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Falcon9 still throws away the second stage every time. The idea of Starship being $10M is that it's fully reusable, so your marginal cost is only fuel/maintena
by cecilpl2 5y ago
Falcon9 still throws away the second stage every time.
The idea of Starship being $10M is that it's fully reusable, so your marginal cost is only fuel/maintenance/launch.
- dr_orpheus 5y agoOkay, according to Elon [0] the cost (to SpaceX) of a refurbished Falcon 9 is $15 million, $10 million of which is the upper stage as you say is not re-usable. So $5M for everything else for a rocket that gets 18k lbs to Low-earth-orbit. If we scale that up to the Starship (220k lbs to LEO) then lets estimate a re-use/refurb cost of $61M. So if a Falcon 9 costs $50M to launch, then 70% of that cost is SpaceX profit/recouping its design cost. Starship is supposed to be even more re-usable so lets assume that they only need 30% of the launch cost for recouping design costs/profit. This would be $87M/launch So my really aggressive estimate is still almost an order of magnitude higher, which is why I am doubtful. Lets also remember that SpaceX got $396M from NASA for the development of Falcon 9 and Dragon [1] [0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/ https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and_funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and_fundin...
- cecilpl2 5y agoIt's a mistake to assume the marginal cost scales linearly with payload. Fuel will (ish), but many other costs are fixed per launch. I'd argue your estimate is not aggressive. SpaceX continues to claim an eventual marginal cost in the high 7 to low 8 figures per launch. I'm inclined to believe that deep analysis over a back-of-the-comment Fermi estimate.