Comment by ceejayoz
1 day ago
There's an unavoidable physical cap here.
It's fueled with methane and oxygen, and its size is known.
It can't be, say, $50m/flight in fuel for the same reason a 747's flight can't be; there's not enough space for that much fuel.
Sure, but that's true of Saturn V as well, and of Falcon 9, and Soyuz and any other rocket you want. That didn't make space deployment a viable military strategy so far, and I think we should be skeptical of any such claim about Starship.
Also, fuel is just part of the cost of a rocket.
> Also, fuel is just part of the cost of a rocket.
Sure. But if you blew up a 747 at the end of every trip, it'd be a small part of the total cost, not a major part.
Starship's reusability makes it very clearly not like the other examples you cite, yeah? There are lots of scenarios where the US government would pay, say, $10M to deliver a payload somewhere fast, but not $250M.