Thread by @LionnetPierre

#Starlink Gen2 is 5x bigger and 10x more capable than Gen1, i.e. 2x more efficient (not considering potential lifetime extension). Curious to see if service price drops accordingly, to enable more market penetration. But let's have a look at some launch numbers now. 1/

https://twitter.com/stanshull/status/1529969326421291008

If Starlink Gen2 is 30000 satellites (spacenews.com/spacex-goes-al…) it represents 36000 tons at launch in total. Or 240 #Starship flights (at 150t/flight). 2/

@elonmusk noted that indeed F9 cannot be used to deploy Gen2, thus making Starship a single point of failure for the #Starlink project (as I noted in the past already) 3/

With 240 Starship launches in plan for Gen2 deployment, SpaceX would achieve a launch cadence of at least one launch/week to deploy a full constellation in 5 years. Can this be managed with two pads and 2 mechazillas (Boca & KSC)? Will we see more of them? 4/

To reach the cadence of at least 1 starship/week, how many Starships must be available for operations? This will depend a lot on turnaround time, but we have no idea how long that could be (NB: for >30 F9 launch/year SpaceX has a stock of >20 boosters) elonx.net/overview-of-fa… 5/

I suspect that Starship, even more than F9 will be an operation where the fixed costs are overwhelmingly high, with huge infrastructures and a lot of flight hardware. I am curious to see how all this turns out in operations, and what the average full cost/launch will be. 6/

On a side note, if we assume full Starlink gen2 deployment between 2025 and 2030, this is what the total launched mass statistics would look like (ceteris paribus) - impressive... but credible? 7/

And one last point. 240 Starship launches equate to 1 million tons of LOX and 260k tons of CH4. I am curious to see what facilities will enable this complex logistic. Ferrying this by truck seems impractical (imagine a rotation of >6000 trucks/year)? 8/end