Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to LEO. I see a blurb that says Musk says Starship launches will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while before it costs $10m to launch a Starship.
This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is. But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal...
An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which will cut costs considerably.
I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do some basic analysis and not just believe everything they hear from that guy!
And then there are Starlink launches. They made money on it on 2024, according to Shotwell, so launch cost must be way lower than external price.
[0] - https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
> Starship rocket to less than $10 million. However, Starship is still very much a development program, and Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39 Raptor engines and labor expenses.
So it's going to be somewhere over $100 for a fully disposable launch. What happens when they start reusing the booster? What happens when they have optimised production further?
Are you sure that your anti-musk bias isn't clouding your judgement?
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/rocket-report-a-new-es...
There’s a have a fairly linear relationship between rocket payload and size, and for large structures going big tends to increase cost per pound so ~10x the size resulting in ~20x the cost is just mildly pessimistic.
If and only if they the thing is both rapidly reusable and individual starships are actually used for hundreds of launches do those highly optimistic numbers become vaguely possible. Even just a 0.2% failure rate would represent a massive increase over their optimistic estimates.
SpaceX's financial situation argues very differently. They have raised relatively little money for a company that is spending multiple billions on two very expensive development programs (Starship and Starlink).
If Falcon cost $100M per launch the 134 launches this year would have bankrupted the company. The $1.7B they raised in spring 2022 was their last major capital injection, and have been self funded since.
If Falcon cost substantially more than $20M to launch SpaceX would need to be getting external money from somewhere. They aren't. Their revenue is well understood and is around $10B per year, and salary costs fot 13,000 people are going to consume most of that. What NASA and the Space Force pay is public knowledge, what they charge for a private launch is known, and the number of Starlink subscribers has been revealed.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-investment-in-starship-approach...
I think you misunderstand my argument. Let me restate it.
Someone, sometime said the Starship launch was $2b. The Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer. Someone, sometime said it was around $100m. The Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer. There is a lot of range between 100m and 2b, which implies there's a lot of data getting thrown around and we don't have good numbers.
If observing that we don't have good numbers is arguing in bad faith... I don't know what to tell you.
Musk at some point said $10m for a Starship launch. I think I found a reference for that in a CNBC interview... I'll look it up later. But my point is... It is unlikely that Starship launches are $10m RIGHT NOW. But sure... maybe they will be in the future. I take Elon with a grain of salt because of his comments regarding Full Self-Driving Mode and Robo-Taxi deployment dates.
I said we should not compare New Glenn estimated launch costs RIGHT NOW with Elon's asperational price target of $10m. We should compare Starship's cost per kg to LEO RIGHT NOW with New Glenn's estimated cost per kg to LEO RIGHT NOW. Or we could compare them at a particular point in the project history. We could compare per-kg costs at first launch or estimated per-kg costs at the 10th launch.
Both companies are saying they want to do a lot of launches, so we'll eventually have MUCH better data.
I'm suggesting we compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges and not apples to oranges.
At the current moment, all Starship launches have been fully disposable (though yes, one booster was caught by the chopsticks so it's probably more accurate to say the whole system is about 1/12th re-usable.) At this point in the program, you have to pay for each vehicle that lands or crashes in the water. I agree with you when you say "100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch." Starship is currently more disposable than it is reusable.
When SpaceX re-uses the boosters and the Starships, then it will not be fully disposable and the price per launch will go down. We are not at that point at the moment. You can tell this because a number of boosters and starships have fallen into the ocean, some crashing, some coming to a controlled stop just over the ocean and then falling over.
But the important part here is that the equipment that wasn't caught by the chopsticks doesn't get to be re-used. So if you want to do another launch, you have to build new equipment. That new equipment will cost money.
So if the current, mostly non-reusable Starship launches cost $100m a pop, that's after several launches. Even though we have someone estimating the first couple of New Glenn launches cost $68m, let's wait until it has 6 launches and THEN compare costs.
We don't have to use Musk's cost figures for Starship. Starship has been built in the open and can be relatively accurately cost estimated by experts.
He did. He also said it'd be available in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024.
So yeah...
