Why will the new Elon Musk rocket really matter?

Q: Why will the new Elon Musk rocket really matter?

A: If you are old enough to remember the promise of the Space Shuttle, to be a cargo truck to space that will make space launches regular and affordable? Starship and Super Heavy is the serious attempt to make that promise real, without the feature creep that made the Space Shuttle unable to uphold that promise.

This is a ridiculous analogy, but it’s useful to understand the problem.

A Bugatti Chiron supercar can go faster than 400 km/h (kilometres per hour) – roughly about 0.1 kilometres per second. And I pick that car, because you need that kind of car to go that fast. The fine engineering and superior material makes it expensive – $2,700,000 for the base price.

To get to low earth orbit (so that it stays in space), you need to get it to speeds of about 7.8 kilometres per second.

That’s about 80 times as fast. Remember the price tag of the Chiron, and then imagine the engineering and material cost to go 80 times as fast. Plus, you can’t stop to refuel. You need to take all the fuel with you. And the fuel to lift the fuel. And the fuel to lift that fuel, and so on.

And then, the big cost: you throw all those Bugatti Chirons away, because they’re in the air and will crash into the ground. So they’re single-use Bugatti Chirons! And the size of the trunk is ridiculous.

That’s pre-SpaceX rockets in a nutshell. What Elon Musk did with the Falcon 9 was to replace that single-use Bugatti Chiron with an Opel Astra, yours new for $18,100, or used for $3000, and you don’t have to throw it away after every trip.

Starship and Super Heavy takes a new evolution on that: it replaces that Opel Astra with a Ford Transit. It does roughly the same job as the Astra and you still don’t have to throw it away after each launch. But you can carry loads of more cargo and passengers, meaning that cost per kilogram is way less. And there will be a gazillion of them.