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How much does it cost them to lose a starship lower stage? Those things can't be cheap.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
How much does it cost them to lose a starship lower stage? Those things can't be cheap.
- BryanLegend 3y agoThey make a new booster about every six weeks.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHow much does it cost though?
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoSpaceX's Raptors cost about $250k each according to some leaked sources. Given there are 33 engines in the booster, you get 8,250,000 just in engine costs. I would say it's safe to assume around 30% of the cost of flight is in engines, so probably around another 5,775,000 for the rest of the craft bring it in at around $14M for just the booster hard costs. That's not accounting for the $100m crane they've built, labor, propellant, nor the Starship itself which has another 9 engines. Keep in mind that the RS-25's cost $100m each. If it was atlas, the engines alone would cost $3.6B.
- danpalmer 3y agoI was under the impression the $250 was a long term goal, not a current development cost. Do you know what context you heard this in? Edit: propellant is relatively cheap I believe. My understanding is <$1m per launch.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoinitially the merlin engines were $2m each, with raptor v2 coming in at under $1m, and they are pushing out 1 Raptor v3 a week now, so i'm sure they've come close to their goals. You might want to push that number up by 50% to get a more realistic estimate, and then by another 100% to include labor, propellant, etc. $44m per booster starts to sound like a more reasonable number.
- jwells89 3y agoThe number of iterations Raptor has seen is kind of insane. V3 seems like it’s a substantially different beast compared to the original. I suppose that’s par for the course when bringing a previously lab-bound type of engine into practical use, but still. Did Merlin see iteration at such a pace prior to being fitted on Falcon 9’s? Raptor looks to be on track to be in a considerably more refined state when Starship goes into service than Merlin was at during the same point with Falcons.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoThere's a video that i can't find, where they show Raptor v1, next to raptor v2. The raptor v1 has all these wires, and tubes and looks crazy, next to it, the raptor 2 looks super sleek and not that complex. They ended up molding everything they needed straight into the block itself. Can only imagine what the v3 designs were since they are now all internal. But what you get at the end with something like 3000 parts in it's BOM, to something like 20 parts in the BOM, because most of the parts were deleted and integrated directly into the mold.
- chrisjc 3y agoPerhaps this video? Everyday Astronaut: Elon Musk Explains SpaceX's Raptor Engine! https://youtu.be/E7MQb9Y4FAE?t=140 https://youtu.be/E7MQb9Y4FAE?t=140
- dotnet00 3y agoMerlin saw much less major iteration, but with that it's worth considering that there is a lot more experience with Kerolox engine design out there (plus a much simpler combustion cycle). Plus it was based on a NASA reference design. I do recall from Eric Berger's Liftoff book, they struggled with the nozzle design though. Very early Merlin had an ablative nozzle. I suppose the better way to put it might be that Merlin's iteration was more in getting the production sorted out, whereas Raptor is iterating everything based on lessons from Merlin and previous Raptor iterations.
- imtringued 3y agoAnd this is why I am disillusioned by this whole ordeal. People just take rumors and treat them as certain facts.
- danpalmer 3y agoIt's hard to say from the outside because of all the optimism. They are targeting $250k per engine, and have thrown around numbers like $5-10m for the fuselage(?). From what I understand, the engines are still >$1m each, but coming down as they ramp up production speed and have radically simplified the engines with V2. The body is probably also much higher than the target range, but bearing in mind that it's just stainless steel and relatively well known manufacturing techniques, and not aluminium going through complex and expensive manufacturing techniques, they're probably well under any other typical rocket. I'd assume even significantly less than a new Falcon 9, which is already the low end of the industry in terms of price. Another thing I'd bear in mind is that many of these ships never got completed, on purpose. There have been explicit "pathfinder" builds, but even with the "real" ships most never flew and were pretty much about working through techniques, tools, materials, etc. These won't have needed a full fit-out and will have been cheaper. Edit: updated engine target from 500k to 250k
- BryanLegend 3y agoIt costs six weeks of time, which is the only thing Elon cares about.
- patapong 3y agoIf the plan is to scrap the rocket no matter whether it succeeds or fails, does it cost anything? All of these seem like data gathering missions to me.
- mulmen 3y agoYes, of course it has a cost. Material has value. Even Elon doesn’t have unlimited capital. Even if raw material was “free” there’s still the opportunity cost of simply selling the material and pocketing the cash. The test may be worthwhile but that doesn’t make it free.
- nicky0 3y agoIt's amusing that you posit the notion that instead of launching the rocket (its entire purpose to exist), they might disassemble it for scrap to save some cash.
- mulmen 3y agoThey built the rocket out of raw material which they paid for. I’m not sure what’s hard to follow here. Rockets aren’t free. How is that controversial? SpaceX has built and scrapped 17 Starships, 14 of them without even a static fire. They have scrapped four Super Heavy boosters, three of them without firing. Test flights require fuel, planning, approval, and of course flight hardware. None of that is free.
- nicky0 3y agoThey could save money by not building any rockets at all, that's much cheaper.
- mlindner 3y agoFor this type of operation I think asking about the material cost isn't very useful considering how vertically integrated they are. They're still paying the workforce whether the test happens or anything is built. The input raw material is pretty close to "free" as it comes in as giant rolls of sheet steel. I think the issue you seem to be missing is that the marginal cost of materials that go into building a rocket is very low. The fuel cost is similarly a small percentage of the cost of building a rocket. The cost comes from the large workforce required and the low flight rate.
- colechristensen 3y agoApproximately every stage of every rocket before spacex started landing them was “lost”. Test flights are part of development costs. Nobody at spacex is particularly concerned with test fights being test flights.
- nicky0 3y agoDon't know the cost but the rate of development is so fast they don't want to keep the old ones anyway. It's not like they would keep it and use it for anything except scrap metal. The technology is so out of date compared to the models waiting to go. Blowing it up or ditching it in the sea is basically an easy way to get it off the pad to make room for the next one.
- grecy 3y ago> How much does it cost them to lose a starship lower stage? About the same as every rocket that has ever been launched in all of history. i.e. even when they are successful, every rocket in history before SpaceX's Falcon 9 "loses" the lower stage.
- dotnet00 3y agoThe costs get kind of complicated since various bits get out of date and have different value. For example, there is speculation that a finless "Starship" that had been seen at the site some time ago which now appears to be being scrapped without any use was thrown together in case S25 was not ready in time for the second flight. So while construction wise they spent money, is that money that was part of the test cost? Similarly, they're moving to Starship V2 and Raptors are moving to V3, making the previous hardware obsolete. But since they can still gather data from launching the older hardware, they will launch and lose it since scrapping is supposed to happen anyway. So at that point losing the vehicle in flight hasn't cost them much more than just scrapping it. However, since you probably mean actual construction cost, the boosters must clearly be expensive, thus their interest in getting those working even if it means sticking sacrificial Starships on top. I'd guess each unit is probably around $40-50 million each. Still revolutionarily cheap per kg, but certainly not so cheap that they can keep endlessly throwing them away on incremental steps.
- wilg 3y agoThe kids seem to think its about $75 million in terms of the marginal cost of ship+booster. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/17z01rj/how_much_did_the_latest_starship_launch_likely/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/17z01rj/h...