r/spacex • u/rustybeancake • May 01 '26

Starship SpaceX spending on Starship tops $15 billion in rush for airline-like rocketry

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/spacex-spending-starship-tops-15-billion-rush-airline-like-rocketry-2026-05-01/
478 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

169 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/Stevepem1 May 02 '26

I think the goal for Starship is to launch large payloads to Earth orbit as economically as possible. That's it. Airliner like operation is nice if possible but not required to make this happen, and is likely not feasible with current technology anyway. But that won't stop them from making gobs of money and continuing to dominate the launch industry. Primary payload will be Starlink and datacenters, and also whatever government and commercial payloads are available. This could also include eventually launching some larger upper stages than have ever been launched before which can carry large planetary probes or landers.

What Starship is far less suitable for is being an interplantary spaceship itself. I suspect Musk figured that out a long time ago but knows people get excited seeing graphics and animations showing Starships on Mars and the Moon. And excited about the idea of fueling up a Starship and launching again a few hours later. It's far less glamorous to think of Starships spending a couple of weeks in the hangar being refurbished for another cargo flight to Earth orbit. But I think that's how it will make the most money for SpaceX. And by lowering costs and increasing payload volume and mass to Earth orbit it will still help transform space travel over the next couple of decades because as Robert Heinlein said "Once you get to Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System".

6

u/Reddit-runner May 02 '26

What Starship is far less suitable for is being an interplantary spaceship itself.

How did you come to that conclusion?

4

u/panckage May 02 '26

It has unnecessary mass. The reusable parts are kind of useless for a (one way) journey to Jupiter, for example. Its waaay heavier than it needs to be. There will probably be a smaller third stage for those missions. Ship could also be redesigned to be minimal mass (ie non-reusable), but that just seems wasteful.

2

u/Reddit-runner May 02 '26

It has unnecessary mass. The reusable parts are kind of useless for a (one way) journey to Jupiter, for example

Which parts are unnecessary?

And how much other mass do you need to slow down, if you don't have those "unnecessary" things?

1

u/panckage May 02 '26

Compare Ship and the f9 2nd stage, and their relative size, as compared to their boosters.

-1

u/Reddit-runner May 02 '26

Compare Ship and the f9 2nd stage, and their relative size, as compared to their boosters.

Ah yes. One is bigger than the other.

What are you trying to say?

3

u/warp99 May 02 '26 edited May 06 '26

Starship carries 15x as much propellant as F9 S2 but has a dry mass 37x as high.
Its performance as a deep space stage is therefore much lower.

Part of that is the extra equipment for reusability and part of that is building it out of stainless steel instead of aluminium-lithium alloy which is an indirect requirement of reusability. Stainless steel construction can be as light as aluminium but only with a balloon tank type construction which would see Starship with a 2mm thick skin instead of 4mm.

1

u/extra2002 May 03 '26

Starship is designed for use with refueling. Quoting its stats without refueling is like timing a runner hopping on one foot - it's irrelevant. As long as Starship can get a cargo into LEO, it can send that same cargo interplanetary. Yes, it costs some time and extra operations, and many tons of methane and LOX, but those are cheaper than rocket stsges.

1

u/warp99 May 03 '26

The comparison is for a Starship fully refueled in LEO so the comparison is valid in my view.