>>13789740Starship would allow SpaceX to put 400 satellites directly into their respective shells rather than with F9 where they're staged at the bottom of the Earth's gravity well and they have to burn fuel to reach their final orbit. Each Starship is worth approximately 8 Falcon 9 launches for Starlink. If you assume that SpaceX will launch 25 Cargoships a year just for Starlink, that's 10,000 satellites that would get deposited directly into their respect LEO orbits (350-550km). As technology advances, the amount of users they can address and the bandwidth they can provide will increase per satellite, driving down the need to launch mega-thousand constellations and probably cap their Earth Starlink constellation at 12k tops. Also, I could very easily see SpaceX use the upmass capability of Starship to build a Starlink station in high LEO and have it deposit shell deployment links there which are then launched into target orbits and they simply use their thrusters to position downwards into slots where other sats have failed and/or have deorbited.
Even if you were to say each Cargoship launch costs ~$100M, that's still vastly cheaper than each F9 launch where they're throwing away the 2nd stage (which I think cost like $3-5Mil to build, so that's $24-40Mil lost for 8 launches for 1 Cargoship launch), and then assuming the internal cost of each F9 is ~$30Mil, then 8 = $240Mil + ~$30Mil (for second stages lost) = $270Mil. Thus, theoretically and on average, they'd be saving $170Mil for each Cargoship launch. Which means, for the UPMASS value of 1 cargoship, they're getting the second flight effectively equivalently free. THUS:
>8 F9s = 480 Starlink Satellites @ $270Milor
>2 CS = 800 Starlink Satellites @ $200MilStarship architecture completely changes how cost and upmass value is calculated. It makes everything preceding it look like a fucking joke.
