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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Falcon Heavy requires significant refurbishment work after every launch and they need to build a full new 2nd stage.
The goal with Starship is it won’t need that refurbishment, it will land and the only work needed will be a refuel.
It’s kind of like the difference between having to do a full engine rebuild of your car every single time you drive it vs having to do an oil change every 10,000 miles. In both cases you’re still reusing the car, but one’s a whole lot cheaper.
And with that, you can service more launches with fewer rockets, so that also saves you money (it’s cheaper to build and maintain one vehicle than 10). Combine that with the fact that most parts on Starship are also designed to be cheaper, and you save even more. If you’re cheap enough that demand goes up then that means overhead becomes a smaller percentage of cost, so that saves some money too.
All the small (and not so small) things combine and add up to significant savings.
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