Oh, also: Apparently cost per kg of air freight across the Pacific is $5-$10/kg. So maybe by 2035 or so, after Starship is fully operational and has had time to be optimized more and deployed at massive scale, it’ll be approximately as expensive to visit an orbiting space station, or to mail something there, as it is to fly from US to China.
(All of this assumes no AGI of course. AGI changes everything and makes things even more crazy.)
ChatGPT suggests China → US: about $6.5 per kg : US → China (backhaul): about $1.2 per kg. That means a roundtrip of 1kg is a bit less than $4. Of that around a fourth is fuel prices, so you have around $1 fuel prices per kg.
Starship on the other hand needs around $1000k in fuel to transport 150kg mean $6.6 per kg. Even if you double the efficiency you still won’t reach the same numbers.
When it comes to non-fuel costs, I would not expect them to be much cheaper. Especially when we talk about prices billed to customers.
The airplane market is very competitive with low profit margins that regularly make airlines go bankrupt so that they need to be bailed out. SpaceX will likely target higher profit margins and I don’t see a market with airplane like competition in 2035.
Oh, also: Apparently cost per kg of air freight across the Pacific is $5-$10/kg. So maybe by 2035 or so, after Starship is fully operational and has had time to be optimized more and deployed at massive scale, it’ll be approximately as expensive to visit an orbiting space station, or to mail something there, as it is to fly from US to China.
(All of this assumes no AGI of course. AGI changes everything and makes things even more crazy.)
ChatGPT suggests China → US: about $6.5 per kg : US → China (backhaul): about $1.2 per kg. That means a roundtrip of 1kg is a bit less than $4. Of that around a fourth is fuel prices, so you have around $1 fuel prices per kg.
Starship on the other hand needs around $1000k in fuel to transport 150kg mean $6.6 per kg. Even if you double the efficiency you still won’t reach the same numbers.
When it comes to non-fuel costs, I would not expect them to be much cheaper. Especially when we talk about prices billed to customers.
The airplane market is very competitive with low profit margins that regularly make airlines go bankrupt so that they need to be bailed out. SpaceX will likely target higher profit margins and I don’t see a market with airplane like competition in 2035.