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ben_wyesterday at 10:38 PM1 replyview on HN

If you're counting Falcons, you are making my point for me: even with those, on three launch sites, they still can't get close to the minimum for an extremely small, to the point of being unreasonable, target satellite mass.

Further, until they actually do solve upper stage reuse, it is an "if" which can kill the economics of the vehicle itself, let alone reach the eventual potential cost reductions necessary for space based data centres to be worthwhile.


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timschmidtyesterday at 10:51 PM

I don't see any reason a non-renewable Starship upper stage would kill the economics of the vehicle. No one else has a renewable upper stage yet, so there's no competition in that space until someone else does. Stoke have an interesting design but it hasn't flown yet and is only about the size of Falcon.

If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Starship is much easier to build than Falcon. Welding is simpler and less expensive than the carbon composites used on Falcon upper stages.

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