Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That's finally changing.

Perhaps the most fundamental assumption was that these satellites would ride to orbit inside the uppermost part of the rocket, protected by a clamshell-like aerodynamic shroud that would peel away once the launch vehicle soared above the atmosphere and reached the sterile environment of space. The only launch vehicle to ever challenge these assumptions was NASA’s Space Shuttle, which deployed numerous satellites of all sizes in the first half of its career before it proved a commercial failure. NASA then turned its focus to constructing the International Space Station, a task the Space Shuttle marvelously completed upon retiring in 2011. Ultimately, the Shuttle was outclassed, at least on a commercial basis, by lower-cost expendable rockets. Its unique attributes never had much influence on how engineers designed their satellites. Today, SpaceX’s Starship rocket is again promising to upend the launch industry and, by extension, the futures of those who build and own satellites. There are other super-heavy-lift rockets coming onto the market, too. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, particularly a yet-t0-fly upgraded variant with more engines, fits in between SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and Starship. SpaceX settled on this novel architecture for several reasons. The flat design allows each satellite to have a broader surface area facing the Earth. It also eliminates the need, at least initially, for SpaceX to focus on developing a large payload fairing. Rocket Lab’s smaller medium-class Neutron rocket takes a similarly revolutionary approach to payload fairing design, integrating it with the Neutron’s reusable booster stage rather than the expendable upper stage. With Starship, however, SpaceX intends to make the entire vehicle rapidly reusable. Other satellite manufacturers are starting to take note, but not all of them. Satellites for China’s Qianfan broadband megaconstellation use a flat-panel, stackable design. Amazon’s broadband constellation, Amazon LEO, uses a more conventional-looking satellite. Muon Space, a satellite manufacturing startup, announced earlier this month that it is developing a new high-power satellite design to take advantage of Starship’s payload accommodation. Muon Space calls the new platform Condor-Ultra. The company says it is “optimized for stackable mass-deployment from SpaceX’s Starship” for potential use on communications, sensing, and orbital data center-type missions. “It is designed for stackable deployments through the opening without requiring the whole fairing to open,” said Greg Smirin, president of Muon Space. “That’s sort of what we’re designing to, what us and other customers have an understanding of for [what SpaceX will offer in] the near term, in the sort of ’28 timeframe.” “There will likely be some other configurations,” Smirin said in an interview with Ars. “This particular one is absolutely designed to work with the Pez dispenser framework. It sort of maps to the high nadir-facing payload face that you want for Earth interaction, that could also work with a stackable Pez dispenser sort deployment.” Other satellite manufacturing startups are making inroads in flat-panel designs. Last year, Apex announced a new flat satellite chassis called Comet. On its website, the company teases an even larger version of Comet, named Comet XL, “optimized for Starship and the super-heavy launchers of the future.” A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred. Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission. This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million. In the paper, Jones writes that SpaceX could achieve these numbers “through a combination of manufacturing and operational learning curves, lower marginal costs, a fully laden rocket, and adequate reuse.” SpaceX has shown it can do it with Falcon 9, but it won’t happen overnight with Starship. Earlier this month, SpaceX launched one of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters for a record-setting 35th time. The company reached nine flights of one booster in 2021, nearly 11 years after the very first Falcon 9 launch. But flat-packed, stackable satellites allow operators to deliver more capability to orbit faster. Starship will take this to the next level with its capacity to launch SpaceX’s more powerful Starlink V3s. “On a Falcon 9, they can only launch 27 of these V2s,” Jones said. “The Starship can launch 60 of these larger V3s. What this means is bandwidth per launch amounts to 61,000 gigabits per second on Starship versus 2,600 gigabits per second for V2s on Falcon 9. In other words, almost 24 times as much bandwidth can be deployed per launch on Starship versus the Falcon 9 and the V2 satellites. That’s huge.” Of course, costs are not the same as prices. SpaceX charges commercial customers $74 million for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch, about five times the internal launch cost. This still makes Falcon 9 the most affordable and reliable launch option in the Western world. It’s too early to know where or when SpaceX will set Starship launch prices. Part of the calculation will hinge on the progress of SpaceX’s competitors, such as Blue Origin. “Certainly, that’s what the industry wants to see, is two equal players,” Jones said. “It absolutely contributes to the economics in terms of price per kilogram.” “We’ve got these two rocket companies vying for positions,” Jones said in an interview. “I think it’s going to be important that we have competition here, and one company seems to be ahead right now, but whether you’re first to market or a fast follower, I think we would all benefit from seeing this competition between these two companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX. I think that’s critical.” Some economists believe Starship is simply too big to fulfill all of SpaceX’s lofty goals, but Jones doesn’t buy it. “Sometimes, when you increase the size of any type of transportation system, it creates something called diseconomies of scale, where the marginal costs start to increase,” Jones said. “Now, I think Starship is going to prove a new price point, but some think that when you get too big, kind of like the [Airbus] A380 airplane that tried to compete with the [Boeing] 747, it created all sorts of demands and types of maintenance. “Could the Starship follow that path and become not relevant? I don’t really believe it,” she said. “I think that they’re going to have to prove it. They’re going to have to prove over time that they can fly the Starship and continue to see marginal costs decrease, and hopefully the space sector will discover a new sweet spot, but right now it’s the Falcon 9.”