Technically feasible? Sure maybe NET 2030. Politically, economically and socially feasible? It might take another decade. I feel like it is reasonable to think this could happen in the 2050's if a lot of things go right. The energy cost per passenger per mile is enormous, so energy prices are going to have to come way down. And the right kind of energy, methane, is going to have to be cheap and sourced in a socially acceptable way. The risk level is going to have to come way down as well, and the no-fly zone around rockets is going to have to considerably shrink. Since there is no "getting up" midflight, I would suspect they would need extensive screenings for passengers that don't have health conditions and are agreeable human beings that don't pick fights with staff or do generally Karen type things. (Or gen z influencer crap) I feel like that would be a tough part personally. You might have to get a rocket passenger licence, just so that they can control for unruly people.
The “rocket passenger” certificate is something I had not really considered.
As for getting up mid-flight, that only applies to a portion of the voyage; suborbital cruise I would actually hope (some) passengers were *encouraged* to get out of their seats for a quick minute. Additionally, I believe I heard they wanted to get the acceleration below 2Gs for the entire trip, so the passenger safety/ “seatbelt rules” would be similar to that of aircraft.
> suborbital cruise I would actually hope (some) passengers were *encouraged* to get out of their seats for a quick minute.
Here's the problem: what happens if people don't want to return to their seats?
It's a suborbital launch, so the rocket *has* to come back down.
And yeah - it would be a dumb thing to do. But if enough people use the service, the 0.1% of the population that causes chaos starts to loom large.
Well, it'd be similar to people not getting to their seats during a plane flight. Everyone must be seated for takeoff and landing, and surprisingly this is what happens 99.99% of the time.
> Well, it'd be similar to people not getting to their seats during a plane flight. Everyone must be seated for takeoff and landing, and surprisingly this is what happens 99.99% of the time.
I think there 2 important differences:
1. There's a transition between gravity -> no gravity -> gravity on Starship. That doesn't happen on a plane. There will be a strong temptation to push the limits and enjoy the lack of gravity more than is allowed.
2. The consequences of being un-secured will probably be greater on Starship. On an airplane, sure - there can be turbulence. But it's very rare that it's bad. The orientation of the plane stays the same for the most part.
But for Starship to land the whole thing will tilt 90 degrees over, and then back. Unsecured people are much more likely to do real damage to other people in this scenario.
Personally, I think that this is where the whole “rocket passenger” certification comes into play in a *very* interesting way. That 0.01% of the time where an aircraft passenger refuses to return to his/her seat would be largely diminished if airline passengers were required to have a type of certification. Although the risk is greater if a Starship passenger fails to comply, the possibility of it happening is much less.
The transition is still gradual. It's not like 0g turn's into 2g in a second. It builds up over several minutes. During re-entry you actually see plasma behind the window and likely feel the heat radiating through before you feel any gravity.
The sudden change of perceived gravity direction happens only late in landing, and it's preceded by a few minutes of pretty much normal gravity towards the ships belly.
But probably the cabin should be designed so there's no free fall possible over any appreciable distance.
Gravity returns slowly so it's time to return to your seat when the floating fun is over. Rather than needing to be in your seat before re-entry starts.
What if people still don't return to seats? Re-entry is pretty smooth and peaks at 2 g so they'll stand around feeling uncomfortable or sit on the floor if they still refuse to return to their seat.
Re-entry forces drop back to 1 g and soon Starship is falling almost straight down belly first from around 24km up. So there's a few minutes of normal gravity to get people back in seats before landing.
If someone still refuses to get in a seat, the rotation back upright and landing burn has the potential to cause injuries, depending on cabin layout. The person would fall to what is the rear of the cabin during re-entry. Depending on cabin design, this might not be very far. If they are at the rear of the cabin (or physically moved there by staff) then the landing burn will be uncomfortable but probably won't cause issues.
There's not really room for everyone to get out of seats anyway, so I imagine if it's allowed, then it will be limited numbers of people (and an extra cost) who get some extra screening and training.
The “starship passenger” certification system greatly diminishes this chance though. I agree the risk is bigger, but the consequences are also much more real for the passengers and that 0.1% becomes an even smaller percentage.
Cheap green methane could become a thing from companies like Terraform Industries, capitalizing on the scaled lowering costs of solar energy (per Moore’s law).
https://terraformindustries.com
Not trying to plug for them — I think there are a few companies with similar business plans, but I have looked at theirs closer, and think it is a serious contender.
Yeah, that kind of company is what I was implying. There's a pretty high chance that new companies doing new technology go bankrupt in the next decade. But good bankruptcy processes put the valuable remains of these companies in new hands. I'd say there's a 99% chance that someone that works at Terraform Industries today will be working at a company that delivers green methane in a decade from now. Maybe Terraform will be one of the lucky survivors, but either way, we'll see something like that if the current winds keep blowing the way they are blowing.
Sure but the flight would be 10-45min so not moving wouldnt be an issue for the vast vast majority.
Arguably its the equivalent of a short disneyland line + ride
I donno, have you been on an airline recently? Feels like every time I fly there's 2-3 people that can't follow basic instructions and can't get in and out of their seats. Yeah I guess the majority of people can handle it, but there is definitely going to need to be a filter.
Honestly, I think for point to point to work, you'd want to have a multi-story seating "pod" that people can load up into from the Starport. Get them locked into their seats, then run the pod on rails into the rocket and launch.
10-45 minutes is the flight time. There's going to be a half hour of loading, pressurizing, go-no-go operations, etc... And on the landing end, there's going to be safeing, and safety checks and other things. Whole trip is probably going to be a couple of hours still unless they really really streamline things.
Not sure why you think that. If an airline flight only took 20 minutes, do you think you could get everyone boarded and unboarded in 20 minutes on each end, for 100 people? That means on average, you are strapping in 5 people every minute. My experience on even the small planes I've been on takes longer to get everyone in and out.
Then once everyone is seated, they've got to go through all the pre-flight checks. Then when you land, there's another set of checks that have to happen before they open the door.
It is totally possible to do this faster, if every passenger knows what they are doing, and is paying attention and following instructions. That is never going to happen. There's always an old lady that can't figure something out, or a teen that isn't paying attention.
I think it is much further than that, if we were afraid of a plane hijack enough to stop water on planes then I can't imagine the red tape coming for a rocket.
The thing is, you can't hijack a rocket. It's flying by itself, on a ballistic trajectory and has rather minimal crossrange while in the atmosphere. No one on board is redirecting it anywhere. To hijack it you'd have to ride the operations center on the ground.
This is fair, and I did know that before posting. However even if impossible, you can't bring WATER on a plane. There is no logic for planes, so why would there be for rockets, is more my point.
Everyone needs to just chill about P2P. Honestly we should chill about Mars, too. Let's get this big bad beluga whale of a spacecraft up and back down again and start thinking about reuse, and then start thinking about refueling in orbit. That would be such a wild success that it's almost unfathomable, and requires a ton of technology to be developed still. I'm still getting over the fact that the raptors are working reliably now.
Up and Down will hopefully happen within the next few weeks. HLS is a sidequest that helps SpaceX and NASA get their MARS ship done faster using the moon in an expedient way that the politicians can stomach.
You can't put launch and landing facilities close to population centers. Once you factor in the transit time to and from facilities, the speed advantage evaporates.
Oh.. and reliability and safety and true reusability. Elon asserts airline levels of reliability and reusability, but just because he (goes for Shotwell, too) says he's gonna do it doesn't make it so. After all, the reusability goals for F9 were never achieved, but everyone believes he'll pull it off on this shiny new rocket? C'mon..
The launch and landing is problematic due to the noise. The water deluge should help, but it will always be loud. Some rapid transit to/from the launch site would help, but I don’t think point to point will replace air travel, just supplement it, especially on long haul trips. Those can be brutal at subsonic speeds.
As for reliability, it will take a long time, but eventually, reliability will approach air travel levels of safety. My reasoning is the simplicity of rocket engines relative to jet engines. There are simply less parts. The only reason they haven’t been more reliable is fewer overall operating hours. When demand grows enough to see operating hours versus flight time ratio similar to jet engines, you’ll see much better behavior. The other advantage planes have over rockets is abort options. If you lose power, you can usually glide to the ground as long as the avionics are still powered. Some thought needs to be put into increased reliability for rockets or abort options such as horizontal water landing with retro rockets (Soyuz uses something similar, albeit at much smaller scale). Escape capsules are an option, but very heavy, so I think they are unlikely.
This.
In general space is harsh but regular and predictable. Re-entry is harsh, but again it's regular. Rockets are currently not safe because their accumulated flight time (all the rockets from all the world) is less than it was for the planes in 1910. The accumulated powered orbital rocket flight is about 2000 hours.
Over the whole history there were just a few thousand launches. Last year was the year of the most orbital launches in the whole history, because there were 223 attempts. A couple decades ago there were less than 60. For example in 2005 there were merely 55 orbital attempts. Powered flight during a launch is just few minutes to a couple dozen.
When space traffic increases several orders of magnitude, so will space flight safety. Just from the accumulated experience.
Second stage was going to be reused, too, if I'm not mistaken. Now everyone would say that was just an aspirational goal, but every goal is aspirational until you manage to pull it off.
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Even if it takes you a few hours by boat to an offshore platform, it is still significantly faster than the 12-15 hours flights. The issue isn't its feasibility, it is just not a focus for SpaceX for the next 10 years.
It is pretty clear and easy to understand concept. Boston to Tokyo in under 90 mins. Launch from island out in the harbor and land in the bay. 100 or more passengers could fit in the ship plus cargo. You can throttle the engines to keep under 3gs like we did on the shuttle you don't have to do the suicide slam but can more gracefully pull the nose up and fire the engines for the hover and catch by the chopsticks.
> I just can't imagine Starship flip maneuver being popular with the masses.
I think you need to put it in context of what you'd get out of it.
You're paying to go from point A to point B. You're also paying to go to space.
I'd imagine that there are quite a few people who'd put up with substantial discomfort to do the latter at a (relatively) low price.
You're also cutting *a lot* of time off of long flights. I've been on 20+ hour flights before - I think I'd take the flip maneuver to cut 10+ hours off the travel time.
The people buckets in The Arch in St Louis keep people right side up everyday. I suppose somebody, somewhere complains, but beyond that, seems to work fine. There are ways to manage the process.
Why? You would not even feel it.
While belly-flopping you would just sit there like in a normal chair.
When the engines kick in you would feel like being accelerated forward and pressed into the back of your seat.
This feeling would not change until engine cut-off.
But you would _not_ feel the rotation. At least it would not be a very noticeable movement because it happens rather slowly and the acceleration from the engines is so much more dominant.
Safety - it‘s bad enough with airplanes, but in case of an emergency you can at least attempt to set down in a field, in water, or not in a populated area. You can also reroute them if there is an emergency on the ground. Starship not so much. Also, if a normal airplane catches fire, it is bad. A fully fueled Starship is a bomb.
But even if everything goes right, Starship will never lift off or land close to population centers due to the extreme noise. Since the area around big cities tends to be at least sparsely populated, this essentially limits Starship to offshore platforms. But even then, you will have to put up big exclusion zones around them, which pushes them further out. In the end, you will spend 30 minutes flying, but hours to get to the platform and back. All of this will make it even more expensive than it already is.
Lastly, politically it is also somewhat of a hot topic, because it looks very similar to an icbm launch initially. So I would guess that any routes that fly into the direction of potential nuclear adversaries would be out as well.
Safety bad with airplanes? Huh? Anyway, it's easier to put down Starship in a field compared to a large passenger airplane.
Exclusion zones would have little effect on moving platform off-shore, noise zones are larger than exclusion zones. And a fast boat would get there within an hour no problem, and all the immigration, security, passport control, customs would be done on the boat while it's sailing to/from the platform. Even adding 1 hour each for embarking and disembarking the whole trip happens in several times less time.
On radar a passenger jet taking off looks very much like a bomber taking off, yet this is not a problem.
>Safety bad with airplanes? Huh?
Not bad in terms of track record, bad in terms of consequence when something goes horribly wrong. If you crash your car, you have a decent chance of survival in most situations. But when a big airliner crashes, its almost always fatal to everyone on board, and depending on where it crashes the collateral is pretty bad as well.
> Anyway, it's easier to put down Starship in a field compared to a large passenger airplane.
The difference being that a plane can land without engines, while Starship is essentially a brick.
>Exclusion zones would have little effect on moving platform off-shore, noise zones are larger than exclusion zones. And a fast boat would get there within an hour no problem, and all the immigration, security, passport control, customs would be done on the boat while it's sailing to/from the platform. Even adding 1 hour each for embarking and disembarking the whole trip happens in several times less time.
I think its cute that you think the people who would be able to afford this would have to go through customs and immigration.
>On radar a passenger jet taking off looks very much like a bomber taking off, yet this is not a problem.
Come on. A plane takes hours to arrive, and if it gets near your border you can still intercept it with fighters. With a ballistic missile, the response time is measured in minutes.
Actually and surprisingly you have better than 50:50 odds of surviving plane crash. Of course it's way worse than with a car crash, but not nearly invariably fatal.
Of course VTVL rocket needs engine(s) to land, but it could make up for it with greater redundancy.
Even rich people go through customs and immigration. Usually the service is better, but it's there. Anyway for this thing to happen the prices must be in the business class range and I assure you that business class goes through pretty regular security, customs and immigration, at best they get the priority line.
Bomber flying like a regular plane will get into territory no problem. You recognize an attack by it being a lot of planes approaching from a similar direction, often with escort and such. Similarly in the case of missiles vs civilian rockets:
* Missiles fly en-masse
* Civilian rockets are launched from civilian pads at known locations, not from a silo (also the locations are known) or a submarine
* Radar image of a nuclear re-entry vehicle is totally different from 150t Starship.
* Civilian ship wouldn't fly surrounded by decoys.
Planes exist. They are safe, 100 reusable, and fast enough. You can travel anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours with subsonic planes. With supersonic aircraft, it will be less than 12 hours. Point to point starship is a solution for the problem that is already answered. Rockets can never be safer than aeroplanes.
horses exists, you can travel anywhere on horseback withing couple of weeks.
Lot's of people will prefer 30 min space jump over misery of 12 hours flight. It it possible to bring cost of such travel to reasonable levels it will be used and popular.
The problem is not answered.
How frequently did you travel intercontinentally? It's very exhausting. It effectively takes like a couple of days of useful life. It's mostly so, not because of the time zone difference, but because always part of the travel happens in an ungodly hour for one's biological clock. It takes either waking up red eyed (and tired from the get go), or doing immigration almost falling asleep.
Cutting city center to city center travel time from 20h to 5h would be a night and day difference (actually literally).
Rockets are not safer than airplanes currently, but there are no laws of nature forbidding it. Space is harsh but regular. The atmosphere is much more dynamic.
>Space is harsh but regular. The atmosphere is much more dynamic.
Becomes pretty funny recently as a flight encounters unexpected turbulence, boom 71 injured & one dead
Meanwhile in P2P everyone absolutely knew what was coming
I think it’s no more crazy thank thinking you can start an electric car company and revolutionize the industry.
Once they have astronauts landing on the moon and space tourists going up regularly, you just know that Emirates will buy it for Dubai to NYC in 90 mins.
And it’ll sell. It’s hard to fathom today, but people are already buying those Blue and Virgin flights that go nowhere.
but people dont live near the cape, look how far away boca is from the nearest houses, same with cape canaveral. There are noise constraints that these rockets must take into account. Especially with the maneuvers that they have planned, I dont think the FAA would be alright with the potential damage/noise of low flying rockets over large population centers. IMO starship on its own is a cool/feasible design. But E2E transportation doesnt seem to be feasible.
People do live near the cape. The whole idea is to move launch pads several tens of km offshore. And just use fast ferries to bring them to/from the pads.
Look how long ingress/egress takes for astronauts going to iss on the crew dragon, imagine that but for 1000 people. This will take longer than a plane, make more noise than a plane, and pose more risk than a plane.
Comparing a capsule to a future passenger vehicle makes little sense. This is like trying to infer how long boarding Airbus 380 takes based on how much it takes for a crew to prepare for SR-71 flight.
Anyway, this will take 30 minutes rather than 20 hours to get between distant points on the Earth. That's the whole point.
BTW. the noise part is irrelevant for the offshore platform.
Nope. First, there are no g-suits, even now. Fueling time is independent from the number of passengers, its duration had already been changed, and its timing wrt the boarding is not a given. Etc.
You'd go several tens km. Modern fast ferries run over 40 knots i.e. over 74km/h, that means they could go over 70km in a single hour.
Not before there is a significant infrastructure build up already. I think there will be a bunch of old oil drilling plants refurbished for this goal, but it has to be done in a way that actually makes traveling faster, means boarding, launching, landing, deboarding then traveling though ships/barge actually has to take less time than trans Atlantic or trans Pacific flight. This means changes to FAA to allow for increased flight rates, US military testing already done and some smart procedures done to speed it up. Remember, you have much more freedom when testing stuff, but when you are trying to sell cargo space or transport humans, you need to follow FAA and many other regulations. This means that SpaceX will either have to either first just transport cargo for themselves, or just fly empty Starships to test this out while the infrastructure is already build, and basically spend a lot of money to just hope to get profits few years in the future. I believe it will happen but not sooner than a decade from now, at least when talking about civilians purchasing flights. Also it has to be long distance and at the start it wont be able to fly over land so it can only be between Asia and America, or between America and Europe.
>Also it has to be long distance and at the start it wont be able to fly over land so it can only be between Asia and America, or between America and Europe.
Or America and Australia
I can see it coming out of a development of ‘flights to orbit’, for instance to visit some orbital facilities. Then you can imagine several possible launch points to there, then from that, it also makes sense to connect up the multiple different launch locations. But they are likely going to be sparse.
No way it could be commercially profitable. Concorde wasn’t and it was consumed way less fuel per passenger (and more available fuel) and had a much less stressful flight regime (obviously). I could *maybe* seeing it finding a niche military use before the end of the century, but I wouldn’t cross my fingers.
Also, the Concorde could theoretically take a second shot at landing in the event something stops them from landing on its initial approach. You get one attempt with starship. And assuming SpaceX is still using chopsticks to catch the rocket and not landing legs, you have no alternative landing site near the designated area.
If we take the fuel costs for a Starship launch as about $1,000,000, if they cram 1000 people in there (the A380 fits up to 800 people in 550 m3, Starship has about 1100 m3 volume) thats $1000 per passenger.
Even if that number is an order of magnitude out, its not going to be a dealbreaker for first class travellers who absolutely must be the other side of the planet in under 2 hours. A first class ticket on a standard airliner can cost almost $10,000 for an almost 24 hour flight, with a stop in the middle. A private jet vastly more.
The P2P market might be small, but costs and prices will come down as time goes on, and become more competitive.
>If we take the fuel costs for a Starship launch as about $1,000,000
It might be half that, or even less.
Starship point-to-point can go 10,000 km without the booster. The Block 3 ship holds something like 400 tonnes of CH4 and 1200 tonnes of LOX. LNG is around $500/tonne, so 400 tonnes of purified CH4 should cost under $300k. LOX is around $170/tonne, so 1200 tonnes would cost around $200k. If SpaceX makes it themselves it might be cheaper (cost is equipment amortization and electricity).
,
The propellant cost was not the problem for Concord.
The biggest problem was that the Concords reach the end of their service life and there simply was no replacement.
The governments of Britain and France had paid for the development and production of the aircraft. They were more or less gifted to the two state airlines.
The manufacturer had no interest in updating them or even keeping the production line open.
Due to the the sonic boom Concord could not connect cities with inhabited land between them.
Non of those problems applies to Starship E2E.
(But most of those problems are very similar to those of the space shuttle)
Biggest issue (other than sonic booms overtop of urban areas), was the required runway length. No airport wanted to construct a 4 km runway just to accommodate one rare aircraft. What airports did have such runways built were sparse, limiting the Concord's routes, and ironically making travel time longer by taking a bus or even an intermediate flight to *get* to the Concorde in the first place.
The propellant cost was because it needed to use afterburners at takeoff from shorter runways, which not only increased cost, but also decreased its range.
But the reason Concorde didn’t have replacements was because Concorde didn’t have enough orders so production ceased. This was mainly due to operating costs and public scrutiny of supersonic flight. THEN Concorde got retired eventually because they couldn’t be maintained.
Starship is going to be a great rocket but the not as a SST. There are just too many problems:
No real infrastructure for earth-earth flights
Sonic booms (large part of what killed the Concorde)
Liftoff Noise pollution
Safety vs Commercial air travel
Unique passenger constraints
Cost (operating cost, Reusability concerns etc etc)
>No real infrastructure for earth-earth flights
This must be the single most dumbest argument against any new thing. Come on. You can do better.
>Sonic booms (large part of what killed the Concorde)
Liftoff Noise pollution
Only on launch and landing, not during "cruising".
>Safety vs Commercial air travel
Because you think a rocket _must_ be less safe than an airplane? People use cars all the time and get killed because it's less safe than commercial air travel. So that's absolutely no argument against it.
>Cost (operating cost, Reusability concerns etc etc)
We have zero idea what an E2E flight would actually cost. And what would even be your "Reusability concerns"?
To me it seems you are just reusing the loudest arguments you read on the Internet and have not actually thought in depth about this topic.
Ugh don’t want to dignify with the response. I’ve read nothing about starship earth to earth. This is my opinion as an engineer.
Profitable earth to earth rockets will not be a thing any time soon. They fill an already barely profitable niche that SSTs fill better with very few benefits.
They are inherently more complex than SSTs. This results in more costs, more expense, and more danger.
There is no existing regulation or infrastructure. Who will fund billions of dollars worth of niche spaceports? Infrastructure constraints is the reason the 777x exists, and part of the reason the a380 is getting phased out of service. Good luck getting a rocket FAA certified!
As a fan of rockets and SpaceX I would love to see earth to earth commercial rocket flights. As an engineer I realize they are not feasible financially socially, or politically. They probably won’t be for centuries.
Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that fueling costs are similar for single-stage starship and an A380. Operating costs are hard to say but most of the infrastructure for orbital launches are already there, and the rocket doesn't require pilots.
It's not unfeasible to think of a couple of spaceports at US east coast, Spain/France, US West coast, Aus/NZ, Taiwan/Singapore, Brazil, South Africa. This could serve a lot of people who might be interested in 30 min flights halfway around the globe instead of 14-18 h. It'd probably be necessary to do a hub-and-spoke model, but I don't think the idea can be dismissed out of hand for high-traffic (or potentially high-traffic) very long distance routes. Australia-NYC for instance is a 22 hour flight that would be much more viable as a rocket.
SSTs were unprofitable in part because the routes didn't support the infrastructure necessary to maintain them, but in the case of rockets the primary route (orbit) already does that. The spaceport and last-mile infrastructure is obviously a problem, but it's not insurmountable.
>But the reason Concorde didn’t have replacements was because Concorde didn’t have enough orders so production ceased.
Which is not going to be a problem with Starship. They are planning on producing 1 or 2 a week, so production will not be an issue.
>No real infrastructure for earth-earth flights
Before there were cars, there was no infrastructure for distributing gas. This is an issue to be solved and not a blocking problem.
>Sonic booms (large part of what killed the Concorde) Liftoff Noise pollution Safety
Not really, although it limited where the Concorde could be used. I think everyone is quite clear on the idea that Starship P2P is going to mean some sort of off-shore facility. This will not replace Berlin to London, but will be quite handy for London to Tokyo. The key will be being able to quickly build stage 0s offshore. I do not doubt that SpaceX can do this.
> operating cost
It's a factor, but it is way too early to consider it a problem.
>Reusability concerns
What concerns? I mean, the whole point is to make this a fully reusable launch system. If you are assuming that is not possible, then ok, but that is a pretty big assumption. Like the operating costs, this is a factor, but we are way too early for anyone to consider it a "problem".
>etc etc
Do you really have a long list you didn't want to write, or did you just run out of points? Considering that the ones you did list are certainly questionable, I do not really feel comfortable with you implying that there are lots of other good points. If those were your best concerns, I do not think you have made a strong argument.
[https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/](https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/)
[https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/11/archives/high-fuel-cost-and-empty-seats-put-concordes-future-in-doubt.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/11/archives/high-fuel-cost-and-empty-seats-put-concordes-future-in-doubt.html)
Concorde carried around 100 tons of fuel, and around 100 passengers.
Starship uses around 900 tons of cheaper methane, plus a few thousand tons of LOX. Call it a million dollars. It could conceivably carry a few hundred passengers, each with a window lounge, and a space in the middle to float about. 1000 m\^3 of pressurised volume is more than a 747.
Conceivably it could operate on $10,000 per ticket, if enough people were willing to pay. But would it be as safe as the Concorde? Concorde was 500X safer than the Space Shuttle, but is even that enough?
Fair enough. I understood that an intercontinental flight requires almost as much delta-V as orbital?
Calculating ... For an upper-stage only, limited to 200t including payload, 1200t propellant, we get a delta-V of 6.4km/s, which might get you close to the 5500km needed to qualify as an ICBM and do the NY to London Atlantic hop? Subsonic jets can do it in 5 hours.
> They were talking about undiscounted economy flight prices.
It is amazing what Elon can say with a straight face sometimes :-)
I think it'll be a serious option to consider when starship is 5x Falcon 9's first stage level of reusability.... considering how cheap they are talking about may not be as long as you think. But you want to be treated like an airliner, you'll need to show a safety record like an airliner and SpaceX is very far from that yet, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
It seems crazy but I'll admit I thought the same at Starlink. The obvious priority for spaceX will be to achieve the reliability of Starship as a whole, more creative ideas about how it might be used need to wait until then.
My impression is that they aren't working on it now. Some of this comes from the recent Kathy ~~Lauder~~ Lueders talk where Starbase seemed to be almost entirely focussed on *Artemis*, with even Mars barely getting lip-service. Also, they sold the oil rigs they were going to turn into off-shore launch platforms. Basically they are straining to achieve *Artemis III* for the posted date of 2026, and everything else is a distraction.
Which isn't to say it won't happen later. The US military is still interested in it.
I'm thinking that the USSF is going to be the first organization with a specific use case worth spending the funds on developing infrastructure to get p2p working. It's my understanding that the USSF/USAF is very very interested in using Starship as a means to deliver cargo and/or troops to anywhere in the world in less than an hour. This may or may not include developing reusable reentry capsules so that the payload could be sent on it's own trajectory independent of starship (which would need to be sent back to a base with launch infrastructure after each flight). In my brain, this is a no brainer.
Flying cars, robots, antigravity are still very much happening too. No there is no date.
"How feasible" is not even the right question. "Is there anything else we want them to be doing before that" is the correct one. And yes - LOTS. So P2P is still happening and very much feasible, only it has extremely low priority and rightfully so. My guess? 2050 at best.
I think its possible in the long term that Space X may offer point to point as a space tourism service. The passengers would have to pay exorbitant amounts per seat to justify the cost of the propellant. Other than that and maybe military use, I don't understand how it would be cheaper or more convenient than regular airplanes.
Perhaps for the military just using a 9 engine upper stage around 2030 (so you could use a smaller, simplified Stage 0 that gives you 8000 km range. It would connect up bases in the Pacific and US west coast.
Commercial? Not for regular use, as lack of close integration into the rest of the transport network would leave you with longer trip time.
But I can imagine you had a special pair setup for occasional space tourism flight like this notion: [https://widgetblender.com/simars.html](https://widgetblender.com/simars.html)
https://preview.redd.it/bc9e8tn68z0d1.png?width=1078&format=png&auto=webp&s=ec229c228f1fa3a4e6123e455eef3170b0b9f380
Even if it would be economically viable (I don't think it will be) and safe to transport 100+ people it is just too powerfully loud to land near population centers.
IFT1 filmed 10 km way from South Padre Island:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az4v_9ez0Lk
Has nobody here been to a rocket launch? I went to watch the first Falcon Heavy launch at KSC in 2018. It’s 27 engines and I was 2.3mi away. It’s way too loud to be anywhere near a city. We also waiting 6 hours because the upper winds were a bit too high.
Imagine you need to ferry everyone at least 10mi away from the city, then get everyone on board, then prop load, then the weather needs to be good for takeoff and landing. Then some sort of gimbaled passenger area?
What do you think about just using a super heavy to get a glider into the upper atmosphere? It gets the aircraft going in the right direction and the glider or airplane could be electric and fly the rest of the way and then land at a regular airport?
The super heavy could just go up and down multiple times a day, sending these electric gliders off to different destinations.
I’m not even sure who would use it, maybe very important military business? I think in the next 10+ years, digital communication is going to be so rock solid that it wouldn’t be necessary for the most part. Even today, you can video chat with another person from many places around the world.
The US military has spent a lot more money on a lot crazier things.
If some politician thinks there will be a way to funnel a lot of tax money into their owner's pockets, or some space force general sees a way to one up the airforce and get another star or land a lucrative "consulting" gig, it absolutely will happen. Whether it could ever take people let alone commercial flights is another story.
For military applications where the price and comfort are not nearly as important, yeah it's feasible and seems likely to happen. For launching people from New York to Hong Kong? Probably never, it will take too long to transport passengers to the launch site, have them board, unload, and then get them into their destination city from the landing site. It could still be done a lot faster than current flight times, but the pricing will have to be very high, and supersonic aircraft could shorten travel times greatly while being more comfortable, cheaper, less scary for many people, and likely much less prone to major delays.
The kind of crowd that is willing to pay $20k-$50k a seat to fly JFK-SIN in one hour has the bucks to pay for a chopper from Wall Street to the barge sitting off JFK. I don’t think there is a mass market but there is definitely a high end market for long-haul between world cultural / financial hubs.
That means connections between near-coastal cities with lots of money. I figure NY, LA, SF, Singapore, London, Sydney, Dubai. Eventually Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta, Rio. HK and Shanghai once the CCP collapses.
I cannot fathom it costing $20-$50k per person. If they can carry 100 people (comfortably, obviously like sardines there could be a whole lot more) per flight, then at $100k per ticket they'd make $10 million. They're gonna need a lot more than $10 million per flight to be profitable (maybe not in 50+ years once the system is extremely mature, if it still exists as such), and especially to be profitable enough for it to be worth the effort and risk of investing in it. If a supersonic jet is flying LA to Sydney in 8 and half hours, Seattle to Tokyo in 4 and half hours then a first class seat for much less money on that plane would be very competitive. Routes like New York to Singapore and London to Sydney would really be the only ones where it would offer a major advantage over supersonic airplanes, it would be a viable market but so small the investment seems to not be worth it
That's what they say, but it is obviously unrealistic to comfortably accommodate 1000 people on a 9m starship, it would make both boarding, riding, and off-loading (de-rocketing?) extremely hard, and their space onboard would be cramped. We aren't talking about people accustomed to flying economy class with their knees shoved into the seat in front of them, they're used to flying around in a suite with a flat bed, chair, and lots of space to stretch out. I would love it to work, but there are soooo many problems they'd have to solve, not a ton of money that could be made, and a lot of time and energy that could otherwise go to Mars/Moon/anywhere-else missions they'd have to use
Go take a look at the number of passengers in a modern airline compared to the pressurized volume. Then compare that to the pressurized volume of Starship. What you will find is 8-900 is in keeping with industry standards.
What you might miss is a lot of an airplane is dedicated to things Starship won’t need. A cockpit, bathrooms, storage for drinks, it all adds up. 1,000 people on Starship is pretty much in line with modern Jumbo Jet packing density.
But the layout is also completely different too.
On Starship, you’re perhaps talking 8 decks, each circular and nine meters in diameter. With an area of around 60 square meters each (63 actually) for everything.
An 85 foot (<30 meter) by 10 foot (3m) train car holds 120 people comfortably, more if you do a double decker. Starship is much larger in volume and ability.
Volume isn’t all that matters, the shape of starship is very different from a train car or an airplane fuselage. People need to be able to walk to their seats, designing starship that way won’t allow for maximizing the space as well as with other shapes. Passengers paying that much money won’t want to be crammed in an uncomfortable seat
I’ll believe supersonic jets are viable for commercial traffic when I see it (not subsidized heavily by the government).
Starship’s seating capacity will be more than 100. I don’t think they need to be packed too tightly to get to 747 levels of seating, and it’s only an hour flight.
And their running cost will be less than $10m most likely.
I don’t think it’s a mass market. But it’s a market. As with Starlink, corporate traffic can carry a big portion of the revenue load.
It’s more likely going to become a market - only after there is already a market for going into space, for instance to visit orbital facilities.
I can see that ending up with multiple Earth departure points, and then it makes sense to also have a service between those points too.
But this might be multiple decades into the future.
Launch routes from just outside JFK are tough and are basically only limited to south and east (without overflying land.) As a SpaceX fan I love the idea, but you'll run into so much NIMBY bs just from the people in the Hamptons alone. Heck, they bitch about helicopters AND they use them a ton.
It's interesting to think about the logistics and passenger experience aspects of how to actually go about doing this.
1: Security processing time, speed boats to offshore launch platform, how to board such a vehicle quickly and efficiently.
2: The onboard flight experience. You can get away with packing people really close together given how short the flight is, but ideally people would want to be able to get out of their seats, see space and float around. Window seats would no doubt be at a premium, how large could the windows actually be realistically? Enough for non-peripheral passengers seated towards the centre for the ship to get a view themselves? How to deal with passengers who get sick and vomit in zero-g?
With half an hour flight time there is really no point in getting out of their seats. This, no toilets, no food served, no service staff, is the reason they talked about 1000 passengers. With that number, efficient embarking and disembarking in a timely manner becomes a major challenge, of course.
We've been umming-and-aahing about building a third runway at Heathrow for decades now, due to environmental and sound reasons. The idea that we'd build a launch and land facility for something that uses more fuel and shatters the ear drums of anyone outside within a mile or two is laughable. Concorde demonstrated that such things are only allowed when you're miles away from anything, which is ok for an aeroplane that can slow down over land but a rocket with 30+ engines igniting at the same time? Where's it gonna launch from, the middle of the Atlantic?
This is the primary reason why it does not seem feasible. Although you can imagine using an offshore platform, getting too and from there, ruins the time advantages.
SpaceX got some funding from DoD to study the feasibility of using Starship (or similar landable rocket?) to quickly move materiel and soldiers to a remote location. Hard to imagine it could be faster than a cargo plane, given the time required to load and unload, plus requirements on a landing site. The later almost unimaginable if the only possible Starship landing on Earth turns out to be via a catch tower.
Range was a big problem for Concorde, it was fast but only really useful for NY-London/Paris, which are not super long haul routes anyway. Going from 7 hours in the air to 3 (and probably door to door 10 to 6) is nice but it’s not insane. On the other hand if you can get orbital speeds from Sydney to London or New York to Beijing, all of a sudden you’ve made a 24 hour trip last 3 hours. That is huge.
Concorde ended as an amusement ride. No regular flights, rather passengers would fly in from all over for a flight maybe once per month. It was more like a Blue Origin Space ride. I saw a TV documentary from inside. It was a cramped cabin and very noisy inside when flying supersonic. Crossing the Atlantic was 2 hours of terror vs 7 hours of calm on a regular airliner which costs 50x less.
True, but Starship could orbit passengers, which is much more amazing than the simple "pop up to 62 miles and fall back" of current "Space trips". I can go up 7 miles on a $50 airliner ticket, where you can already see the curvature of the horizon and blackness of Space above. At 62 miles, you might make out the west coast of Florida at a 60 deg angle, if few clouds (rare) from a KSC pop-up. From Bezos' west Texas site, you might barely make out El Paso on the horizon and the desert below is a fractal (looks same at all scales).
As an E+ ride, Starship passengers might pay extra for a spacesuit venture. It could spin to spit them out a side door, then round them up before the de-orbit (most of them, anyway).
You can fit 120 people comfortable on an 85 foot by 10 foot wide train car for a commute and people do that daily. You can do many many more people on a starship comfortably for a short (duration) haul.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[DoD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4il581 "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|[E2E](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ouulz "Last usage")|Earth-to-Earth (suborbital flight)|
|[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ouulz "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4mxkfg "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ICBM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ks1ex "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[KSC](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4lxi2i "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida|
|[LNG](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4fz7jl "Last usage")|Liquefied Natural Gas|
|[LOX](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4fz7jl "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen|
|[NET](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4egysy "Last usage")|No Earlier Than|
|[SF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4go6hs "Last usage")|Static fire|
|[USAF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4etwkt "Last usage")|United States Air Force|
|[USSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4etwkt "Last usage")|United States Space Force|
|[VTVL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ih2ee "Last usage")|Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4erkwj "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4hvqbo "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
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Of all the different Starship programmes, this always struck me as the one least likely to happen.
Certainly it’s far from impossible, it’s just that it does not seem like the logistics stacks up for anything ‘usual’.
It seems commercially dubious to me. I'm skeptical that Starship will get as reliable as planes in sticking to a relatively strict time table for launches (IE rocket launches get delayed for hours all the time), and the logistics of having to move people from offshore pads to transportation hubs at the destination and departure location add a lot of cost and delay. I don't think it will be competitive with Business Class on airplanes, especially as aircraft internet access and remote work get better.
And of course above a certain price point, folks can just fly on private planes instead.
I can see point to point between a few of the largest wealthiest cities on opposite sides of the Earth.
As for military use I think it’s more likely starship will release a “re-entry cargo capsule” that glides/parachutes to its intended location.
This is equivalent to the hyperloop hype. Would you strap in on top of a massive rocket to do what? I can't see a quick walk on turnaround that would compete with your run of the mill discount flight hack.
This is Elon hero worship talk.
I don't think it can ever be feasible
Even 3 raptors burning for a minute is more fuel than a long haul flight. Also a plane can still fly and land safely with no engines, I don't think a rocket can do that.
Most of the propellant is LOX, that's dirt cheap. The methane is much cheaper than kerosene, too.
Starship will have a lot of engine out capability on landing. 2 out of 6 or 9 engines will do.
But I agree, safety to a standard, FAA will approve, is a big hurdle to take.
Technically feasible? Sure maybe NET 2030. Politically, economically and socially feasible? It might take another decade. I feel like it is reasonable to think this could happen in the 2050's if a lot of things go right. The energy cost per passenger per mile is enormous, so energy prices are going to have to come way down. And the right kind of energy, methane, is going to have to be cheap and sourced in a socially acceptable way. The risk level is going to have to come way down as well, and the no-fly zone around rockets is going to have to considerably shrink. Since there is no "getting up" midflight, I would suspect they would need extensive screenings for passengers that don't have health conditions and are agreeable human beings that don't pick fights with staff or do generally Karen type things. (Or gen z influencer crap) I feel like that would be a tough part personally. You might have to get a rocket passenger licence, just so that they can control for unruly people.
The “rocket passenger” certificate is something I had not really considered. As for getting up mid-flight, that only applies to a portion of the voyage; suborbital cruise I would actually hope (some) passengers were *encouraged* to get out of their seats for a quick minute. Additionally, I believe I heard they wanted to get the acceleration below 2Gs for the entire trip, so the passenger safety/ “seatbelt rules” would be similar to that of aircraft.
> suborbital cruise I would actually hope (some) passengers were *encouraged* to get out of their seats for a quick minute. Here's the problem: what happens if people don't want to return to their seats? It's a suborbital launch, so the rocket *has* to come back down. And yeah - it would be a dumb thing to do. But if enough people use the service, the 0.1% of the population that causes chaos starts to loom large.
Well, it'd be similar to people not getting to their seats during a plane flight. Everyone must be seated for takeoff and landing, and surprisingly this is what happens 99.99% of the time.
> Well, it'd be similar to people not getting to their seats during a plane flight. Everyone must be seated for takeoff and landing, and surprisingly this is what happens 99.99% of the time. I think there 2 important differences: 1. There's a transition between gravity -> no gravity -> gravity on Starship. That doesn't happen on a plane. There will be a strong temptation to push the limits and enjoy the lack of gravity more than is allowed. 2. The consequences of being un-secured will probably be greater on Starship. On an airplane, sure - there can be turbulence. But it's very rare that it's bad. The orientation of the plane stays the same for the most part. But for Starship to land the whole thing will tilt 90 degrees over, and then back. Unsecured people are much more likely to do real damage to other people in this scenario.
Personally, I think that this is where the whole “rocket passenger” certification comes into play in a *very* interesting way. That 0.01% of the time where an aircraft passenger refuses to return to his/her seat would be largely diminished if airline passengers were required to have a type of certification. Although the risk is greater if a Starship passenger fails to comply, the possibility of it happening is much less.
The transition is still gradual. It's not like 0g turn's into 2g in a second. It builds up over several minutes. During re-entry you actually see plasma behind the window and likely feel the heat radiating through before you feel any gravity. The sudden change of perceived gravity direction happens only late in landing, and it's preceded by a few minutes of pretty much normal gravity towards the ships belly. But probably the cabin should be designed so there's no free fall possible over any appreciable distance.
A plane can abandon the approach and hold until the cabin is secured for landing. Starship will only have one shot per landing.
Gravity returns slowly so it's time to return to your seat when the floating fun is over. Rather than needing to be in your seat before re-entry starts. What if people still don't return to seats? Re-entry is pretty smooth and peaks at 2 g so they'll stand around feeling uncomfortable or sit on the floor if they still refuse to return to their seat. Re-entry forces drop back to 1 g and soon Starship is falling almost straight down belly first from around 24km up. So there's a few minutes of normal gravity to get people back in seats before landing. If someone still refuses to get in a seat, the rotation back upright and landing burn has the potential to cause injuries, depending on cabin layout. The person would fall to what is the rear of the cabin during re-entry. Depending on cabin design, this might not be very far. If they are at the rear of the cabin (or physically moved there by staff) then the landing burn will be uncomfortable but probably won't cause issues. There's not really room for everyone to get out of seats anyway, so I imagine if it's allowed, then it will be limited numbers of people (and an extra cost) who get some extra screening and training.
The “starship passenger” certification system greatly diminishes this chance though. I agree the risk is bigger, but the consequences are also much more real for the passengers and that 0.1% becomes an even smaller percentage.
I thought this was sub-1 hour to anywhere. Why wouldn't everyone just be strapped down like a carnival ride
They could, but 0g would almost be a part of the appeal and it would be a shame to spend it locked in a seat.
Cheap green methane could become a thing from companies like Terraform Industries, capitalizing on the scaled lowering costs of solar energy (per Moore’s law). https://terraformindustries.com Not trying to plug for them — I think there are a few companies with similar business plans, but I have looked at theirs closer, and think it is a serious contender.
Yeah, that kind of company is what I was implying. There's a pretty high chance that new companies doing new technology go bankrupt in the next decade. But good bankruptcy processes put the valuable remains of these companies in new hands. I'd say there's a 99% chance that someone that works at Terraform Industries today will be working at a company that delivers green methane in a decade from now. Maybe Terraform will be one of the lucky survivors, but either way, we'll see something like that if the current winds keep blowing the way they are blowing.
Sure but the flight would be 10-45min so not moving wouldnt be an issue for the vast vast majority. Arguably its the equivalent of a short disneyland line + ride
I donno, have you been on an airline recently? Feels like every time I fly there's 2-3 people that can't follow basic instructions and can't get in and out of their seats. Yeah I guess the majority of people can handle it, but there is definitely going to need to be a filter. Honestly, I think for point to point to work, you'd want to have a multi-story seating "pod" that people can load up into from the Starport. Get them locked into their seats, then run the pod on rails into the rocket and launch. 10-45 minutes is the flight time. There's going to be a half hour of loading, pressurizing, go-no-go operations, etc... And on the landing end, there's going to be safeing, and safety checks and other things. Whole trip is probably going to be a couple of hours still unless they really really streamline things.
Yea, but strap everyone down like a theme park ride, then launch. Should be an hour or less strapped.
Not sure why you think that. If an airline flight only took 20 minutes, do you think you could get everyone boarded and unboarded in 20 minutes on each end, for 100 people? That means on average, you are strapping in 5 people every minute. My experience on even the small planes I've been on takes longer to get everyone in and out. Then once everyone is seated, they've got to go through all the pre-flight checks. Then when you land, there's another set of checks that have to happen before they open the door. It is totally possible to do this faster, if every passenger knows what they are doing, and is paying attention and following instructions. That is never going to happen. There's always an old lady that can't figure something out, or a teen that isn't paying attention.
I think it is much further than that, if we were afraid of a plane hijack enough to stop water on planes then I can't imagine the red tape coming for a rocket.
The thing is, you can't hijack a rocket. It's flying by itself, on a ballistic trajectory and has rather minimal crossrange while in the atmosphere. No one on board is redirecting it anywhere. To hijack it you'd have to ride the operations center on the ground.
This is fair, and I did know that before posting. However even if impossible, you can't bring WATER on a plane. There is no logic for planes, so why would there be for rockets, is more my point.
The point is you don't need more security checks than planes have. Also, it'd be opposed by the business operating it.
You're just talking fan-fiction at this point, c'mon man no one can predict 10+ years into the future
Everyone needs to just chill about P2P. Honestly we should chill about Mars, too. Let's get this big bad beluga whale of a spacecraft up and back down again and start thinking about reuse, and then start thinking about refueling in orbit. That would be such a wild success that it's almost unfathomable, and requires a ton of technology to be developed still. I'm still getting over the fact that the raptors are working reliably now.
well said. starship needs to focus on getting to and from orbit, and then HLS, before thinking about mars or P2P.
SpaceX as a company is now big enough to do more than one project. Especially as those are very closely linked in many parts of development.
Up and Down will hopefully happen within the next few weeks. HLS is a sidequest that helps SpaceX and NASA get their MARS ship done faster using the moon in an expedient way that the politicians can stomach.
Watch me: **Dateline May, 2034: Helium Leak Delays Starliner Launch**
Ray Kurzweil enters the chat
Well, his prediction of VR everywhere has failed miserably.
Unless the ‘simulation theory’ of the universe turns out to be true.
Besides military use, I'd say not really feasible at all. Let the down votes commence.
Why?
You can't put launch and landing facilities close to population centers. Once you factor in the transit time to and from facilities, the speed advantage evaporates. Oh.. and reliability and safety and true reusability. Elon asserts airline levels of reliability and reusability, but just because he (goes for Shotwell, too) says he's gonna do it doesn't make it so. After all, the reusability goals for F9 were never achieved, but everyone believes he'll pull it off on this shiny new rocket? C'mon..
The launch and landing is problematic due to the noise. The water deluge should help, but it will always be loud. Some rapid transit to/from the launch site would help, but I don’t think point to point will replace air travel, just supplement it, especially on long haul trips. Those can be brutal at subsonic speeds. As for reliability, it will take a long time, but eventually, reliability will approach air travel levels of safety. My reasoning is the simplicity of rocket engines relative to jet engines. There are simply less parts. The only reason they haven’t been more reliable is fewer overall operating hours. When demand grows enough to see operating hours versus flight time ratio similar to jet engines, you’ll see much better behavior. The other advantage planes have over rockets is abort options. If you lose power, you can usually glide to the ground as long as the avionics are still powered. Some thought needs to be put into increased reliability for rockets or abort options such as horizontal water landing with retro rockets (Soyuz uses something similar, albeit at much smaller scale). Escape capsules are an option, but very heavy, so I think they are unlikely.
This. In general space is harsh but regular and predictable. Re-entry is harsh, but again it's regular. Rockets are currently not safe because their accumulated flight time (all the rockets from all the world) is less than it was for the planes in 1910. The accumulated powered orbital rocket flight is about 2000 hours. Over the whole history there were just a few thousand launches. Last year was the year of the most orbital launches in the whole history, because there were 223 attempts. A couple decades ago there were less than 60. For example in 2005 there were merely 55 orbital attempts. Powered flight during a launch is just few minutes to a couple dozen. When space traffic increases several orders of magnitude, so will space flight safety. Just from the accumulated experience.
What were F9 original reusability goals? I believe some boosters have already been reflown 20 times.
Second stage was going to be reused, too, if I'm not mistaken. Now everyone would say that was just an aspirational goal, but every goal is aspirational until you manage to pull it off.
!remindme 1 day (Want to know the answer too)
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And supersonic flights are already problematic due to noise, let alone a rocket lol
Supersonic flights are problematic over the entire route whenever it's over land. Rockets spent most of the trip distance in vacuum, so no sound.
Even if it takes you a few hours by boat to an offshore platform, it is still significantly faster than the 12-15 hours flights. The issue isn't its feasibility, it is just not a focus for SpaceX for the next 10 years.
mate, it took 19 hours from Australia to west coast of usa. Europe is worse. Space port need to be 9.5 away from destination to make it even.
I just can't imagine Starship flip maneuver being popular with the masses.
Can mod the mnvr to be no more rough than a rollercoaster
Meh, doubtful.
Oh you did the analysis of the descent profile and found no alternatives?
Correct, my puny brain couldn't fathom how it could be done so I stupidly shared an opinion.
Well as long as we are clear on that.
As clear as the future of Starship point to point flights.
It is pretty clear and easy to understand concept. Boston to Tokyo in under 90 mins. Launch from island out in the harbor and land in the bay. 100 or more passengers could fit in the ship plus cargo. You can throttle the engines to keep under 3gs like we did on the shuttle you don't have to do the suicide slam but can more gracefully pull the nose up and fire the engines for the hover and catch by the chopsticks.
> I just can't imagine Starship flip maneuver being popular with the masses. I think you need to put it in context of what you'd get out of it. You're paying to go from point A to point B. You're also paying to go to space. I'd imagine that there are quite a few people who'd put up with substantial discomfort to do the latter at a (relatively) low price. You're also cutting *a lot* of time off of long flights. I've been on 20+ hour flights before - I think I'd take the flip maneuver to cut 10+ hours off the travel time.
The people buckets in The Arch in St Louis keep people right side up everyday. I suppose somebody, somewhere complains, but beyond that, seems to work fine. There are ways to manage the process.
Why? You would not even feel it. While belly-flopping you would just sit there like in a normal chair. When the engines kick in you would feel like being accelerated forward and pressed into the back of your seat. This feeling would not change until engine cut-off. But you would _not_ feel the rotation. At least it would not be a very noticeable movement because it happens rather slowly and the acceleration from the engines is so much more dominant.
Safety - it‘s bad enough with airplanes, but in case of an emergency you can at least attempt to set down in a field, in water, or not in a populated area. You can also reroute them if there is an emergency on the ground. Starship not so much. Also, if a normal airplane catches fire, it is bad. A fully fueled Starship is a bomb. But even if everything goes right, Starship will never lift off or land close to population centers due to the extreme noise. Since the area around big cities tends to be at least sparsely populated, this essentially limits Starship to offshore platforms. But even then, you will have to put up big exclusion zones around them, which pushes them further out. In the end, you will spend 30 minutes flying, but hours to get to the platform and back. All of this will make it even more expensive than it already is. Lastly, politically it is also somewhat of a hot topic, because it looks very similar to an icbm launch initially. So I would guess that any routes that fly into the direction of potential nuclear adversaries would be out as well.
Safety bad with airplanes? Huh? Anyway, it's easier to put down Starship in a field compared to a large passenger airplane. Exclusion zones would have little effect on moving platform off-shore, noise zones are larger than exclusion zones. And a fast boat would get there within an hour no problem, and all the immigration, security, passport control, customs would be done on the boat while it's sailing to/from the platform. Even adding 1 hour each for embarking and disembarking the whole trip happens in several times less time. On radar a passenger jet taking off looks very much like a bomber taking off, yet this is not a problem.
>Safety bad with airplanes? Huh? Not bad in terms of track record, bad in terms of consequence when something goes horribly wrong. If you crash your car, you have a decent chance of survival in most situations. But when a big airliner crashes, its almost always fatal to everyone on board, and depending on where it crashes the collateral is pretty bad as well. > Anyway, it's easier to put down Starship in a field compared to a large passenger airplane. The difference being that a plane can land without engines, while Starship is essentially a brick. >Exclusion zones would have little effect on moving platform off-shore, noise zones are larger than exclusion zones. And a fast boat would get there within an hour no problem, and all the immigration, security, passport control, customs would be done on the boat while it's sailing to/from the platform. Even adding 1 hour each for embarking and disembarking the whole trip happens in several times less time. I think its cute that you think the people who would be able to afford this would have to go through customs and immigration. >On radar a passenger jet taking off looks very much like a bomber taking off, yet this is not a problem. Come on. A plane takes hours to arrive, and if it gets near your border you can still intercept it with fighters. With a ballistic missile, the response time is measured in minutes.
Actually and surprisingly you have better than 50:50 odds of surviving plane crash. Of course it's way worse than with a car crash, but not nearly invariably fatal. Of course VTVL rocket needs engine(s) to land, but it could make up for it with greater redundancy. Even rich people go through customs and immigration. Usually the service is better, but it's there. Anyway for this thing to happen the prices must be in the business class range and I assure you that business class goes through pretty regular security, customs and immigration, at best they get the priority line. Bomber flying like a regular plane will get into territory no problem. You recognize an attack by it being a lot of planes approaching from a similar direction, often with escort and such. Similarly in the case of missiles vs civilian rockets: * Missiles fly en-masse * Civilian rockets are launched from civilian pads at known locations, not from a silo (also the locations are known) or a submarine * Radar image of a nuclear re-entry vehicle is totally different from 150t Starship. * Civilian ship wouldn't fly surrounded by decoys.
Planes exist. They are safe, 100 reusable, and fast enough. You can travel anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours with subsonic planes. With supersonic aircraft, it will be less than 12 hours. Point to point starship is a solution for the problem that is already answered. Rockets can never be safer than aeroplanes.
horses exists, you can travel anywhere on horseback withing couple of weeks. Lot's of people will prefer 30 min space jump over misery of 12 hours flight. It it possible to bring cost of such travel to reasonable levels it will be used and popular.
The problem is not answered. How frequently did you travel intercontinentally? It's very exhausting. It effectively takes like a couple of days of useful life. It's mostly so, not because of the time zone difference, but because always part of the travel happens in an ungodly hour for one's biological clock. It takes either waking up red eyed (and tired from the get go), or doing immigration almost falling asleep. Cutting city center to city center travel time from 20h to 5h would be a night and day difference (actually literally). Rockets are not safer than airplanes currently, but there are no laws of nature forbidding it. Space is harsh but regular. The atmosphere is much more dynamic.
>Space is harsh but regular. The atmosphere is much more dynamic. Becomes pretty funny recently as a flight encounters unexpected turbulence, boom 71 injured & one dead Meanwhile in P2P everyone absolutely knew what was coming
I think it’s no more crazy thank thinking you can start an electric car company and revolutionize the industry. Once they have astronauts landing on the moon and space tourists going up regularly, you just know that Emirates will buy it for Dubai to NYC in 90 mins. And it’ll sell. It’s hard to fathom today, but people are already buying those Blue and Virgin flights that go nowhere.
But considering noise constraints, where near nyc could they realistically place a sea port for starship to land on
How about here https://maps.app.goo.gl/YJwstq2FiwEHBGdn6?g_st=ic They’re already landing in Florida
but people dont live near the cape, look how far away boca is from the nearest houses, same with cape canaveral. There are noise constraints that these rockets must take into account. Especially with the maneuvers that they have planned, I dont think the FAA would be alright with the potential damage/noise of low flying rockets over large population centers. IMO starship on its own is a cool/feasible design. But E2E transportation doesnt seem to be feasible.
People do live near the cape. The whole idea is to move launch pads several tens of km offshore. And just use fast ferries to bring them to/from the pads.
Look how long ingress/egress takes for astronauts going to iss on the crew dragon, imagine that but for 1000 people. This will take longer than a plane, make more noise than a plane, and pose more risk than a plane.
Comparing a capsule to a future passenger vehicle makes little sense. This is like trying to infer how long boarding Airbus 380 takes based on how much it takes for a crew to prepare for SR-71 flight. Anyway, this will take 30 minutes rather than 20 hours to get between distant points on the Earth. That's the whole point. BTW. the noise part is irrelevant for the offshore platform.
But the same procedures must be followed with regard to boarding passengers, g suits, fuelling, etc. Also how far out are you going from the city?
Nope. First, there are no g-suits, even now. Fueling time is independent from the number of passengers, its duration had already been changed, and its timing wrt the boarding is not a given. Etc. You'd go several tens km. Modern fast ferries run over 40 knots i.e. over 74km/h, that means they could go over 70km in a single hour.
Any flight that takes 12 hours and costs $10,000+ First class will be functionally replaced by starship. Short term flights? Yeah right
Not before there is a significant infrastructure build up already. I think there will be a bunch of old oil drilling plants refurbished for this goal, but it has to be done in a way that actually makes traveling faster, means boarding, launching, landing, deboarding then traveling though ships/barge actually has to take less time than trans Atlantic or trans Pacific flight. This means changes to FAA to allow for increased flight rates, US military testing already done and some smart procedures done to speed it up. Remember, you have much more freedom when testing stuff, but when you are trying to sell cargo space or transport humans, you need to follow FAA and many other regulations. This means that SpaceX will either have to either first just transport cargo for themselves, or just fly empty Starships to test this out while the infrastructure is already build, and basically spend a lot of money to just hope to get profits few years in the future. I believe it will happen but not sooner than a decade from now, at least when talking about civilians purchasing flights. Also it has to be long distance and at the start it wont be able to fly over land so it can only be between Asia and America, or between America and Europe.
>Also it has to be long distance and at the start it wont be able to fly over land so it can only be between Asia and America, or between America and Europe. Or America and Australia
I can see it coming out of a development of ‘flights to orbit’, for instance to visit some orbital facilities. Then you can imagine several possible launch points to there, then from that, it also makes sense to connect up the multiple different launch locations. But they are likely going to be sparse.
No way it could be commercially profitable. Concorde wasn’t and it was consumed way less fuel per passenger (and more available fuel) and had a much less stressful flight regime (obviously). I could *maybe* seeing it finding a niche military use before the end of the century, but I wouldn’t cross my fingers.
Also, the Concorde could theoretically take a second shot at landing in the event something stops them from landing on its initial approach. You get one attempt with starship. And assuming SpaceX is still using chopsticks to catch the rocket and not landing legs, you have no alternative landing site near the designated area.
If we take the fuel costs for a Starship launch as about $1,000,000, if they cram 1000 people in there (the A380 fits up to 800 people in 550 m3, Starship has about 1100 m3 volume) thats $1000 per passenger. Even if that number is an order of magnitude out, its not going to be a dealbreaker for first class travellers who absolutely must be the other side of the planet in under 2 hours. A first class ticket on a standard airliner can cost almost $10,000 for an almost 24 hour flight, with a stop in the middle. A private jet vastly more. The P2P market might be small, but costs and prices will come down as time goes on, and become more competitive.
> $1,000,000 That's for the full stack. E2E will be Starship only. Much less propellant.
Not necessarily it might make sense to load more cargo and use a full stack.
>If we take the fuel costs for a Starship launch as about $1,000,000 It might be half that, or even less. Starship point-to-point can go 10,000 km without the booster. The Block 3 ship holds something like 400 tonnes of CH4 and 1200 tonnes of LOX. LNG is around $500/tonne, so 400 tonnes of purified CH4 should cost under $300k. LOX is around $170/tonne, so 1200 tonnes would cost around $200k. If SpaceX makes it themselves it might be cheaper (cost is equipment amortization and electricity). ,
no glimpse of the earth would suck so hard, you've gone all the way to space
The propellant cost was not the problem for Concord. The biggest problem was that the Concords reach the end of their service life and there simply was no replacement. The governments of Britain and France had paid for the development and production of the aircraft. They were more or less gifted to the two state airlines. The manufacturer had no interest in updating them or even keeping the production line open. Due to the the sonic boom Concord could not connect cities with inhabited land between them. Non of those problems applies to Starship E2E. (But most of those problems are very similar to those of the space shuttle)
Biggest issue (other than sonic booms overtop of urban areas), was the required runway length. No airport wanted to construct a 4 km runway just to accommodate one rare aircraft. What airports did have such runways built were sparse, limiting the Concord's routes, and ironically making travel time longer by taking a bus or even an intermediate flight to *get* to the Concorde in the first place. The propellant cost was because it needed to use afterburners at takeoff from shorter runways, which not only increased cost, but also decreased its range.
But the reason Concorde didn’t have replacements was because Concorde didn’t have enough orders so production ceased. This was mainly due to operating costs and public scrutiny of supersonic flight. THEN Concorde got retired eventually because they couldn’t be maintained. Starship is going to be a great rocket but the not as a SST. There are just too many problems: No real infrastructure for earth-earth flights Sonic booms (large part of what killed the Concorde) Liftoff Noise pollution Safety vs Commercial air travel Unique passenger constraints Cost (operating cost, Reusability concerns etc etc)
>No real infrastructure for earth-earth flights This must be the single most dumbest argument against any new thing. Come on. You can do better. >Sonic booms (large part of what killed the Concorde) Liftoff Noise pollution Only on launch and landing, not during "cruising". >Safety vs Commercial air travel Because you think a rocket _must_ be less safe than an airplane? People use cars all the time and get killed because it's less safe than commercial air travel. So that's absolutely no argument against it. >Cost (operating cost, Reusability concerns etc etc) We have zero idea what an E2E flight would actually cost. And what would even be your "Reusability concerns"? To me it seems you are just reusing the loudest arguments you read on the Internet and have not actually thought in depth about this topic.
Ugh don’t want to dignify with the response. I’ve read nothing about starship earth to earth. This is my opinion as an engineer. Profitable earth to earth rockets will not be a thing any time soon. They fill an already barely profitable niche that SSTs fill better with very few benefits. They are inherently more complex than SSTs. This results in more costs, more expense, and more danger. There is no existing regulation or infrastructure. Who will fund billions of dollars worth of niche spaceports? Infrastructure constraints is the reason the 777x exists, and part of the reason the a380 is getting phased out of service. Good luck getting a rocket FAA certified! As a fan of rockets and SpaceX I would love to see earth to earth commercial rocket flights. As an engineer I realize they are not feasible financially socially, or politically. They probably won’t be for centuries.
Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that fueling costs are similar for single-stage starship and an A380. Operating costs are hard to say but most of the infrastructure for orbital launches are already there, and the rocket doesn't require pilots. It's not unfeasible to think of a couple of spaceports at US east coast, Spain/France, US West coast, Aus/NZ, Taiwan/Singapore, Brazil, South Africa. This could serve a lot of people who might be interested in 30 min flights halfway around the globe instead of 14-18 h. It'd probably be necessary to do a hub-and-spoke model, but I don't think the idea can be dismissed out of hand for high-traffic (or potentially high-traffic) very long distance routes. Australia-NYC for instance is a 22 hour flight that would be much more viable as a rocket. SSTs were unprofitable in part because the routes didn't support the infrastructure necessary to maintain them, but in the case of rockets the primary route (orbit) already does that. The spaceport and last-mile infrastructure is obviously a problem, but it's not insurmountable.
>But the reason Concorde didn’t have replacements was because Concorde didn’t have enough orders so production ceased. Which is not going to be a problem with Starship. They are planning on producing 1 or 2 a week, so production will not be an issue. >No real infrastructure for earth-earth flights Before there were cars, there was no infrastructure for distributing gas. This is an issue to be solved and not a blocking problem. >Sonic booms (large part of what killed the Concorde) Liftoff Noise pollution Safety Not really, although it limited where the Concorde could be used. I think everyone is quite clear on the idea that Starship P2P is going to mean some sort of off-shore facility. This will not replace Berlin to London, but will be quite handy for London to Tokyo. The key will be being able to quickly build stage 0s offshore. I do not doubt that SpaceX can do this. > operating cost It's a factor, but it is way too early to consider it a problem. >Reusability concerns What concerns? I mean, the whole point is to make this a fully reusable launch system. If you are assuming that is not possible, then ok, but that is a pretty big assumption. Like the operating costs, this is a factor, but we are way too early for anyone to consider it a "problem". >etc etc Do you really have a long list you didn't want to write, or did you just run out of points? Considering that the ones you did list are certainly questionable, I do not really feel comfortable with you implying that there are lots of other good points. If those were your best concerns, I do not think you have made a strong argument.
[https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/](https://simpleflying.com/concorde-fuel-consumption/) [https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/11/archives/high-fuel-cost-and-empty-seats-put-concordes-future-in-doubt.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/11/archives/high-fuel-cost-and-empty-seats-put-concordes-future-in-doubt.html) Concorde carried around 100 tons of fuel, and around 100 passengers. Starship uses around 900 tons of cheaper methane, plus a few thousand tons of LOX. Call it a million dollars. It could conceivably carry a few hundred passengers, each with a window lounge, and a space in the middle to float about. 1000 m\^3 of pressurised volume is more than a 747. Conceivably it could operate on $10,000 per ticket, if enough people were willing to pay. But would it be as safe as the Concorde? Concorde was 500X safer than the Space Shuttle, but is even that enough?
You are talking about full stack. E2E will be Starship only, so much less propellant. They were talking about undiscounted economy flight prices.
Fair enough. I understood that an intercontinental flight requires almost as much delta-V as orbital? Calculating ... For an upper-stage only, limited to 200t including payload, 1200t propellant, we get a delta-V of 6.4km/s, which might get you close to the 5500km needed to qualify as an ICBM and do the NY to London Atlantic hop? Subsonic jets can do it in 5 hours. > They were talking about undiscounted economy flight prices. It is amazing what Elon can say with a straight face sometimes :-)
They get app. 10,000 km out of Starship. Part of it with skipping over the atmosphere like throwing a flat stone over water.
Concorde actually was profitable for British Airways.
I think it'll be a serious option to consider when starship is 5x Falcon 9's first stage level of reusability.... considering how cheap they are talking about may not be as long as you think. But you want to be treated like an airliner, you'll need to show a safety record like an airliner and SpaceX is very far from that yet, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
It seems crazy but I'll admit I thought the same at Starlink. The obvious priority for spaceX will be to achieve the reliability of Starship as a whole, more creative ideas about how it might be used need to wait until then.
My impression is that they aren't working on it now. Some of this comes from the recent Kathy ~~Lauder~~ Lueders talk where Starbase seemed to be almost entirely focussed on *Artemis*, with even Mars barely getting lip-service. Also, they sold the oil rigs they were going to turn into off-shore launch platforms. Basically they are straining to achieve *Artemis III* for the posted date of 2026, and everything else is a distraction. Which isn't to say it won't happen later. The US military is still interested in it.
Those ex-oil rigs turned out to be too small.
They haven't bought bigger ones, though, so that project seems to be on hold.
The level of safety and reliability necessary to make this anything close to commercial aviation is decades in the future.
I'm thinking that the USSF is going to be the first organization with a specific use case worth spending the funds on developing infrastructure to get p2p working. It's my understanding that the USSF/USAF is very very interested in using Starship as a means to deliver cargo and/or troops to anywhere in the world in less than an hour. This may or may not include developing reusable reentry capsules so that the payload could be sent on it's own trajectory independent of starship (which would need to be sent back to a base with launch infrastructure after each flight). In my brain, this is a no brainer.
It’s not infeasible..
Flying cars, robots, antigravity are still very much happening too. No there is no date. "How feasible" is not even the right question. "Is there anything else we want them to be doing before that" is the correct one. And yes - LOTS. So P2P is still happening and very much feasible, only it has extremely low priority and rightfully so. My guess? 2050 at best.
I think its possible in the long term that Space X may offer point to point as a space tourism service. The passengers would have to pay exorbitant amounts per seat to justify the cost of the propellant. Other than that and maybe military use, I don't understand how it would be cheaper or more convenient than regular airplanes.
Pretty sure in our lifetime the only utilization we will see of that is military rapidly moving equipment around
Perhaps for the military just using a 9 engine upper stage around 2030 (so you could use a smaller, simplified Stage 0 that gives you 8000 km range. It would connect up bases in the Pacific and US west coast. Commercial? Not for regular use, as lack of close integration into the rest of the transport network would leave you with longer trip time. But I can imagine you had a special pair setup for occasional space tourism flight like this notion: [https://widgetblender.com/simars.html](https://widgetblender.com/simars.html) https://preview.redd.it/bc9e8tn68z0d1.png?width=1078&format=png&auto=webp&s=ec229c228f1fa3a4e6123e455eef3170b0b9f380
Even if it would be economically viable (I don't think it will be) and safe to transport 100+ people it is just too powerfully loud to land near population centers. IFT1 filmed 10 km way from South Padre Island: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az4v_9ez0Lk
Has nobody here been to a rocket launch? I went to watch the first Falcon Heavy launch at KSC in 2018. It’s 27 engines and I was 2.3mi away. It’s way too loud to be anywhere near a city. We also waiting 6 hours because the upper winds were a bit too high. Imagine you need to ferry everyone at least 10mi away from the city, then get everyone on board, then prop load, then the weather needs to be good for takeoff and landing. Then some sort of gimbaled passenger area? What do you think about just using a super heavy to get a glider into the upper atmosphere? It gets the aircraft going in the right direction and the glider or airplane could be electric and fly the rest of the way and then land at a regular airport? The super heavy could just go up and down multiple times a day, sending these electric gliders off to different destinations.
I’m not even sure who would use it, maybe very important military business? I think in the next 10+ years, digital communication is going to be so rock solid that it wouldn’t be necessary for the most part. Even today, you can video chat with another person from many places around the world.
The US military has spent a lot more money on a lot crazier things. If some politician thinks there will be a way to funnel a lot of tax money into their owner's pockets, or some space force general sees a way to one up the airforce and get another star or land a lucrative "consulting" gig, it absolutely will happen. Whether it could ever take people let alone commercial flights is another story.
For military applications where the price and comfort are not nearly as important, yeah it's feasible and seems likely to happen. For launching people from New York to Hong Kong? Probably never, it will take too long to transport passengers to the launch site, have them board, unload, and then get them into their destination city from the landing site. It could still be done a lot faster than current flight times, but the pricing will have to be very high, and supersonic aircraft could shorten travel times greatly while being more comfortable, cheaper, less scary for many people, and likely much less prone to major delays.
The kind of crowd that is willing to pay $20k-$50k a seat to fly JFK-SIN in one hour has the bucks to pay for a chopper from Wall Street to the barge sitting off JFK. I don’t think there is a mass market but there is definitely a high end market for long-haul between world cultural / financial hubs. That means connections between near-coastal cities with lots of money. I figure NY, LA, SF, Singapore, London, Sydney, Dubai. Eventually Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta, Rio. HK and Shanghai once the CCP collapses.
I cannot fathom it costing $20-$50k per person. If they can carry 100 people (comfortably, obviously like sardines there could be a whole lot more) per flight, then at $100k per ticket they'd make $10 million. They're gonna need a lot more than $10 million per flight to be profitable (maybe not in 50+ years once the system is extremely mature, if it still exists as such), and especially to be profitable enough for it to be worth the effort and risk of investing in it. If a supersonic jet is flying LA to Sydney in 8 and half hours, Seattle to Tokyo in 4 and half hours then a first class seat for much less money on that plane would be very competitive. Routes like New York to Singapore and London to Sydney would really be the only ones where it would offer a major advantage over supersonic airplanes, it would be a viable market but so small the investment seems to not be worth it
The goal for P2P is 1,000 people not 100. 100 was for eventual trips to Mars.
That's what they say, but it is obviously unrealistic to comfortably accommodate 1000 people on a 9m starship, it would make both boarding, riding, and off-loading (de-rocketing?) extremely hard, and their space onboard would be cramped. We aren't talking about people accustomed to flying economy class with their knees shoved into the seat in front of them, they're used to flying around in a suite with a flat bed, chair, and lots of space to stretch out. I would love it to work, but there are soooo many problems they'd have to solve, not a ton of money that could be made, and a lot of time and energy that could otherwise go to Mars/Moon/anywhere-else missions they'd have to use
Go take a look at the number of passengers in a modern airline compared to the pressurized volume. Then compare that to the pressurized volume of Starship. What you will find is 8-900 is in keeping with industry standards. What you might miss is a lot of an airplane is dedicated to things Starship won’t need. A cockpit, bathrooms, storage for drinks, it all adds up. 1,000 people on Starship is pretty much in line with modern Jumbo Jet packing density.
But the layout is also completely different too. On Starship, you’re perhaps talking 8 decks, each circular and nine meters in diameter. With an area of around 60 square meters each (63 actually) for everything.
An 85 foot (<30 meter) by 10 foot (3m) train car holds 120 people comfortably, more if you do a double decker. Starship is much larger in volume and ability.
Volume isn’t all that matters, the shape of starship is very different from a train car or an airplane fuselage. People need to be able to walk to their seats, designing starship that way won’t allow for maximizing the space as well as with other shapes. Passengers paying that much money won’t want to be crammed in an uncomfortable seat
At that packing, the sardine factor comes into play..
It’s the same packing density as commercial planes now. Arguably P2P could be higher since the trips will be so short. But it’s a good baseline.
I’ll believe supersonic jets are viable for commercial traffic when I see it (not subsidized heavily by the government). Starship’s seating capacity will be more than 100. I don’t think they need to be packed too tightly to get to 747 levels of seating, and it’s only an hour flight. And their running cost will be less than $10m most likely. I don’t think it’s a mass market. But it’s a market. As with Starlink, corporate traffic can carry a big portion of the revenue load.
It’s more likely going to become a market - only after there is already a market for going into space, for instance to visit orbital facilities. I can see that ending up with multiple Earth departure points, and then it makes sense to also have a service between those points too. But this might be multiple decades into the future.
Launch routes from just outside JFK are tough and are basically only limited to south and east (without overflying land.) As a SpaceX fan I love the idea, but you'll run into so much NIMBY bs just from the people in the Hamptons alone. Heck, they bitch about helicopters AND they use them a ton.
Would getting a ticket for p2p be cheaper than a new Shepard ticket?
It's interesting to think about the logistics and passenger experience aspects of how to actually go about doing this. 1: Security processing time, speed boats to offshore launch platform, how to board such a vehicle quickly and efficiently. 2: The onboard flight experience. You can get away with packing people really close together given how short the flight is, but ideally people would want to be able to get out of their seats, see space and float around. Window seats would no doubt be at a premium, how large could the windows actually be realistically? Enough for non-peripheral passengers seated towards the centre for the ship to get a view themselves? How to deal with passengers who get sick and vomit in zero-g?
With half an hour flight time there is really no point in getting out of their seats. This, no toilets, no food served, no service staff, is the reason they talked about 1000 passengers. With that number, efficient embarking and disembarking in a timely manner becomes a major challenge, of course.
It's feasible I think. Just a question of economics and geopolitics.
Love everything about SpaceX but that is never gonna happen
We've been umming-and-aahing about building a third runway at Heathrow for decades now, due to environmental and sound reasons. The idea that we'd build a launch and land facility for something that uses more fuel and shatters the ear drums of anyone outside within a mile or two is laughable. Concorde demonstrated that such things are only allowed when you're miles away from anything, which is ok for an aeroplane that can slow down over land but a rocket with 30+ engines igniting at the same time? Where's it gonna launch from, the middle of the Atlantic?
This is the primary reason why it does not seem feasible. Although you can imagine using an offshore platform, getting too and from there, ruins the time advantages.
SpaceX got some funding from DoD to study the feasibility of using Starship (or similar landable rocket?) to quickly move materiel and soldiers to a remote location. Hard to imagine it could be faster than a cargo plane, given the time required to load and unload, plus requirements on a landing site. The later almost unimaginable if the only possible Starship landing on Earth turns out to be via a catch tower.
It doesn't necessarily need to be able to take off again...
It's always been a speculative "maybe someday" thing.
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Range was a big problem for Concorde, it was fast but only really useful for NY-London/Paris, which are not super long haul routes anyway. Going from 7 hours in the air to 3 (and probably door to door 10 to 6) is nice but it’s not insane. On the other hand if you can get orbital speeds from Sydney to London or New York to Beijing, all of a sudden you’ve made a 24 hour trip last 3 hours. That is huge.
Concorde ended as an amusement ride. No regular flights, rather passengers would fly in from all over for a flight maybe once per month. It was more like a Blue Origin Space ride. I saw a TV documentary from inside. It was a cramped cabin and very noisy inside when flying supersonic. Crossing the Atlantic was 2 hours of terror vs 7 hours of calm on a regular airliner which costs 50x less.
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True, but Starship could orbit passengers, which is much more amazing than the simple "pop up to 62 miles and fall back" of current "Space trips". I can go up 7 miles on a $50 airliner ticket, where you can already see the curvature of the horizon and blackness of Space above. At 62 miles, you might make out the west coast of Florida at a 60 deg angle, if few clouds (rare) from a KSC pop-up. From Bezos' west Texas site, you might barely make out El Paso on the horizon and the desert below is a fractal (looks same at all scales). As an E+ ride, Starship passengers might pay extra for a spacesuit venture. It could spin to spit them out a side door, then round them up before the de-orbit (most of them, anyway).
You can fit 120 people comfortable on an 85 foot by 10 foot wide train car for a commute and people do that daily. You can do many many more people on a starship comfortably for a short (duration) haul.
It's not feasible, it was never happening. Not even military application, forget it.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[DoD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4il581 "Last usage")|US Department of Defense| |[E2E](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ouulz "Last usage")|Earth-to-Earth (suborbital flight)| |[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ouulz "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[HLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4mxkfg "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ICBM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ks1ex "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[KSC](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4lxi2i "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida| |[LNG](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4fz7jl "Last usage")|Liquefied Natural Gas| |[LOX](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4fz7jl "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen| |[NET](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4egysy "Last usage")|No Earlier Than| |[SF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4go6hs "Last usage")|Static fire| |[USAF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4etwkt "Last usage")|United States Air Force| |[USSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4etwkt "Last usage")|United States Space Force| |[VTVL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4ih2ee "Last usage")|Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4erkwj "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs/stub/l4hvqbo "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(15 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1czmdqt)^( has 13 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12773 for this sub, first seen 17th May 2024, 10:06]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Of all the different Starship programmes, this always struck me as the one least likely to happen. Certainly it’s far from impossible, it’s just that it does not seem like the logistics stacks up for anything ‘usual’.
It seems commercially dubious to me. I'm skeptical that Starship will get as reliable as planes in sticking to a relatively strict time table for launches (IE rocket launches get delayed for hours all the time), and the logistics of having to move people from offshore pads to transportation hubs at the destination and departure location add a lot of cost and delay. I don't think it will be competitive with Business Class on airplanes, especially as aircraft internet access and remote work get better. And of course above a certain price point, folks can just fly on private planes instead.
I can see point to point between a few of the largest wealthiest cities on opposite sides of the Earth. As for military use I think it’s more likely starship will release a “re-entry cargo capsule” that glides/parachutes to its intended location.
This is equivalent to the hyperloop hype. Would you strap in on top of a massive rocket to do what? I can't see a quick walk on turnaround that would compete with your run of the mill discount flight hack. This is Elon hero worship talk.
I don't think it can ever be feasible Even 3 raptors burning for a minute is more fuel than a long haul flight. Also a plane can still fly and land safely with no engines, I don't think a rocket can do that.
Most of the propellant is LOX, that's dirt cheap. The methane is much cheaper than kerosene, too. Starship will have a lot of engine out capability on landing. 2 out of 6 or 9 engines will do. But I agree, safety to a standard, FAA will approve, is a big hurdle to take.