An interesting aspect of this that is not mentioned here is that, fundamentally, although the amount of propellants is large compared to the payload, the vast m

An interesting aspect of this that is not mentioned here is that, fundamentally, although the amount of propellants is large compared to the payload, the vast majority of the propellant (and thus the lift-off mass) is oxygen. Liquid oxygen is extremely cheap as it just requires compressing the air (and, of course, airliners also must compress the air to burn with fuel, it's just that they compress it in-situ). Only getting 4% of your lift-off mass to orbit sounds like a terrible deal, but it's really not so bad when you consider the vast majority of your lift-off mass costs just 5 cents per pound, and almost all the rest costs about 10-30 cents per pound. Near the limit of rocket performance would be the 2016 SpaceX ITS (now Starship) proposal which had an expendable capability of about 550 tons of payload for about 8500 tons of propellant (of which about 20% was fuel). That's a fuel to payload ratio of 3:1. (unfortunately, reusable performance is nearly half as bad, so about 5 or 6:1). https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/making_life_multiplanetary_2016.pdf https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/making_life_multip... For long-haul aircraft carrying cargo, the situation isn't that much better. Near the edge of their range, cargo airliners have about 2-4:1 fuel to payload capability. And considering that rockets are now starting to use LNG for fuel (often significantly cheaper than jet fuel), the fuel cost for Starship (or similar vehicles) could actually be less than that for a long-haul airfreighter on very long routes. In fact, for single-trip flights half-way across the world (i.e. at the edge of the capability of modern aircraft), the fuel:payload ratio for ITS (Starship) or an airliner would be about the same, might be even better for Starship/ITS. In part that's because launch vehicles stage, which makes them extremely efficient. And Don is a fantastic guy, but I also think he exaggerates slightly the engineering in rocketry vs other fields. The cost per unit dry mass of an airliner and a launch vehicle is approximately the same. The factors of safety are also similar (although usually rockets don't have high cycle requirements...). And in some ways, rockets are simpler structurally as their typical load case is pressurization and axial loading (which is often in the same direction). That means they can use relatively inexpensive thin-gauge stainless steel construction in ways that the more complexly-loaded aircraft cannot. The main issue is we just throw away rockets for the most part. Fix that, and we don't need exotic nuclear propulsion or anything to have low costs to achieve orbit. There is one figure of merit that rockets tend to do much better at: Final dry mass to payload. Because rockets stage off the vast majority of their mass early in flight, only a small part of the rocket dry mass has to go through the majority of the delta-v. A rocket upper stage may be a fourth to a fifth the mass of the payload. With airplanes, the dry mass of the airplane essentially always is greater than the payload mass, and on longer flights this might be 2:1 or greater.