Ozan runs some numbers.
After the Starship $300/kg price floor nonsense made the rounds, the ones who shared the studies started saying there isn't a better model out there to look at. I'd be willing to bet whatever @mach33 has put out is way better, but I've always run my own numbers on this stuff…
— Ozan Bellik (@BellikOzan) September 7, 2026
I don’t understand, though, how you get two flights per pad per day into SSO, at least not if you want the SSO on the terminator, which is where everyone claims to want to be, for continuous sunlight.
[Wednesday-afternoon update]
Investors are stoked about Stoke’s latest announcement.
[Thursday-afternoon update]
The coming tidal wave of new rockets.
Yes, for SSO on the terminator launching only to the south, each pad can only do one launch per day. But you have to salvo all of the pads you have at pretty much the same time, hoo boy will THAT be impressive.
After the dawn fleet, you can reload and send tankers up for deep space missions at several times during the day, and there are some interesting reasons to put Mars-bound vehicles into polar parking orbits. I need to do some more thrashing with GMAT.
If you put up tanker missions several times a day they’re all going to be in different orbits. The only orbit that you can launch into multiple times a day is equatorial, and if you don’t do it from the equator, the payload penalty is horrendous.
Yes, this site is obviously for 98 plus percent launches into SSO.
The whole site is a giant tell that Elon is betting the farm on orbital data centers.
True, but if you’re doing a massive launch toward Mars, multiple different polar planes can still hit the same departure asymptote. So the various propellant depots would get charged up over time, then support a massive volley of staggered trans-Mars injections.
When using direct entry at Mars to bring in 1000 landers, each sol would have a flight of Starships doing almost-simultaneous entries and landings, each steering toward a selected landing site. Having 50 Starships landing at 50 points within a few kilometers over a twenty-minute period would be spectacular. The entry paths would need to be offset to avoid hitting the wakes of other craft in the same wave. Then do it again and again for 20 sols.
Technically, you could do two. Don’t think the state of Louisiana would appreciate the ascending node business though.
You could do a bunch, couldn’t you? You could only do a direct insertion a couple times a day, but you could launch a bit short of it and wait for the terminator to catch up before doing the final burn. That’s not nearly as expensive as a plane change.
I was thinking there could be an orbital mechanics hack like that that may be low delta V.
You nearly always need to do some sort of circularization burn anyway, they could just delay that until the satellite was over the terminator (that might take several weeks, depending on how far away from SSO the satellite was inserted). The satellite loses some of the advantages of SSO during transit–it goes into eclipse every orbit until it gets close.
I lack the subject matter expertise to comment knowledgeably on matters of orbital mechanics, but I can do simple arithmetic. Bellik’s analysis of costs is certainly in the correct order of magnitude and also seems at about the right fractional point within said order of magnitude. SpaceX will, as it always has, continue to relentlessly take costs out of its operations at every opportunity. The one thing that is absolutely certain is that nearly all of the most expensive Starship missions ever launched have already occurred. Cost will drop sharply as soon as SpaceX quits throwing entire stacks away. That point may well be reached as soon as Flight 15.
I think there’s some market for non-dawn/dusk SSO (noon at least that I know of). Here’s a question: do all terminator SSO spacecraft need to be going the same direction (i.e., can there be counter- as well as clockwise orbiters)? The collision risk is far lower with modern spacecraft than some people think.
Also, what is the true cost of plane change from 28N to 0? I mean, launch to HEO, change, and lower to equatorial. ion, MHD, etc. They’re not manned, you’re not in a hurry. Not to mention, everything leaving LEO for wherever doesn’t have to be in an equatorial orbit. I mean, if you’re leaving for some other planet, the Earth’s equator only lines up with the solar ecliptic twice a year, at the equinoxes. And why not have your depot in HEO? Then it doesn’t matter either.
I see two problems for taking longer.
– while it’s not in its final orbit it’s not doing its job, and not earning.
– while it’s moving it’s possibly blocking the deployment of other satellites. This is OK if there’s one satellite a year, but probably not with 10 per day.
Yes, the chance of collision is low, but I think they like some minimum distance as a safety factor.
It may not be completely useless while drifting into position (maybe photos that don’t have long shadows still have some uses), but it’s certainly suboptimal. I wonder if having to build the satellite to handle non-SSO power and heat cycles would be more of an issue.
Yeah, I wondered about collisions as well.
While SpaceX is building out barges and breakover fixtures to transport each stage of Starship from Boca Chica to the Cape and Pecan Island, If you load only the needed landing propellant into Starship’s header tanks, the Superheavy could fly the full stack onto a depressed high speed suborbital transfer to the other sites, or at least to Pecan Island. At the destination they would of course need to have two towers ready to catch them at the same time, but the Cape should have three towers next year.
The barges would probably be the cheaper way to transport the stages, but if it served as an acceptance test for flight readiness…