I’ve heard numbers such as $200/kg to LEO for Starship. I’m trying to understand this.
I figure that the Falcon Heavy is already about 96.5% reusable (at least 27 of 28 engines are reused). Based on the recent Roman telescope deal ($255M), Falcon Heavy costs $4000/kg.
How is Starship, which is basically only 3.5% “more reusable”, going to cost 20X less? Is methane massively better than RP5? Is stainless steel way better than aluminum? Is it because it’s taller? Fatter? Is it the tower catch? Is it because the booster returns to the launch pad instead of landing on a drone ship?
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There’s a basic rule of reusability that says that your incremental cost can never go below the cost of the parts that you throw away. The second stage for Falcon 9 is roughly a $10 million piece of hardware, so Falcon 9 can never get any cheaper than that, no matter how many times you fly a booster or how cheap it is to do refurbishing.
Engine count isn’t really a very good way to look at price; the second stage is probably about 20% of the overall cost.
The goal of starship is to be fully reusable, so there is floor on the cost because of throwing away parts. It also avoids the cost of the drone ship, the cost of fairings, and – with any luck – the higher cost of engine maintenance.
How much cheaper it will be is something we don’t know yet. An initial target is probably the same cost as a Falcon 9 launch, or about $50 million. Starship will be around 6 times the payload, so about that much cheaper, after a couple of years or so.
That’s assuming SpaceX can get reuse to work they way they hope to.
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