From Payload Bay to Freight System: A Cargo ConOps for Reusable Super-Heavy Lift

Reusable super-heavy-lift vehicles promise more payload mass and more payload volume, but a large bay is not a freight system. Maritime and air cargo became commodity transport by containerisation: a rated unit, a vehicle-side interface, a unit of account, and a named transfer of risk. Spaceflight has not yet adopted that strategy. This paper develops a cargo concept of operations that extends the mature payload-integration grammar already published for Falcon through factory packing, ground movement, destination receipt and commercial hand-off, and it reconstructs the tapered Starship payload envelope from published station dimensions so that candidate cargo architectures can be compared with the bay that actually exists. The analysis initially considered a concept of stacked cylindrical decks, which that reconstruction does not admit: the envelope supports at most one broad lower-bay cylindrical carrier with internal subdivision, plus a separate tapered upper-envelope cargo regime. The Space Shuttle serves as the control case showing that volume alone does not create commodity freight; Falcon supplies the existing integration baseline. Ground logistics (abnormal-load transport, axis reorientation, dockside modalities), surface off-load including the geared/gearless crane question and pioneer inflatable ramps, named orbital hand-off terms (OFCA and companions), and packaging mass (tare) are developed as first-order variables. The contribution extends a principle already accepted in payload design to cargo operations: earlier heavy-lift studies proposed spending abundant mass and volume on simpler, more rugged spacecraft, and this paper proposes spending part of the abundant envelope instead on a standard aggregation and handling layer whose recurring integration work is lower than bespoke accommodation. A closed screening case at 5 m length then tests whether a cylindrical lower-bay carrier can close mass, useful volume, residual centre of mass and a ground-handling fatigue budget in ordinary structural steel without consuming the abundance it spends. Heritage PAF-plus-adapter remains the default until a standardised carrier outperforms it.