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?
In: 3
It doesn’t. Not yet.
There’s a concept called “economy of scale”. The more stuff you produce, the cheaper it is. If you hired a guy to custom-build you a sports car, it would be crazy expensive. He’d have to know what he was doing (so highly skilled labor), he’d have to design the thing, and he’d have to make a lot of the parts himself. It’s much, much cheaper to just buy a Corvette. Those are produced on an assembly line in huge quantities, and tens of thousands of them are sold each year. The costs are spread out amongst all the buyers.
Right now, space travel is closer to the “hire some people to custom build it by hand” end of the scale, rather than the “buy one from the dealership” end. Musk hopes that Starship will lower the costs enough so that governments will buy more of them. And then private companies will buy some. And gradually the cost will come down, as they set up factories to mass produce them.
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