When Will Starship First Fly More than 1000x in a Single Year?

[go2mars]

I voted near-term. I won “beer-bets” on this site previously about SpaceX. I’ve always ridden on the optimistic/realistic side.

[spacenut]

With Starlink, for every 1 million customers, that gives you $1 billion in profit.  If he gets 100 million customers worldwide, that is $100 billion dollars profit.  The faster he gets all 42,000 satellites up, the faster he can earn billions in profit to finance Mars colonization.

I get $100 per month per cusomer = $1,200 per year.  Take away $200 per year for the cost of equipment and operations, that is $1,000 per year profit off Starlink.  $1,000 x 1,000,000 customers is $1 billion.  So basically for every million customers that is about $1 billion in profit.  It may not be that much profit, but Elon said he was going to finance Mars colonization with Starlink customers.  He could easily get 10 million or more in the US alone.  Then you have planes, ships, etc.  Now the military is interested.  Then you have European, Asian, and outer customers world wide.  India does not have a lot of infrastructure, so they have more cell phones in use than land lines because towers are easier to install than ground systems.  Same with Starlink. 

I think he can get the booster working and landing back at the launch tower.  I think Starship will get to orbit.  I think it can make it back through re-entry.  The landing to me is the hardest.  If all this can be mastered in the next 2-3 years, then within 10 years of manufacturing Starships and launch facilities, he could get 1,000 launches a year.  He will need more than Boca Chica though. 

[Steve G]

They'll never reach 100, lucky if they launch 50.

First, what's the need for 1000 flights?

What's the cargo?

Who is paying for it?

How are they going to launch that many? Where's all that fuel coming from to support three launches a day? How is the GSE supposed to withstand that kind of thrust and heat for rapid reuse?

This Mars colonization fantasy is simply unaffordable. Musk can't afford it and no one other than multi-millionaires could buy their own passage. Who the hell will sacrifice their lives to live on a freezing, nearly airless desert for the rest of their lives? And Elon is talking about 100,000 per launch window? That's beyond delusional. Who's paying their passage, and support equipment? Not them unless there's a new generation of 100,000 billionaires who want to leave earth. Would a billionaire leave all their riches for a confined base with no luxuries? Would 100,000 people sell everything to live like that? Would they be qualified? Would they be healthy? Can babies be conceived and born on Mars? (We don't know)

What kind of government will it have? Military society or a loose democracy? The equipment the Mars flights requires to set up a base with in situ resource production, food production, power production, etc, will cost far more than the Starship flying it, and the Mars Starships rated for humans will cost several billion a piece, and there's no way they can carry supplies and provide space for more than a crew of 20, forget that 100 passenger nonsense. You can be certain the government won't be carrying a tab over a few billion per launch window.

Has anyone seriously thought this through? Musk certainly hasn't.

[DeimosDream]

Never.

The only plausible market for 1000x is point-point transport, but point-to-point passenger transit is different enough that any Starship based derivative would iterate into a new system.

[M.E.T.]

They'll never reach 100, lucky if they launch 50.

First, what's the need for 1000 flights?

What's the cargo?

Who is paying for it?

How are they going to launch that many? Where's all that fuel coming from to support three launches a day? How is the GSE supposed to withstand that kind of thrust and heat for rapid reuse?

This Mars colonization fantasy is simply unaffordable. Musk can't afford it and no one other than multi-millionaires could buy their own passage. Who the hell will sacrifice their lives to live on a freezing, nearly airless desert for the rest of their lives? And Elon is talking about 100,000 per launch window? That's beyond delusional. Who's paying their passage, and support equipment? Not them unless there's a new generation of 100,000 billionaires who want to leave earth. Would a billionaire leave all their riches for a confined base with no luxuries? Would 100,000 people sell everything to live like that? Would they be qualified? Would they be healthy? Can babies be conceived and born on Mars? (We don't know)

What kind of government will it have? Military society or a loose democracy? The equipment the Mars flights requires to set up a base with in situ resource production, food production, power production, etc, will cost far more than the Starship flying it, and the Mars Starships rated for humans will cost several billion a piece, and there's no way they can carry supplies and provide space for more than a crew of 20, forget that 100 passenger nonsense. You can be certain the government won't be carrying a tab over a few billion per launch window.

Has anyone seriously thought this through? Musk certainly hasn't.

What do you mean Musk can’t afford it?

Musk has stated that:

1. The reason he is accumulating assets on earth is to fund Mars colonization.

2. He plans to donate the majority of his assets to charity. That would be the Musk charitable foundation which he fully controls, and I’m sure he can set up funding the interplanetary spread of humanity as a charitable endeavour.

He is currently worth ~$240B. Five years ago that was about $20B. A more than tenfold increase. Where do you think his net worth will be 5 years from now? 10 years from now?

In short, considering the above, in 10 years time Elon alone is likely to be a trillion dollar market for Starship in his own right.

[DistantTemple]

They'll never reach 100, lucky if they launch 50.

First, what's the need for 1000 flights?

What's the cargo?

Who is paying for it?

How are they going to launch that many? Where's all that fuel coming from to support three launches a day? How is the GSE supposed to withstand that kind of thrust and heat for rapid reuse?

This Mars colonization fantasy is simply unaffordable. Musk can't afford it and no one other than multi-millionaires could buy their own passage. Who the hell will sacrifice their lives to live on a freezing, nearly airless desert for the rest of their lives? And Elon is talking about 100,000 per launch window? That's beyond delusional. Who's paying their passage, and support equipment? Not them unless there's a new generation of 100,000 billionaires who want to leave earth. Would a billionaire leave all their riches for a confined base with no luxuries? Would 100,000 people sell everything to live like that? Would they be qualified? Would they be healthy? Can babies be conceived and born on Mars? (We don't know)

What kind of government will it have? Military society or a loose democracy? The equipment the Mars flights requires to set up a base with in situ resource production, food production, power production, etc, will cost far more than the Starship flying it, and the Mars Starships rated for humans will cost several billion a piece, and there's no way they can carry supplies and provide space for more than a crew of 20, forget that 100 passenger nonsense. You can be certain the government won't be carrying a tab over a few billion per launch window.

Has anyone seriously thought this through? Musk certainly hasn't.

Sorry Steve, I am replying to this in order to keep your text in my thread so I can roll it out as an example later ... and see how Starship development and flight compares with yours and others' predictions.

I do think you are way, WAY off!!! "Starships rated for humans will cost several billion a piece" etc.

I voted 2035-2040.  12+ years. Lots of infrastructure, planning, and politics, as well as building ships and developing Mars payloads etc.

And as for cost! A "random" large number, say £1Bn fully considered cost for a human transport departure to Mars (including several refuelling flights, eclss, etc) x150 = £150Bn Definitely affordable to EM. He just blew £42Bn!In 10 years he could easily be worth £1Tn. 150 mars departures means ~ 1000 launches. Still affordable t 4X the price. Then there are world governments and space agencies who will pay to get a bit of the pie.

Mass production will smash these large numbers. Its part of EM's mo. Tesla, F9, Starlink (both satellites, and receivers), and of course Raptor. Remember before Dishy was released, and phased array antennas of that size were thought to cost £20K!!! and now they are under £500! How few years did that take?

Moon flights alone could be 12 per year by 2040. That's ~ 60+ launches! Then there will be orbital station work, Starlink, exploration....

[Robotbeat]

They'll never reach 100, lucky if they launch 50.

First, what's the need for 1000 flights?

What's the cargo?

Who is paying for it?

Starlink alone needs about 200-300 Starship launches per year. That’s if the satellites don’t grow beyond the current 2 tonnes.

How are they going to launch that many? Where's all that fuel coming from to support three launches a day? How is the GSE supposed to withstand that kind of thrust and heat for rapid reuse?…

they have about 7 launch pads planned. With no greater monthly launch rate than LC40 has already demonstrated, that’s around 400 already. If they build 15 launch pads and slightly increase the launch rate, that’s enough. 1000 launches sounds like a lot of fuel, but it’s only about enough fuel for one or two large natural gas power plants.

A fleet of a dozen 777s, barely enough for a small cargo freight airline, would use more fuel. FedEx air freight alone did about 14 billion ton-miles of air cargo in 2020, with a typical efficiency of about 10 ton-miles per gallon, that’s equivalent to about 4,000,000 tonnes of fuel per year, 4 times as much as 1000 starship launches per year. Plus passenger travel is multiple times that.

Has anyone seriously thought this through? Musk certainly hasn't.

Projection.

Gish galloping with lots of questions is not an actual logic argument, it’s just a rhetorical trick.

[neoforce]

Went with 2031-2035.  I'll be optimistic about reuse of booster and starship.  I don't think this requires catching on the tower (they can switch back to landing legs) nor does it require 3 launches from one pad in one day.   It does require that it is significantly funded by Elon spending enough of his wealth... if that doesn't happen there will be no demand and the answer will be never.

But with funding, and some optimistic estimates... 

By 2030 I'll assume they can build 1 Starship a week.  So, with four years at that production level, that is 200 Starships built between 2030 and 2034.  Of course they will be building them during 2035 and they will have some already in service.  But based on 200, the average each would have to fly in 2035 is 5 times.   Some will fly a lot more.  (Fuel to LEO) some will fly a lot less (off to Moon/Mars!)

Not going to estimate booster production... If they can build 1 starship a week, they can build enough boosters.  F9 reuse has shown that shouldn't be a blocker for starship.

Also by 2035, I'll assume 8 active launch pads and at any given time 2 are down for maintenance.  2 at Boca (with limits on launch maximums ended as Texas goes all in on being a spaceport state) 2 Florida existing falcon, and 2 in new LC39C area, 2 in Vandenberg.  Each launches on average every other day when active. 

Of course the goal is to catch, multiple flights a day, almost no downtime.  But I'm using a more conservative estimate to justify this is doable.

So, with enough boosters and ships, and that level of pad utilization, 6x365/2 is 1095.

[c4fusion]

Beginning of the next decade still seems very feasible considering the statements that Glenn Shottwell made in this article: https://spacenews.com/spacex-yet-to-select-launch-pad-for-next-axiom-space-private-astronaut-mission/.

She is right now aiming for 100 starship only flights in 2025.

[rfdesigner]

Beginning of the next decade still seems very feasible considering the statements that Glenn Shottwell made in this article: https://spacenews.com/spacex-yet-to-select-launch-pad-for-next-axiom-space-private-astronaut-mission/.

She is right now aiming for 100 starship only flights in 2025.

I think you meant this link https://spacenews.com/shotwell-says-spacex-ready-for-starship-static-fire-test/

IMHO, that was February, and we've all seen the regulatory delay since then, so I think we'd have to push that back by 6~9 months just for that one reason.

I never voted on the poll, but if I just apply continuation of the geometric growth SpaceX has achieved so far then I'd put the 1000x/year date out at 2037.  I suspect we'll see a lot more regulatory problems if nothing else, just from the sheer volume of launch applications.

[Paul451]

Judging by the comments, "Never" should have been split between "Never, because by then SpaceX will have built something bigger" and "Never, because there's no demand." They are very different opinions & world-views.

[deltaV]

Interesting things in Twitter video (https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1776669097490776563) with approximate timestamps:

36:10: 200+ tonnes to Mars per ship

39:40: self sustaining needs order 1M people, millions of tonnes

40:25: 10 launches per day, 1.5M tonnes to LEO per opportunity, 250k tonnes to Mars per opportunity

41:26: build ~1000 starships per year

Elon seems to have scaled plans back a bit, now planning 10 launches per day. That's 3.65x more than this poll's 1000 flight/year threshold but two orders of magnitude less than the 100 megatonnes per year mentioned in Elon's tweet quoted in this thread.

[JSz]

Never. Unless SpaceX manages to operationally deploy Starship before a large world war breaks out .

[DanClemmensen]

Never. Unless SpaceX manages to operationally deploy Starship before a large world war breaks out .

This is close to Elon's position: build a self-sustaining colony on Mars before civilization is wiped out on Earth. Global war is only one of several existential threats. Runaway AI is more likely.

[Paul451]

This is close to Elon's position: build a self-sustaining colony on Mars before civilization is wiped out on Earth. Global war is only one of several existential threats. Runaway AI is more likely.

Not sure how a single colony on Mars protects/preserves humans from a "runaway AI". Unless you ban AIs on the Mars colony, which seems unlikely.

[laszlo]

Never. Unless SpaceX manages to operationally deploy Starship before a large world war breaks out .

This is close to Elon's position: build a self-sustaining colony on Mars before civilization is wiped out on Earth. Global war is only one of several existential threats. Runaway AI is more likely.

On what basis? AI has no thumbs. If it wants to sit in its server and hallucinate, big deal. The real problem is people sharing the hallucinations and acting on them - buying and selling stock based on idiot software's recommendation, setting social policies that incite violence and rebellion, fighting wars based on machine hallucinations. That's human foolishness, not some sci-fi rise-of-the-machines singularity. The enemy is us, not a piece of software that can be fooled into thinking that a cat is a toaster oven.

Climate change induced conflict (already in progress) is much more likely. Which brings us back to the colony needing to be self-sustaining before we lose our high tech infrastructure and how many launches will that take per year.

[DanClemmensen]

Never. Unless SpaceX manages to operationally deploy Starship before a large world war breaks out .

This is close to Elon's position: build a self-sustaining colony on Mars before civilization is wiped out on Earth. Global war is only one of several existential threats. Runaway AI is more likely.

On what basis? AI has no thumbs. If it wants to sit in its server and hallucinate, big deal. The real problem is people sharing the hallucinations and acting on them - buying and selling stock based on idiot software's recommendation, setting social policies that incite violence and rebellion, fighting wars based on machine hallucinations. That's human foolishness, not some sci-fi rise-of-the-machines singularity. The enemy is us, not a piece of software that can be fooled into thinking that a cat is a toaster oven.

Climate change induced conflict (already in progress) is much more likely. Which brings us back to the colony needing to be self-sustaining before we lose our high tech infrastructure and how many launches will that take per year.

Different experts evaluate the probabilities of different existential threats differently, and it really does not matter to Elon. He is attempting to establish a self-sufficient Mars colony as an insurance policy against whichever one happens. The relative risks do not much matter to this topic, except that the probability of surviving all of them is the product of the probabilities of surviving each of them (if they are uncorrelated).

I have been following the AI safety research community for about 30 years, but I'm not an expert. Over the last 18 month or so, the experts are beginning to sound a lot more worried. As to your specific argument, the defenses against direct stock market manipulation by computers ("program trading") are very weak.

[Blackjax]

I think this really boils down to the question of demand.  Where does demand for 1000 flights come from?

I see three possibilities

Elons mars plans
Point to point travel
Commercial demand

For each of those you have 2 questions:

Will that scenario will happen at all?
What is the most likely time line?

If Elon continues to push as hard on his Mars plans as he is today then I could see it happening in ten to fifteen years.  However, stuff happens,  he might:

have a heart attack
lose control of SpaceX
get hit by a bus
lose interest as he ages
get randomly murdered by someone demanding to know "Kenneth, what's the frequency?"
...just to list a few

Elon Musk is the single point of failure in this scenario.  He's a variable not a constant.

As for point-to-point travel, I have one word "Concorde".  It didn't fail because the concept couldn't be made to work, it failed for geopolitical reasons, which could easily sink starship too.  Those same considerations make predicting timelines nearly impossible.  It's also possible that market demand just isn't there at the price point they can offer.

The remaining scenario is commercial. In the latter part of this decade I see Starship replacing Falcon and the combination of traditional demand plus starlink resulting in hundreds of flights per year, not 1000+.  I don't see the number of non starlink payloads growing by a massive amount (although I do see the size of those payloads growing). For commercial demand to ever grow to 1000 flights a year I think it would take several decades and the eventual organic growth of a substantial network of space stations/moonbases prompting major growth in the need for launch that isn't present in the current commercial market.  But that is a time horizon so long that predictions about it are nearly worthless and it could happen with a future generation of vehicle that isn't even called starship anymore.


So to summarize...I couldn't figure out what to vote for.   

(Edit: heh I was so caught up and thinking about it that I didn't even realize it was a super old poll and I couldn't vote anyway)