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Oh very good point. The GP’s $1 million number per falcon 9 launch was ludicrous.

• barbegal 5y ago
  Indeed, I'm using the fact that it's ludicrous to make the case that a $2M starship launch is equally ludicrous.
  • btilly 5y ago
    No, it is not ludicrous. As Elon likes to point out, imagine how expensive it would be to fly if, after every flight, they threw away the plane. That's exactly what people traditionally did with rockets. The result is that the cost to fly a jet is mostly the cost of the fuel, while the cost to fly a rocket is the cost of the rocket. Consider a Falcon 9 launch. Thanks to reuse, the cost to relaunch is in the neighborhood of $30 million. The cost of the fuel is about $200,000. Over 99% the launch cost is depreciation, maintenance, or having to replace what you didn't reuse. The aim with Starship is to make the cost of a launch as close to the cost of the fuel as they can get.
  • simonh 5y ago
    I’m not sure you understand the arguments being made here. $1m per launch for F9 is ludicrous because 20% of the rocket, by manufacturing cost, is expended on every launch. For Starship none of the rocket is expended per launch, the only costs are site operations, fuel and depreciation on the rocket over a hundred or more flights. They are aiming for daily launches of starship, so the site operations costs would be divided by potentially hundreds of launches per year instead of the one or two dozen a year nowadays. The cost model per flight of Starship is more like that of a jumbo jet than that of a Falcon 9.
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  I don’t think it is. A medium lift vehicle that is fully reusable could be made to have a $1 million launch price. I don’t know that Falcon 9 could do that, but some MLV could.
  • SEJeff 5y ago
    Ok. Why has no one done it? The economics would surely be there if someone could. Seemingly, SpaceX is the current best in the world and they couldn’t do it.
    • Robotbeat 5y ago
      SpaceX could absolutely do it. They chose not to in order to focus development resources on starship. It’s all about opportunity cost. Also, you’d have to redesign F9 somewhat. Starship has the fairing integrated with the upper stage, which reduces recovery costs. Starship’s booster also does Return To Launch Site nominally, which means you don’t need a separate recovery droneship (Falcon 9 does that, too, but to make the most out of every expended upper stage, it makes sense to use down-range recovery). The F9 legs are sort of complicated logistically whereas Super Heavy is supposed to be recovered by the actual launch site, reducing turnaround time and costs. Also, using methane means less coking in the engines, which reduces turnaround costs and maintenance. Lots of things like that you’d need to reengineer to enable $1 million launch costs, but it’s feasible for an MLV. Relativity is planning to do it.
    • Me1000 5y ago
      It's amusing how quickly we start taking things for granted. Right now SpaceX is the only company that recovers their orbital class booster. And that didn't happen until 2016! Prior to that, everyone dismissed landing rockets as impossible. Given the lack of competition for launch vehicles + the fat defense contracts being awarded, there wasn't much incentive for the incumbents to even try to bring the cost down. Designing a rocket that can land and be reflow is a multiyear process. As other comments have said, more design changes would been needed to F9 to make it more reusable, those changes have tradeoffs. Instead, SpaceX chose to invest in a new design and more capable vehicle. Other launch providers like RocketLab and Blue Origin are pursuing reusable vehicles. "Why has no one done it?" give it time... it will happen sooner than we probably expect.
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      In general, rockets work better the larger they get. Smaller rocket means more structure made per volume of fuel, which will translate to smaller proportional payload capacity. Manufacture cost is mostly a function of the surface while payload capacity is a function of the volume.