An Airbus A380 is the closest comparable aircraft to Starship. It can handle about 82,000 liters of fuel. Until the last 5 years or so, jet fuel fuel was $3/gallon (peaking at $4/gallon) in the US, higher in Europe and Asia. It’d need about 3 or 4 refuelings to travel to the other side of the world and back with about the same payload as Starship. That’s about $1 million worth of fuel.
The rental price to charter an A380 to the other side of the world and back is about $1.3million not counting fuel or the time spent on the ground fueling and going to/from charter location.
So I’d say a couple million per Starship launch would be on the order of a long-haul aircraft price. Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.
> Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.
Upon further reflection, I'm getting more on board with this, with two big relevant factors: first, how quickly can these new companies work out the fully reusable mojo. SpaceX is clearly many years ahead, but having a predecessor company actually demonstrating a technology surely makes it somewhat easier to re-implement. Second: back to the physics. I don't have a good intuition for this, but I do hope that it's physically possible to efficiently do small scale orbital transport.
One way or another, I'm happy as can be that there are smart people (outside of SpaceX/Blue Origin) really pressing into this problem.
The rental price to charter an A380 to the other side of the world and back is about $1.3million not counting fuel or the time spent on the ground fueling and going to/from charter location.
So I’d say a couple million per Starship launch would be on the order of a long-haul aircraft price. Still has plenty of room for smaller and cheaper per-launch fully reusable rockets.