alt Hacker NewsStarship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count.
Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.
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There is a lot resting on Starlink, 11 gigadollars in direct revenue that accounts for fully 60% of SpaceX's total revenue of 18 gigadollars. It's hard to see how that level of revenue can sustain a 1 terradollar valuation.
Like, TSLA had 94 gigadollars in revenue last year, and it's a 1.2 terradollar company, and most outside analysts are frankly skeptical of that multiple. SpaceX is trying to get a similar valuation on a fifth of that revenue.
Starship is absolutely competing with Falcon 9 in two ways:
1. If F9 is cheaper, why would you use Starship?
2. If SpaceX decides to force Starship adoption by simply halting F9 launches or making them prohibitively expensive, well the market is still open for an F9 clone from someone else.
My point with FH is that there isn't a demand for much bigger payloads. Now, SpaceX wants to induce demand with STarlink launches. OK, so the viability of Starship is tied to the viability of Starlink. I thought Starlink was a clever way to prove F9 reusability but the first-mover advantage won't last forever.
My main point here was that F9 was developed, SpaceX's competition was the likes of ULA with their insanely expensive rockets but whether SpaceX uses F9 or not, it has become the new baseline.
SLS is insanely expensive to build and launch but it still has a much greater launch capacity. Starship's solution to this is essentially in-orbit refuelling where, I believe, it will take ~10 Starship launches to refuel a Starship in orbit. This too is an insanely complicated capability that they haven't even begun to develop yet.
And whatever the ultimate per-launch base cost works out to be the program R&D cost has to be amortized cross those launches so even if the base cost is $10M, if you spent $10B developing the program, it still matters if you launch 10 a year vs 100.
When SpaceX goes public, they're going to be forced to disclose a whole lot more information about the program cost and I suspect it's going to be a lot higher than the rosy projectsions you get on Twitter.
Another way to put it is I think Starship could be SpaceX's Cybertruck.
> Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either.
Currently, this is not the case. Not fully reusable, and not costing less than F9 or BO.