
SpaceX’s Starship is one of the most impressive things Humans have ever built, and it is nearly (ish) ready for commercial operation. But what will that commercial operation look like? No rocket has ever operated like this. Moreover, no rocket has ever operated at the sheer scale Musk is planning for the Starship. Well, when you dig into it, Musk’s plans for Starship make no sense at all.
Firstly, Musk recently announced that they plan to expand their Star factory to produce an entire Starship every day! This scale is understandable, as Starship’s planned launch cost of only $10 million is doable only through economies of scale. For some sense of scale here, that is over 6 times cheaper than a Falcon 9 launch, yet Starship can take over four times the payload of a Falcon 9 into orbit!
Building out such a huge fleet might make sense financially, but it smashes way past physical limits and issues.
For example, the Kessler Syndrome. NASA astrophysicist Don Kessler found that once the total mass of space debris goes past a certain point, a chain reaction will occur where the collision will make more debris, which will go on to create more collisions and more debris and so on. This chain reaction can compound rapidly and, within a few days, destroy all satellites in orbit and even make it nearly impossible for rockets to go into orbit without risk of fatal collisions.
The risk of Kessler Syndrome increases the more objects we put into orbit, as these create space debris through accident impacts. This means there is a limit to the maximum number of satellites we can have before things get seriously messy. A recent paper found that the maximum number of satellites we can safely have in orbit is 72,000.
With that in mind, how many satellites could SpaceX’s planned fleet of Starships take into orbit? Well, a single Starship can carry 100 satellites into orbit in one go, and assuming it has a similar turnaround period to a Falcon 9 (it will likely be shorter once fully operational), it can launch 14 times a year, meaning 1,400 satellites launched per Starship per year. But Musk wants thousands to be in operation, hence why he wants their factory to produce one Starship a day! So, let’s assume pessimistically that Star factory keeps this rate up for a year, and there are 365 Starships launching satellites into orbit. Well, that would mean they would launch 511,000 satellites per year! That’s 7 times the limit of what Earth can safely take in orbit at a time!
So, not only is it questionable whether there is a demand for this many launches in a year, but as most satellites have a lifespan of roughly 15 years, there is a physical hard limit stopping this many launches from taking place!
However, there is also an environmental issue here. A single Starship injects 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per launch. That means our hypothetical fleet of 356 Starships would produce 388,360,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. That is more carbon dioxide than the UK produced during the entirety of 2022!
Many have stated that as Starship uses methane as its fuel, it could switch from carbon-positive LNG to carbon-neutral biomethane to solve this. However, it would take 5,110,000 tonnes of biomethane to fuel all, 5110 launches of our hypothetical 365-strong fleet each year. The globe only produces 5,017,200 tons of biomethane each year, and it is needed elsewhere!
Just a reminder here, Musk doesn’t want a few hundred Starships in operation. He has gone on record saying he wants to build over a thousand Starships to get us humans to Mars!
This brings me to the one criticism some people will have of my viewpoint, that not every launch of a Starship will be for satellite launches.
Well, only 72 launches, which 5 Starships, just 1% of our hypothetical feel, could do in a year, is enough to overload Earth’s orbit and risk Kessler Syndrome. Are we seriously saying that roughly, 5040 launches per year, or 99% of our hypothetical fleet’s annual launch slots, will be used for Space Exploration or Space tourism?
We know Musk can’t do that, as he has stated that projects like Starlink would be needed to fund Mars missions, which would necessitate these numbers to be the other way around (e.g. 1% of rockets used or exploration). So what about NASA? Well, they have zero plans to launch that often, and their annual budget of just over $20 billion wouldn’t cover the $50 billion price tag of paying for the 5040 leftover launch spots.
As for space tourism, well, tickets on a Starship flight will still be in the hundreds of thousands even once such a fleet is operating at scale. With such a price tag, finding enough customers to fill thousands of launches per year will be neigh on impossible.
One question has to be asked: Where is Musk planning on getting the customers for Starship, and even if he somehow solves this crucial issue, how can he ensure he doesn’t destroy Earth’s orbit?!
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Sources: Space.com, BGR, Science Direct, Space.com, America Space, Space.com, Planetary.org, AS, Brown University