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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Elon also talks about Starship being “rapidly reusable”. It is possible that despite being over 90% reusable, the cost of operating the drone ships and faring recovery ships is significant. But if you use off-shore platforms for launching Starship then you will still need ships to get payloads and fuel out to them, so either way you need to operate a fleet of ships.
Falcon9 and Falcon Heavy also jettison their fairings once they leave the atmosphere whereas Starship takes them all the way to orbit. That has to eat into Starship’s payload ratio.
I do think it would be interesting to see some kind of detailed breakdown of where all money goes when a customer buys a launch. I would be interested in hearing what other people think about this.
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