The shuttle had a 2/135 death rate. If Starship becomes the core infrastructure for Starlink, it'll be able to afford hundreds of launches before putting humans on it. You won't have to trust some theoretical calculations, you'll just be able to see in practice what the risk of a Starship launch is.

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arzig 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Isn’t starship supposed to be integral to the Artemis project in say… a year.

	▲	modeless 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure but it doesn't launch or land humans on Earth, which is the hardest part.

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sterlind 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

dumb question, but at what point does the cost of fuel start to become an issue with such frequent launches? today I imagine launch cost is dominated by the price of the nonrecoverable parts, but fuel will become the floor no?

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GMoromisato 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, but it's an order of magnitude difference. Today a Falcon 9 launch cost ~$20 million, mostly because they throw away the second stage.

Propellant for a Falcon 9 launch is ~$500K.

	▲	gorkish 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Starship is more efficient than F9 but in terms of multiple launches per day, the supply chain is indeed a factor. An hourly launch cadence is going to consume roughly as much natural gas as Houston.

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gorkish 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

All back of envelope here just to get a rough order of magnitude:

Starship needs 10kg (0.5mcf) of methane and 36kg of oxygen per kg to orbit. The oxygen takes 22kWh to liquefy or about (0.16mcf to generate that onsite). So 0.66mcf/kg to orbit and 66,000mcf from to fully fuel.

That is the daily gas usage of a midisze city, say 200k population, per launch.

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p-e-w 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

More importantly, those deaths were both caused by substantial design flaws, not by freak accidents.

Bad things happen, and spaceflight is a hard problem. But that’s not what killed two Shuttle crews.