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I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
Can we do some back of the envelope calculations here? How low does the price have to go, for people to start launching satellites en-masse? How many would they want to launch? How many clients would SpaceX have to get to make a decent profit at such a low price point? How much can they launch before triggering Kessler Syndrome?
The bets I placed are on the former, and I admit that it's not impossible I will end up losing it. Fire-and-forget is a lot easier, after all, but I don't think Starship development is going well.
Hence, why I brought up EscaPADE. If they pull it off, that might trigger questions and concerns from SpaceX investors and clients.
I dunno, but I can speculate – it might be that they have lots on hand. Also, it's good to stress-test reusable tech like Falcon 9 as much as possible to discover potential failures, and less costly to discover them with a smaller rocket.
I'd say we are already launching satellites en-masse. You'll note that Falcon Nine started launching in 2010 and started reusing its boosters regularly around 2018; the steep US vertical ascent starts in 2020. You can also compare to CubeSat launches by year (which is not omnidirectional, but broke 100/200/300 in 2014/2017/2021. Since (AFAIK) the low price point has a profit baked-in, I assume as long as they have demand they are profiting at that rate.
Kessler Syndrome happens on accident, of course. Orbit, especially outside of LEO, is really big, and satellites are teensy-tinsy and decay in orbit. So the answer is "tens of thousands" but also that you do have more risk of Kessler Syndrome as you get more up there. However, even if we reach a point where we say "no more satellites" we'll still need to put more up as the old ones decay. Presumably we'll need lots of rocket launches for whatever space exploration we're doing, and possibly (as discussed) for tasks like asteroid mining or even decommissioning old satellites so that Kessler Syndrome is less of a worry.
Obviously, Musk and his sort want to go to Mars and the rest of the solar system. If you're doing that the demand for mass is much more than could be accommodated by satellites (I would imagine), at least until you get onsite resource production up and running.
I don't particularly think Starship development is going poorly. Falcon 9 had a number of failures on early launch tests. Both of its first two launches failed in the recovery phase, and of the first seven, four had some form of a failure. Yet, as I think we've shown, it's matured into a tremendously successful launch vehicle. Musk's whole "move fast and break things" shtick, as I understand it, is built around accepting more risk up front in exchange for faster results. Starship has had three launches so far, with what appears to my untrained eye to be progressive improvement. Unless the costs of these failures are high enough to cause SpaceX to run out of funding (which I doubt – they're made out of stainless steel!) my presumption is that they will simply move past the failures, as they did with Falcon 9. Now, I wouldn't say it's impossible that Starship is found to be unworkable, or retired for other reasons. I just know that accepting and moving past failure is something SpaceX has historically done (and is normal in aerospace development) so without specific reasons to think otherwise I sort of assume that that will be the case here – although I can certainly imagine a number of reasons it might not be.
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I could be very wrong about this, but as I understand it, Falcon Heavy is designed for high-mass launches. F9 launches are usually volume limited; being able to put more Starlink sats in orbit won't help you if you physically cannot fit more of them in the fairing.
You're correct about the volume limitations. They're currently working on an extended fairing option, but that's not to try to get the Falcon Heavy price/volume ratio lower than Falcon 9 - the bigger fairings won't even be reusable like their standard fairings are - it's to support a few bigger individual launches like conjoined Lunar Gateway modules as well as a few National-Security, Might-Be-Declassified-In-50-Years payloads.
But, I would say FH is designed for higher-mass launches; it was only originally that they thought that was necessary for high mass. FH design started before the Falcon 9 version 1.0 (with max payload to LEO of 10.4 tons or to GTO of 4.5 tons) even flew, and that wasn't enough for the DoD contracts they wanted, and they thought FH was the best way to get there ... but then improved Merlin engines and stretched tanks pushed the F9 payloads to 22.8t and 8.3t (fully expended, but for the prices DoD is willing to pay that's fine), and FH took them a lot longer than they'd hoped, and they ended up with a rocket they barely needed (9 launches so far, vs like 350 for F9, in part because a lot of "so heavy it needs Falcon Heavy" payloads ended up riding on upgraded F9s instead) but which they couldn't even cancel (IIRC Musk wanted to, and Gwynne Shotwell had to talk him out of it) because they already had those DoD contracts.
Despite agreeing to the extended fairing development, their internal strategy for fixing volume limitations is to forget about Falcons and finish Starship. 50% more mass capacity than FH with 550% more volume should be more than enough to ensure the latter limit isn't binding.
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