Methane (Starship fuel) is massively cheaper than Kerosene (Falcon 9 fuel). Methane also has a much higher specific impulse, which means you can use less of it to get the same increase in velocity. Methane can be stored in liquid form in same temperature as oxygen, which means less insulation the two propellant tanks. Inversely, Kerosene will freeze at the temperatures required to get oxygen into liquid form.
Basically, nothing you said is accurate.
20% of the cost of the whole rocket. With no reuse. Now that reuse has cut the cost of launch way down, the second stage is much more than that of the cost.
Long-term marginal cost is determined by the nonreusable component cost + minimum refurbish & refit costs per launch. Effectively, the benefits of reuse offer diminising marginal benefit per reuse. Though designing for long-term use (say, a personal automobile vs. a rocketship) can still make sense.
An automobile used for daily commute with a 5 year life sees ~1,000 re-uses. You can vary the parameters to get different results. There are fuel, maintanance, garaging/parking, tax/registration, and insurance costs as well.
Something New Glenn sized definitely could.
Seemingly, SpaceX is the current best in the world and they couldn’t do it.
Right now SpaceX is the only company that recovers their orbital class booster. And that didn't happen until 2016! Prior to that, everyone dismissed landing rockets as impossible. Given the lack of competition for launch vehicles + the fat defense contracts being awarded, there wasn't much incentive for the incumbents to even try to bring the cost down.
Designing a rocket that can land and be reflow is a multiyear process. As other comments have said, more design changes would been needed to F9 to make it more reusable, those changes have tradeoffs. Instead, SpaceX chose to invest in a new design and more capable vehicle.
Other launch providers like RocketLab and Blue Origin are pursuing reusable vehicles.
"Why has no one done it?" give it time... it will happen sooner than we probably expect.
Also, you’d have to redesign F9 somewhat. Starship has the fairing integrated with the upper stage, which reduces recovery costs. Starship’s booster also does Return To Launch Site nominally, which means you don’t need a separate recovery droneship (Falcon 9 does that, too, but to make the most out of every expended upper stage, it makes sense to use down-range recovery). The F9 legs are sort of complicated logistically whereas Super Heavy is supposed to be recovered by the actual launch site, reducing turnaround time and costs. Also, using methane means less coking in the engines, which reduces turnaround costs and maintenance. Lots of things like that you’d need to reengineer to enable $1 million launch costs, but it’s feasible for an MLV. Relativity is planning to do it.
As Elon likes to point out, imagine how expensive it would be to fly if, after every flight, they threw away the plane. That's exactly what people traditionally did with rockets. The result is that the cost to fly a jet is mostly the cost of the fuel, while the cost to fly a rocket is the cost of the rocket.
Consider a Falcon 9 launch. Thanks to reuse, the cost to relaunch is in the neighborhood of $30 million. The cost of the fuel is about $200,000. Over 99% the launch cost is depreciation, maintenance, or having to replace what you didn't reuse.
The aim with Starship is to make the cost of a launch as close to the cost of the fuel as they can get.
They are aiming for daily launches of starship, so the site operations costs would be divided by potentially hundreds of launches per year instead of the one or two dozen a year nowadays.
The cost model per flight of Starship is more like that of a jumbo jet than that of a Falcon 9.
Methane on the other hand is starting out at a much lower temperature, and it's very difficult to get methane molecules to react with each other to form large molecules as you're not starting with any single C-C bonds. Isolated free carbon atoms (soot) aren't much of a problem.
The raptors don’t run fuel rich, which should reduce that problem.
I am skeptical of the claim that they will just be able to refuel and go. Every reusable space vehicle has had that goal and always cost more than expected to refurbish for the next launch. Yes, we may get there eventually but not in the next few decades, the risks of a catastrophic component failure are too high to do no refurbishment.
The starship and super heavy are certainly cheaper to construct but that has more to do with fabrication techniques than the material cost.
Methane is less dense than kerosene so needs larger tanks but it does have more energy per unit mass. The overheads of using cryogenic fuel are reduced on a larger rocket but the performance gain is probably only 10% or so.
I am not aware of any significant insulation between tanks on the Falcon 9 and it certainly isn't a major cost factor.
There have only been 2 reusable launch vehicles ever, and both were only partially reusable. Shuttle and Falcon 9. Falcon 9 has already made massive strides in reducing any refurb costs between missions. there is no reason that you couldn’t build one that requires no maintenance in between flights for the same reason that there’s no reason you can’t make an upper stage that can do multiple firings per flight without any maintenance in between. Upper stage reuse will be trickier, but ultimately there’s no fundamental reason why refurb has to be done in between every flight.
Do they deliberately deorbit the Falcon second stage? Would be interesting if we could keep a couple parked in LEO and refuel them for different missions.
Reusing second stages in space only really makes sense once you are making your fuel in space.
For a lot of purposes, Starship should make it extremely cheap to send propellant from Earth. $10/kg in LEO. Cheaper than any lunar mining proposal I’ve seen.
That said, I hope we do make propellant off-Earth eventually.
The whole reason for the full-flow staged cycle is to have much more reasonable internal temperatures. Methane as well was picked partially because its far more clean burning.
There is no reason rocket engines couldn't be as reliable a jet engines.
> far more fuel
RP1 is very expensive. Methane is much cheaper, and they can even produce it local. Ox is very cheap and is basically gone turn into the cost of electricity and they are using local solar to make it.
Helium is also a very expensive part of the Falcon 9. Starship avoids the use of helium.
Additionally the Falcon 9 used TEE-TAB that is also expensive.
And it used nitrogen as well, that not expensive but just one more thing to worry about.
Falcon 9 has 6 different different consumables, Starship has 2.
> generally more expense in all the ground operations
This is wrong. The Falcon needed to have drone ships operating and tug boats for them as well, to catch the fairing they have another 1-2 boats out there to collect the fairing.
Then the stages need to be brought into port, transported back to the launch site and so on. The fairing have to be refurbished as well.
In additional Starship has multiple design upgrades that make it actually easier. Unlike Falcon 9 Upper stage, the Starship will be fueled from below, meaning there is no secondary fuel infrastructure for the upper stage. Not requiring the fueling of the consumables above also makes it much easier.
Plus they were able to apply everything they learned from Falcon 9 and ground operations to this new launch vehicle and launch site.
> In a world where this can be launched for $2M, Falcon 9 can be launched for less than $1M.
Falcon 9 can not do that. First of all, you need to build an upper stage that cost you 5-10M. You can't build that Upper stage fast enough to reach the required flight rate. Falcon 9 is also more difficult to launch and prep for launch. It wasn't designed to be fully reusable and still need more checks and refurbishments.
Now $2M is extreme, even if it is $10M or $20M that only really matters for stuff like Mars. If you can launch it anywhere under $100M its revolutionary vehicle for space flight.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1094793664809689089?s=20
100 reuses is not the limit either. The first stage in particular may be made for a lot more.