX’s often hyperbolic CEO, Starlink’s success has also depended on Starship, where Musk in a company-wide note has stated that SpaceX as a whole could face bankruptcy if Starship is not ready for to launch 200+ Starlink satellites a month before the end of 2022. While it is simply untrue that SpaceX is at risk of bankruptcy, there may be some the truth behind Musk’s statement. Aside from intimidation, at the heart of Musk’s argument is that Starlink is “economically weak” under the current paradigm, with the Falcon 9 delivering approximately 50,300 kilograms (~ 650 lb) of satellites to orbit with each launch.
Like Starship, Musk believes that the next generation of “Starlink V2” satellites – several times larger than V1 satellites – will drastically improve the cost-effectiveness of the constellation by allowing SpaceX to squeeze much more network capacity out of each unit of satellite mass. . However, making Starlink V2 satellites several times larger would make launching them on the Falcon 9 long less efficient – hence the great need for Starship.
Contrary to Musk’s apocalyptic vision, it’s quite likely that a full Starlink V1 constellation launched by Falcon 9, even though it may be significantly slower and more expensive to implement, may still be economically viable. What it probably would not be, however, is exceptionally profitable, which has long been SpaceX’s master plan for financing its multiplanetary dreams. With a Starship capable of achieving its design goals, that can change.
According to Musk and other SpaceX executives, the true price – before payload – of a flight-tested Falcon 9 launch is somewhere between $ 15M and $ 28M. At an estimated cost of $ 250-500,000 apiece, 50-60 Starlink V1 satellites raise the total cost of a Starlink launch to approximately $ 30-60M. In a partially reusable configuration, the Falcon 9 is capable of firing about ~ 16 tons (~ 35,000 lb) to low orbit (LEO).
Starship, however, is designed to launch at least 100 tons (~ 220,000 lb) and possibly up to 150 tons (~ 330,000 lb) for LEO for a marginal cost of as little as $ 2M. Although SpaceX is an order of magnitude from that target and never gets over 100 tons to the LEO, a $ 20M Starship launch fully loaded with Starlink satellites would still cost five times less than the Falcon 9 per tonne. unit of launched satellite mass. With 150 tons for LEO for $ 10M, Starship would cost 15 times less. If SpaceX one day perfects full recyclability and marginal costs drop to $ 2 million, a 150-ton Starship launch could be up to 70 times cheaper than the Falcon 9.
For exactly the same reasons, it could radically improve the cost-effectiveness of Starlink rollout and finally make humanity’s expansion beyond Earth affordable enough to be viable, Starship would also inherently revolutionize access to space for all other launch customers – not just SpaceX.
According to SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Tom Ochinero, Starship has already begun to make inroads with SpaceX’s healthy list of existing Falcon customers. Although relatively small and unavoidable, it is still an important symbolic move for SpaceX and Starship, as it seeks to deliver a launch vehicle so capable and so inexpensive that it heralds the company’s own Falcon rockets in retirement.
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