U.S. Military Partners with SpaceX to Explore Using Starship for Point to Point Travel
SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. (USTRANSCOM PR) – While speaking at the National Defense Transportation Association’s Fall Meeting on Oct. 7, U.S. Army Gen. Stephen R. Lyons, commander, U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), announced USTRANSCOM is looking to space to quickly move critical logistics during time-sensitive contingencies or to deliver humanitarian assistance, helping to project and sustain the Joint Force in support of national objectives.
Speaking at the virtual meeting from the command’s headquarters at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, on Oct. 7, Lyons told the audience about USTRANSCOM’s partnership with Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to explore this emerging capability of rapid transportation through space.
“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons asked the virtual audience. “Think about that speed associated with the movement of transportation of cargo and people. There is a lot of potential here and I’m really excited about the team that’s working with SpaceX on an opportunity, even perhaps, as early as 21, to be conducting a proof of principle.”
Logistics traditionally labors under the tyranny of distance and time, and global access. For example, operations in the Pacific Ocean theater may transit 10,000 miles—one way.
“For the past 75 years or so, we have been constrained to around 40,000 feet altitude and 600 miles per hour in our very fastest method of logistics delivery—airlift,” said USTRANSCOM deputy commander, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Dee Mewbourne, who leads the command’s effort in this area.
Current space transportation is also more weight- and volume-constrained than airlift, and faces challenges in positioning, launching, and recovery operations. As industry advances to overcome these challenges as well as increase its pace of launches to decrease costs, a space transportation capability to put a crucial cargo quickly on target at considerable distances makes it an attractive alternative.
“Now, what are the possibilities for logistical fulfillment at about 10 times those figures, when the need for support on the other side of the world is urgent? It’s time to learn how our current strategies to project and sustain forces can evolve with a new mode of transportation,” continued Mewbourne.
Commercial space transportation would allow point-to-point rapid movement of vital resources while eliminating en route stops or air refueling. This capability has the potential to be one of the greatest revolutions in transportation since the airplane.
USTRANSCOM’s Technology Transfer office is now building teams of industry and academic agencies through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADA), which facilitate direct, voluntary partnerships with the federal government to explore new concepts.
To investigate space transportation, USTRANSCOM is teamed with SpaceX and XArc. These partnerships allow the Department of Defense (DOD) to leverage industry innovation where the bulk of technological innovation is occurring outside the U.S. Government. The CRADA, in which industry participates voluntarily without federal funding, is examining the use cases, technical and business feasibility, and concepts of employing space as a mode of transportation supporting USTRANSCOM’s role as the Defense Department’s global logistics provider.
“The potential of space transportation to deliver Defense Department cargo anywhere in the world in an hour provides an additional option to complement USTRANSCOM’s strategic sealift and airlift capabilities,” stated U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Nirav Lad, principal investigator for Space Transportation Cooperative Research and Development Agreements, USTRANSCOM’s Strategic Plans, Policy, and Logistics Directorate.
Industry is overcoming the technical and cost barriers which have blocked practical use of space transportation. USTRANSCOM is providing expertise in logistics and distribution in austere environments which will inform commercial space industry efforts to support programs that will ultimately be required to operate on the lunar surface and eventually Mars. Additionally, the CRADA partnership is investigating the legal, diplomatic, statutory, and regulatory issues that must be addressed to enable the normalization of high-frequency, point-to-point, commercial space launches.
The partnership will allow USTRANSCOM to assess the business case and return on investment requirements for both government and commercial parties to enter into long-term space transportation surge capability agreements, similar to the existing Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) emergency preparedness programs. The CRAF is a cooperative, voluntary program involving the Department of Transportation, DOD, and the U.S. civil air carrier industry in a partnership to augment DOD aircraft capability during a national defense-related crisis where air carriers volunteer their aircraft to the CRAF program through contractual agreements with USTRANSCOM.
“I had no sense for how fast SpaceX was moving, but I’ve received their update and I can tell you they are moving very rapidly in this area,” Lyons said.
USTRANSCOM exists as a warfighting combatant command to project and sustain military power at a time and place of the nation’s choosing. Powered by dedicated men and women, TRANSCOM underwrites the lethality of the Joint Force, advances American interests around the globe, and provide our nation’s leaders with strategic flexibility to select from multiple options, while creating multiple dilemmas for our adversaries.
84 responses to “U.S. Military Partners with SpaceX to Explore Using Starship for Point to Point Travel”
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I guess the idea is that you’d have supplies in their own container with a heat shield and landing equipment, which would then either be launched into a suborbital flight from the first stage of Starship or from the cargo bay of a cargo variant Starship in Low Earth Orbit?
That’d have to be some very valuable cargo needed in an extremely dangerous place, for that to be preferred over just airlifting in supplies. That seems like a very niche thing, especially since you’d probably not deploy the troops too far from where they could be airlifted out/in.
Starship has been shown with two different elevators for getting cargo to the ground. The Starship user guide says the payload section is modular and can be stretched for custom configs (standard = 8×17.24 & 8×22 meter bays), different types are possible. Also, Musk has tweeted about a Starship with 2,000 tonnes of propellants instead of 1,200. Earth to Earth Starships could have up to 9 sea level engines.
Human Lander System (L) & Commercial Lunar Payload Services.(R)
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Elon Musk has also hinted at a Starship 2.0 that has twice the diameter and four times the payload of the Starship 1.0 he is building. It would basically be a Sea Dragon class of spacelifter. That is the nice thing about Starship, if it works it’s scalable just like the B707 was scalable to the B747.
Some have gone to effort of estimating the noise that some of Elon’s larger fantasies might put out and there isn’t any current launch complex that is far enough away from civilization. Moving offshore makes logistics even harder.
They’re building an orbital launch pad at Boca Chica – actually a launch table with 6 legs each over 2 meters of reinforced concrete clad in 2″ of steel. Huge.
SpaceX already has a fair amount of experience with off-shore logistics. Anchored platforms will be a lot simpler even if quite a bit bigger.
the 707 did not upscale to the 747
Loading anything for the military onto a rocket is going to require a whole new level of education for loadmasters. If it takes longer to get the cargo correctly loaded into a container, installed on the rocket, and launched than it would take to fly it to its destination, then what’s the point? Nominally, with aerial refueling and flying at the quoted 600 mph, you can be anywhere on the planet in about 12000/600 or 20 hours. Even if it takes another 5 hours on each end to load and unload, that’s only 30 hours. I’m very skeptical that the overhead of a launch will be less than that, at least anytime soon.
The Spec Ops guys will be saying, “but can we put a howitzer and a bofors on it?”
Elon responds, “Sure, and a flame thrower.”
More likely the military will look at the feasibility of point to point suborbital from the USA to major staging areas like Diego Garcia, Guam and perhaps a location in Europe and/or the Middle East (UK, Italy, Poland, UAE). The offshore platforms Elon Musk proposed for point to point service would fit well at those locations and a squadron with perhaps 8-12 Starships would provide the rapid transport capability. The question would be if it’s practical and if there was a military advantage created that was worth the costs involved. Another question would be if they were operated by the USAF or USSF, although it looks like it’s the USAF that is interested.
No advantage. Currently C-17s (with roughly the payload of starship) fly directly in theater. If you have to deliver the same payload to somewhere like Diego THEN transport it to the theater, you have not gained anything. Note also that there are only so many C-17s. It doesn’t matter how fast you can deliver materials to Diego, you’re going to be limited by how fast you can transfer the materials in theater with a C-17. So why not just put the goods on a C-17 in the first place???
Asked and answered. Far greater overall end-to-end speed. A Starship could move and land three or four loads from CONUS to the far western Pacific in the time a C-17 dispatched from CONUS would take lumbering across all that water subsonically with a single load while following whatever course would be required to keep allow it to meet up with its en-route refueling tankers.
It doesn’t matter. There are a finite number of C-17s.. You can totally bury Diego in personnel and supplies with starship, but you’re still limited by the other methods to get those assets in theater. And if you are sending all this shit to Diego first, you’ve totally negated the advantage of using starship.
that is unlikely…if the starship matched the average turn time of a B777 and somehow you could figure out how to match the load time of a C17…then the turn around time at each end would be nearly 5 hours
sorry
Unloading airlifters is a lot faster than loading them. Starships can land on compact pads and don’t have to taxi prior to either landing or take-off. Refueling would probably be about the same as an F9, about 33 minutes. If loading is the bottleneck, have multiple Starships loading in staggered sequence so a new one is ready to go every couple hours once the first one is off. Don’t dispatch the next one until confirmation is received that the last one has arrived, been unloaded and launched back deadhead.
A C-17 is far less vulnerable to SAMs than a Starship. Not that C-17’s are not vulnerable ….. But your point is well taken. No way a ballistic transport is going to drop vertically down from on high into contested territory where someone has even a semblance of an air defense capability.
I don’t think that’s under consideration.
That is exactly what this Study is exploring. It will be interesting what the experts with access to cost data and operational information we don’t have will determine. Also you seem to be forgetting there are still a lot of C-130s around.
Mostly, no, they don’t. They fly to some major rear-area base, refuel, then fly to their closer-to-the-“front” drop-off bases. Smaller craft usually pick up the ball from there. C-17s can land on dirt strips, but they usually don’t. On the rare occasions this might be necessary, they start with enough fuel load to get them both there and back as large quantities of jet fuel are not usually available at quick-and-dirty FOBs. Fuel for other uses, like generators and vehicles, is often a major part of their incoming loads.
Heh.
It’s not even 5 hours on the receiving end if the load is rigged for an air drop off the back of a cargo plane. The aircraft can also change drop locations at the very last minute where a rocket will be very committed much earlier.
Rockets are the most inefficient vehicles we’ve come up with. There’s no other choice to get into space, but it’s hopeless for travel. If the mission is humanitarian aid, the first order of business is figuring out what’s needed. Next, the supplies need to be rounded up and brought to a spaceport that would have a rocket just sitting on a pad ready to go. Since it would be expensive and complicated, there would be a wait for all supplies to arrive before launching. With aircraft, supplies can leave the warehouse and be on their way to the destination without needing to wait for a full load. Most aircraft can operate in weather that isn’t a full blown hurricane. Rocket launches are held up frequently for weather, recalcitrant valves, uncooperative GSE and various other things.
If you send a rocket full of aid or military, what do you do with it after it gets there? Refueling capability might not be available. Does it get blown up or is it just left in a field for the neighborhood kids to tear down for the scrap metal? Do you put the demolition explosives on board as part of the cargo? It would be good to keep them far away from any Lithium batteries.
I highly doubt that there is any benefit to keeping a rocket(s) on a hot pad alert just in case which blows any advantage in travel time. The flexibility of aircraft both civilian and military along with how numerous they are is hard to overcome. If the destination is at the maximum distance between two points on the Earth, why is the US on the hook for the billions of dollars a year to cover every contingency? Nobody else could get aid or troops in? The government couldn’t call up an air cargo company and contract for some flights?
Any conflict that caught the US so flat footed that it was necessary to rocket ship troops and arms would mean the intelligence agencies have fallen completely flat on their face. The US already has bases all over the world, at great expense, that are supposed to be ready to move out in short order. We may have a couple of allies left too, maybe.
One doesn’t dispatch airlifters to places they cannot be refueled and turned around either. The necessary refueling infrastructure for Starships would be in place already at whatever forward logistics bases would be nearest the potential trouble spots in question.
Yes, the U.S. has bases all over the world. Adding an ability to receive and turn around Starship cargolifters to as many of them as practicable would simply increase the value of that investment.
Given the record of our intelligence agencies over the last 75 years, I think counting on getting surprised should simply be SOP anyway. The CIA never seems to see the big stuff coming.
Many military aircraft can be refueled in flight or from a tanker aircraft on the ground. I haven’t seen that trick for a rocket.
You are suggesting that it would be a good use of money to have refueling GSE and cryogenic fuels/oxidizers available worldwide to accommodate a rocket fleet as and when?
Yes. The facilities need not be huge. There’s a liquid air plant a few miles from my domicile. It’s a lot smaller than either of the shopping malls that flank it. Liquid methane can be made with similar facilities anywhere there’s natural gas infrastructure.
Terrestrial point-to-point rockets don’t need to be refueled in-flight – an advantage they have over airlifters.
“The necessary refueling infrastructure for Starships would be in place
already at whatever forward logistics bases would be nearest the
potential trouble spots in question.”
Uuuuhhhhh, so froward military bases are going to have huge LCH4 and LOX tanks sitting at the ready? The GRU or the equiv are going to have something to say about that. Let alone the locals. Dude you could only operate something like that far far in the rear. If you’re delivering to the front you either go in with enough fuel to hop back out, or you send it there and leave it there. Think the G-4 Waco, or the Horsa glider.
You wouldn’t be launching and landing Starships at typical FOBs in “Injun Country,” but you would be operating them in and out of places like Bagram. That’s quite doable.
I fly with people who cycle in and out of Bagram on a monthly basis. To this day they have to take shelter from mortar attacks. Large LCH4 and LOX tanks can’t run.
Bury them or put them in concrete bunkers and they won’t have to. There’s already plenty of other stuff at Bagram that can’t run either.
The stuff left in the open at Bagram does not turn into a fuel air munition when they leak. …. Lack of logistics is not what’s making Afghanistan not work.
Most loads would, one presumes, be pre-packed and ready to load at a moment’s notice. It’s hardly as though airlifter loads are all assembled from scratch in real-time either.
Yeah, actually they are. Your ignorance of airlift is showing. Bad.
Even assuming you are correct about that, a P2P rocket would suffer no comparative disadvantage anent an airlifter.
Back in the 60s when everything in space seemed possible they came up with every crazy idea you can think of. Now it seems the possible potential of Starship is giving military planners the same craziness. Reality will temper these ambitions over time.
Actually, something like this idea *is* about that old (Bono and Gatland’s ‘Frontiers of Space,’ 1969. I still have mine)…
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/w1Y5…
And yes, it does have many of the same possible operational problems discussed here…only bigger.
Airlift was considered a crazy idea once too.
This is ideal for special operations. to be able to get that amount of people and some equipment to a point that fast, is a revolution, and cost should be no problem. But not needed for this in ordinary operations. The loading should be no problem, having a ready loaded Starship on standby would give an incredible boost in capability.
The problem for spec ops is you see them coming in in so many ways like this. Optical, RADAR, and thermal. For all it’s advances an SA-2/S-75 would take out a incoming Starship as soon as it dips below 50,000 feet. I’d much rather hug the geography in a UH-60 or C-130.
Not to mention the sonic boom. I’ve been 3 miles from an F9 booster landing, and holy hell that thing was loud. An inbound Starship will definitely wake up everybody within 50km. Not great for stealth.
Before we start thinking about using drop ships to support small unit action, I think a good analysis with a complete set of lessons learned of the incident at Hadley’s Hope/LV426 is in order. Before going forward into a bold new future, we need to have a firm grasp of how these things played out in the past.
Heh. The Russkies and the Chinese aren’t quite as formidable as Aliens.
You wouldn’t be going into a combat area with it but a staging area like Diego Garcia, then shifting to other transport to the battle zone.
Then why would you even bother? C-17s go directly into the theater. If you have to go to Diego first, you’ve totally negated any advantage to using Starship.
You gain a lot of speed, save a lot of time, eliminate refueling rendezvous and eliminate in-transit risk of intercepton. Palletized/containerized freight can be quickly transferred to C-17/C-130 at a base set up for such transshipments. From CONUS to the other side of the Pacific one would get the most benefit.
Big airlifters aren’t exactly stealthy either.
As you noted above, Starships could be useful for “flak suppression” missions too. Send off a “flak suppression” Starship a few minutes before the one loaded with cargo.
With spec ops you usually don’t want to alert the locals you injected a team. Think the raids on the Norwegian heavy water plant in Hardanger back in WWII, forming an insurgency from scratch or turning an insurgency your way as with the Hmong in SE Asia, or the Scud hunters of desert storm. If you kick down the air defenses and suddenly nothing happens, the local police/militia or regular forces will probably be put out on the hunt for small units operating locally. Kicking down the door from orbit just advertises you’re active and is best applied to conventional warfare.
I wasn’t figuring that spacelift would be very useful for actual insertion of spec ops troopies except perhaps to get a bunch of them to some rear area jumping-off point PDQ. Spec ops insertions/extractions are mainly the job of helos and tilt-rotors. Starship wouldn’t replace those, just the C-17s said troopies would otherwise ride in on the boring parts of their trips.
Looking at it from your POV, it would seem to be the answer would be in the cost effectiveness of that transport vs using C-17s.
we are all in fantasy world now. the only use for this thing would be resupply and retroop in a secure area.
23 years US military. this is going no where
🙂 Well, let’s wait another 23 years and see what develops. It’s way too early to count these chickens from the malformed eggs of the Starship program, but if it does turn into a ballistic heavy lifter, options will open up.
I am the guy who was on the team of folks who 20 years ago suggested launching “mass loads” of cruise missiles from C17’s …which is now in the testing stage.
I list some issues with this. I will be around 23 years from now. we will see 🙂
I seem to remember that Adm. Leahy had even more time in grade than that when he confidently opined that the atomic bomb could never work.
ADM Leahy was following along with what Admiral Rockford opined.
nuclear concepts were hard to grasp for most people.
Yes. And SpaceX seems to be an equally difficult concept for you to grasp.
That would depend on how close one intended to land to enemy territory and what sort of countervailing defenses were available.
Okay, but that means you still have to use conventional means of inserting the troops. How much are you gaining? Also consider that in a future with easy access to space every nation will have the means of monitoring traffic from geo orbit all the way down. I think in such a future, it’ll be be easier to hide a C-17 flight than a space flight.
Right now, nobody’s got that sort of capability including us. Developing at least an approximation of such capability is one of the jobs Space Force, SDA and DARPA are already getting busy on. None of our allies are going to build their own. Russia can’t afford to. That may soon be true of the Chinese too. The Chinese are, in any case, the only opponents we’ve got with even a semi-plausible shot at doing so.
As you know, I’m long since on record as doubting the long-term viability of the PRC regime. The job of DoD is to make up for lost time by deploying what we should have had for two or three decades now and keeping it in service until all our consequential enemies have imploded of internal contradictions.
This sort of thing would have some utility in something like a crisis in the Baltics where you want to make a show of your commitment in a very public way with meaningful hardware in as spectacular a fashion as you could. Or as a means of transporting equipment to Taiwan after it’s placed under maritime blockade, but not invaded along the lines of the 1948 Berlin crisis.
A more aggressive development would be along the lines of operating like a Falcon 9. Climb into a trajectory to target, release a B-52 like payload worth of munitions to attack SAM sites and enemy airfields etc, then boost back to base. Those flight dynamics are already demonstrated by Falcon 9. Operate out of England and suppress the S-300 and S-400 site in Kaliningrad without exposing the launch platform to fire, meanwhile deplete or destroy Russian air defenses on the ground before you send in a more conventional strike package.
Well, that’s one way to slay the ITAR beast. I want to see them land one at Ramstein.
“You haff shattered windows for kilometers in effery direction.”
“We were out of non-dairy creamer. You lost. You lost the war. And since then, you’ve lost the will to defend yourselves. Got any crullers, or should I send out?”
Heh.
Actually 75 years ago at the end of WWII the fastest way to get cargo/passengers somewhere was with a C-69 (Constellation) or a C-54 (DC-4) with a cruise speed around 300 mph, ceiling of around 25,000 ft and no aerial refueling. Although Comets jetliners we’re flying in 1952 the real breakthrough in military jet transport, the KC-135,C-135, only entered service in 1957.
What’s your point?
That it was in the late 1950’s that global logistic capabilities hit the ceiling of the sound barrier, not at the end of WWII. And the lack of any military supersonic transports seem to indicated that cost/benefits of increased speed were not worth it.
So by this reasoning, there is no reason whatsoever to use starship for transport.
That’s quite a leap. Pointing out that we’ve only been stuck at high subsonic transport speed for 60, rather than 75, years is hardly equivalent to buying into your notion that there’s no value to going a lot faster.
Do the math. Prove me wrong.
Given that the U.S. military seems to take the idea seriously, I venture to suggest that the burden of proof for the idea being laughable is on you.
probably not.
at some point “cost” comes into the equation …but even at that point whenever it is settled the next issue is infrastructure.
its the infrastructure of the vehicle…launch pads, fuel, maintenance
the infrastructure of the logistics…the parts/people have to come from somewhere to some US launch facility by planes trains or cars…and loaded then “flown” to some place and then unloaded…in a vertical vehicle this is not trivial. HOw much electricity does this thing take sitting on the pad? keeping the methane Oxygen coo?
then there is the logistics of protecting the vehicle and the landing/launch pad
speed would be good but its unclear that it overrides those things
Ships and most aircraft need nontrivial infrastructure at each end of their routes too. Forward-located ports and airbases also require defense. Given the potential time saving, it’s hardly obvious that this idea is any more impractical than airlift or sealift.
As with the SST it will be a cost/benefit decision. British Airlines and Air France took a loss on their Concordes for years because it boosted their image. After one crashed the costs to returning them to flight was determined to be no longer worth it.
This study will determine if the cost of rapid point to point military transport is worth it.
I wonder If cargo is set to the same level as a C-17 (77.5 mT) and the starship is made of titanium instead of stainless steel, the starship is able to fly with no super heavy booster to any part of the world (up to its antipods).
USTRANSCOM said 80 tonnes
Titanium would require different production processes, thicker metal and thicker TPS. There’s no advantage in doing that.
When SpaceX floated the idea of point-to-point, I thought to myself that the cost/logistics constraints would limit the financial viability of this proposed service, as it did with Concorde. But, The Military, that’s a totally different kettle of fish. They are not under the same cost restraints, they are generally totally delivery time critical. This is a potential DOD bonanza for SpaceX: Annual multi-billion dollar payment for Assured Theatre In-Time Access. 🙂
Dup
I wonder if it would be possible to stretch starship a little bit and maybe add some extras raptors so you Could use it without Superheavy on earth to earth flights
Musk has said they can stretch Starship’s tanks from 1200 to 2000 tonnes, and increase the engine count to 9 sea level Raptors. USTRANSCOM is talking about an 80 tonne payload, and Starship is always shown with an integrated elevator.
NASA Human Lander System (L), and Commercial Lunar Payload Services (R) https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Okay thanks..
Has there been any talks about using starship without super heavy on earth to earth flights, I think it would make a Starship a lot easier to operate
I haven’t seen any suggestions, but it would leave VG and New Shepard in the dust if someone used Starship for suborbital tourism flights.
That would be great ,but I was also thinking that if they stretched the tanks it would be capable of flying airliner services and military service. But I guess that they prove that the system works before they move on to it .
Yeah, that idea for simplifying P2P ops has apparently been getting some attention within SpaceX. Perhaps the current thinking on that will be part of the upcoming Starship Update Elon is supposed to be presenting in a couple weeks or so.
I see the artist’s rendering of a future spaceport and imagine the Boring Company providing transport infrastructure.
Diabolically synergetic. +10 tycoon points.