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I would like to know too. When sn8 crashed I googled and saw a quora article saying it costs $180 mil for each prototype. But this article says ~10 mil. Im assu

I would like to know too. When sn8 crashed I googled and saw a quora article saying it costs $180 mil for each prototype. But this article says ~10 mil. Im assuming to ~180 mil number is the production version? https://qr.ae/pGRZv0 https://qr.ae/pGRZv0 It makes sense at $10 mil since they are pumping these out like mad. Also NASA awarded $135 mil for the starship design so it can’t cost $100 for each of these sn’s right!?

adwn 6y ago
> Im assuming to ~180 mil number is the production version? The best assumption would be that the author of the $180M figure has no idea what they're talking about and derived at this number from a lack of information and through bad analogies and misapplication of scaling laws.
runawaybottle 6y ago
They must be willing to foot the bill for testing beyond a certain amount of the NASA award (40 million of the 135?).
qayxc 6y ago
I don't believe the $10 mil figure for one second. That'd mean a Raptor engine would cost less than $1 mil and that just can't be true - that'd be about half the price of a much smaller and less complex Merlin engine...
- iso1631 6y ago
  They're heading towards that $1m per engine, but that price includes development effort. The cost to make 1000 engines is not going to be 10 times the price of making 100 engines, the more that are made, the better they get at making them
  - qayxc 6y ago
    Heading there doesn't mean the engines they're currently using are already at that point.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      We have no idea what the marginal cost of the engine is, but it's far lower than the total cost of developing an engine, and the more they build the closer they get to $1m, $500k and towards the $250k target But even if it were $2m, there's 3 engines, that's $6m, leaving $4m for a bit of steel out of that $10m budget.
elihu 6y ago
A quick google search says that SpaceX charges 62 million for a typical Falcon 9 launch. Let's say they have a 50% profit margin (no idea if that's true, but let's go with it). They had 26 launches in 2020, so that's 806 million in profit they can redirect to R&D on Starship (in addition to loans or VC funding rounds or loose change found in Elon Musk's couch). The Starship prototype cost is a big variable, but assuming it's somewhere in the (log scale) middle of the 10 to 180 million range it's not unreasonable to think that SpaceX can afford to keep producing these things at a rapid rate for quite a while without going broke.

adwn 6y ago

> Im assuming to ~180 mil number is the production version? The best assumption would be that the author of the $180M figure has no idea what they're talking about and derived at this number from a lack of information and through bad analogies and misapplication of scaling laws.

runawaybottle 6y ago

They must be willing to foot the bill for testing beyond a certain amount of the NASA award (40 million of the 135?).

qayxc 6y ago

I don't believe the $10 mil figure for one second. That'd mean a Raptor engine would cost less than $1 mil and that just can't be true - that'd be about half the price of a much smaller and less complex Merlin engine...

iso1631 6y ago
They're heading towards that $1m per engine, but that price includes development effort. The cost to make 1000 engines is not going to be 10 times the price of making 100 engines, the more that are made, the better they get at making them
- qayxc 6y ago
  Heading there doesn't mean the engines they're currently using are already at that point.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    We have no idea what the marginal cost of the engine is, but it's far lower than the total cost of developing an engine, and the more they build the closer they get to $1m, $500k and towards the $250k target But even if it were $2m, there's 3 engines, that's $6m, leaving $4m for a bit of steel out of that $10m budget.

elihu 6y ago

A quick google search says that SpaceX charges 62 million for a typical Falcon 9 launch. Let's say they have a 50% profit margin (no idea if that's true, but let's go with it). They had 26 launches in 2020, so that's 806 million in profit they can redirect to R&D on Starship (in addition to loans or VC funding rounds or loose change found in Elon Musk's couch). The Starship prototype cost is a big variable, but assuming it's somewhere in the (log scale) middle of the 10 to 180 million range it's not unreasonable to think that SpaceX can afford to keep producing these things at a rapid rate for quite a while without going broke.