With SpaceX successfully demonstrating the catch of Starship's Booster and Musk's Trump's election as President, Musk's next major industry disruption is but a few years away. The airline industry and aerospace giants like Boeing and Airbus are about to experience what the car and space industries are now experiencing, courtesy of Elon.
https://x.com/i/status/1855477289925885958
1. How it works
As the above video demonstrates, passengers on SpaceX ETS (Earth Transport Services) will board a very fast large catamaran or trimaran for a 40-50km ride to SpaceX's floating Starship launch facilities, which will be located in the open sea or ocean, far from land because of the extreme noise of Starship launches and range safety issues.
Customs, immigration and 2nd stage security procedures will likely be handled on board the boat to maximise efficiency and customer experience. As the boats will depart from local docks, ferry terminals and marinas, Musk will be able to craft the entire experience to his customer's needs and eliminate many of the painful and unpleasant aspects of airports.
In particular, security can be far better handled with an initial basic level on-shore followed by more seamless but effective security aboard. Boats are much harder to blow up than planes and a big multihull has space for different, pleasantly set up security zones to be passed through at leisure rather than endless queuing.
Passengers will then go straight from the boat, up the launch tower elevator to their seats on the Starship and fly to their destination 1/3rd or 1/2 way around the globe in under 1 hour. They will get to experience weightlessness and see the Earth from space - both extraordinary experiences in themselves.
2. Minimising Regulation
It is highly likely that most SpaceX ETS launch facilities will be located more than 12 nautical miles from land in international waters outside the territorial jurisdiction of nation states. This is partly due to the physical issues outlined above but also so that SpaceX ETS can adopt a single flag jurisdiction for all his launch facilities and thus only have to comply with one set of regulations. This will likely be the US initially, but one day could be a smaller jurisdiction that Musk controls more completely. When you own a ship or floating platform you get to choose its flag state.
3. Customer Experience
It is obvious that SpaceX ETS will provide a massively superior customer experience in every way to today's long distance air travel. As a once regular flyer between Australia and Israel I can tell you that long distance air travel sucks big time. 24 hours in the air and airports is a killer.
I hate airport queues which treat people like animals or criminals.
Woke airport security that makes life miserable for everybody because they focus on things (like a bottle of water or work tools) rather than people. In Israel, with the best security in the world, you can take a water bottle on the plane as the focus is on the person. Everyone is interviewed by attractive security staff. They are trained to determine whether the person is a potential threat. If so further questioning and investigations of luggage etc are done.
Anything can be a weapon, but people planning something nasty are unable to hide physiological ticks.
Musk will likely be able to adopt this more sensible approach, as it will be within his control.
4. How much will it cost?
Contrary to most people's expectations, it will ultimately be a similar price to existing long distance airline flights.
Musk has spoken about this in the past and I examine the cost issues in detail below.
4.a. Capital Cost
Both long distance airliners and Starships are complex and expensive pieces of engineering that cost a lot of money.
The ultra long distance Boeing 777-9 aircraft costs $442.2 million.
The current cost of building a fully stacked Starship and Booster has been recently estimated to be only $90 million.
This is still in the prototyping stage so costs will likely drop considerably.
Elon Musk told Dr Robert Zubrin that "he anticipates to be turning out Starships for a costs of about $10 million each." [The New World On Mars, 2024, Dr Robert Zubrin, at page 55.]
Now this cost is is just for Starship and does not include Booster, which is larger (71m vs 50m high and has 33 Raptor engines vs 6 for Starship). So Booster probably costs double Starship to build. Let's say $20M.
Now let's be conservative and add in a Musk optimism factor of 100% so that at scale, Starship and Booster cost $60M to build.
Add 100% profit margin and this is only $120M, less than 1/3rd the cost the ultra-long range aircraft it is competing with.
4.b. Capital Utilization
Because a Starship is so much faster, it can complete many transcontinental flights in a single day whereas a traditional airliner takes most of the day just to get to its destination.
That means that SpaceX ETS (Earth Transport Services) may get 3-5x as much capital utilization as a typical airline. 3-5x as many flights means 3-5x the number of tickets assuming similar passenger capacity. Starship is expected to be able to take around 300 people on E2E flights, the same as a Boeing 777-9. While it has a greater internal volume, it is difficult to organise it as efficiently.
4.c. Other Operational Costs
Catering, Staff Costs, Airport Fees and Overflight Fees are major contributors to the cost of running a long distance flight.
Long distance flights require 2 full meals and snacks to be provided to passengers. This is a significant cost to the airlines.
Pilots and crew have mandatory rest requirements that means the number of pilots and crew increases as flight length rises beyond 8 hours and is often double on 12+ hour flights.
This creates substantial wage costs and reduces passenger capacity.
Airport fees are another substantial cost that SpaceX ETS avoids. They are not cheap.
As SpaceX ETS flies into space it is beyond national airspace and thus will not have to pay overflight fees that many countries charge.
4.d. Fuel Costs
While Starship uses more fuel than a long range airliner, it burns liquid methane and oxygen (in a 1:3.52 ratio) "MethOx" which is much cheaper than the highly refined kerosene (avgas) used by commercial aircraft. According to Dr Zubrin, Starship needs 5000 tons of fuel at $150/Ton to fly between any two points on Earth which works out at $750,000 per flight.
Others online suggest that $100/Ton for MethOx or less is achievable with LOX being obtainable by distillation from air at $40 a ton and methane obtainable more cheaply by bulk separation from natural gas.
For example a recent $650 million long term deal for natural gas supply in Israel for 3.5 Billion cubic meters (2.53 million tonnes) values the natural gas, which is 95%+ methane, at $256 a ton. If this can be processed to pure liquid methane for $300 a ton, then a ton of MethOx can likely be produced by SpaceX for (3.52x$40+$300)/4.52 = $97.52 per ton.
I note that there are many places in the world where long term natural gas contracts are available at even cheaper prices than in Israel.
Also there are places where it is more expensive (ie Europe).
SpaceX will likely pursue its own production of MethOx at massive scale and bring its fuel price down lower than $100/ton in many locations.
But based on $100/Ton the fuel cost for Starship and Booster will be $500,000 per flight.
Based on 300 passengers this is $1,667 per person.
A Boeing 777 has a fuel capacity of 145.538 tons and a maximum range of 15,843km. Jet fuel is currently around $700/ton. So the cost to fully fuel a Boeing 777-9 would be around $100,000 at current prices.
But of course oil prices fluctuate a lot and Avgas prices are closely linked. In contrast, long term natural gas contracts are fixed. This gives SpaceX ETS more stable long term economics.
4.e. Conclusion:
So while fuel costs currently favour airliners, all the other cost components strongly favour Starship.
According to Zubrin (page 51), airline ticket prices are typically triple plane fuel costs, which would mean $300,000 / 300 people =$1000 one way.
I think this is low for a flight times over 15 hours as while it is possible to get a flight to Australia for this price it is pretty much as cheap as you can get and long term average prices will be much higher (perhaps 2x).
So average airline ticket prices for Starship competitive routes likely average $2000 one way.
SpaceX ETS could likely price at $2500 - $3000 one way and be strongly profitable.
Given the massively faster flight time and better customer experience, SpaceX will likely destroy the existing long distance airline industry and aerospace industry.
For any flight over 5 hours where there is a Starship route, the vast majority of customers will choose Starship.
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