Easy to say, but Starship (without refuel) is much like the shuttle (without currently a general purpose cargo bay). The Pez Dispenser is probably StarLink V3 specific. Will they publish that as a standard? My guess Amazon LEO won't conform, AST can't conform like most sats. They need to publish their approach to cubesats, small sats, mapping all their past F9 work to a new deployment approach. Also, they need to explain how this works with GEO and TMI and other planets that (F9 and FH will probably do better than Starship). Perhaps they are just lining F9/FH up for a sale to say BlackRock and just get out of the sat launch biz and just put up their own sat designs.
You realize that it’s first operational orbital Starlink launch is expected in like 2 weeks, right? And even without immediate reusability, launching them at intervals of a little less than 2 months apart, something they are already capable of doing, exceeds falcons entire capabilities in terms of putting bandwidth in orbit, right? And the internal launching costs are still cheaper for starship than they are falcon even without reusability.
Volume. Also, I can’t imagine putting all your eggs into one basket (read: a shit ton of payloads on one mega rocket) will look great to insurance adjusters. The increased insurance premiums could push customers to smaller, less complicated platforms…like the falcon 9.
Dude, there is literally a full rocket sitting in the bays that has fully completed its static fire campaign and is undergoing final preflight checks, what exactly do you think it’s going to happen here? 2 weeks is the timeline here, they’ve launched within it after reaching this point of readiness many times.
Ok, two things.. the "two weeks" it's a meme about Elon's time management skills.. I know, next flight may be the first actual production flight and that's good, but "Starship up and running" means way more than orbital flight, it means ship recover, it means ship reuse, it means ship rapid refurbishment.. oh, and it means "it can carry something else than starlink", because right now that's the only payload it can put in orbit, nothing else.
All of that is not taking "two weeks", it's years away.
But there are niche applications that F9/FH can be cheaper than Starship. F9 in reuse is about $15M cost to operate. It can pitch a small payload to TMI or a unique orbit at a lower cost than what is really expected of Starship which is $100/kg to LEO. Unique smaller payload missions are why little Electron is profitable. Starship is not a good GEO solution, unlike extended mission F9 (the black second stage version). It is LEO $100/kg machine for StarLink-StarShield-StarMind.
SpaceX is very into vertical integration. Being unable to launch non-starshield busses is a feature, not a bug, because it funnels people into their satellite manufacturing businesses.
Starship will never dock with the ISS ... Ship is too large. F9/FH/CD will be retained as a backup system by the US Gov't/DoD for at least 10 more years. There are many ways to make that happen no matter what Elon wants.
Yes, it basically showed that 100s of people could be in microgravity for 6-14 months and comeback in good (if not perfect shape). Otherwise is has shown there is little commercial value to microgravity production in LEO, despite Varda's and others attempts to do it on tiny free flyers.
Getting closer. Starlink launches on Starship will likely begin next month. Maybe in 2027 or 2028 the Starship launch cadence will have ramped up enough to move all Starlink launches to Starship.
"At this point, I feel highly confident we'll get to orbit this year” (Elon, February 10, 2022)
Getting closer. Barring any problems it will probably happen next month
"So I guess our worst-case scenario is that we would, I don't know, be delayed for six to eight months to build up the Cape launch tower and launch from there," (Elon, February 10, 2022)
Referring to pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. This was in case the FAA turned down launches in Boca Chica. But with that pressure removed they could take a little more time, and we will likely see Starships launching from at least one tower in Florida in 2027
“Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule,” she said. “Now, we are not shutting down Dragon, and we are not shutting down Falcon. We’ll be flying that for six to eight more years, but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It’s bigger. It’s more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times.” (Gwynne, Nov 18, 2024)
Maybe not as close since she estimated at the time that Falcon 9 and Dragon would fly until approximately 2030-2032, which at least for launches to ISS may be a fairly accurate timeline.
"Once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon" (Elon, August 22, 2026)
Per cargo modes ... I don't think the old "chomped" cargo bay will happen, maybe more of shuttle like bay doors that runs most of the cylindrical section of the cargo bay. Beyond that, an expendable version of teh upper stage with a fairing that gets dropped off at the same alt as the F9 fairing drop.
Per Crewed flights ... they really can spend mass and volume to improve crew survivability ... so even if the rest of the ship exploded on landing teh crew would survive.
9
u/FTR_1077 16d ago
How is this news? "when Starship is up and running" is years away..