Starship is still not understood

Re:Starship is still not understood by dr_orpheus on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:23PM (#29027835)

Okay, according to Elon [0] the cost (to SpaceX) of a refurbished Falcon 9 is $15 million, $10 million of which is the upper stage as you say is not re-usable. So $5M for everything else for a rocket that gets 18k lbs to Low-earth-orbit. If we scale that up to the Starship (220k lbs to LEO) then lets estimate a re-use/refurb cost of $61M.

So if a Falcon 9 costs $50M to launch, then 70% of that cost is SpaceX profit/recouping its design cost. Starship is supposed to be even more re-usable so lets assume that they only need 30% of the launch cost for recouping design costs/profit. This would be $87M/launch

So my really aggressive estimate is still almost an order of magnitude higher, which is why I am doubtful. Lets also remember that SpaceX got $396M from NASA for the development of Falcon 9 and Dragon [1]

[0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Conception_and_fundin...

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Re:Starship is still not understood by cecilpl2 on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:59PM (#29029055)

It's a mistake to assume the marginal cost scales linearly with payload. Fuel will (ish), but many other costs are fixed per launch.

I'd argue your estimate is not aggressive. SpaceX continues to claim an eventual marginal cost in the high 7 to low 8 figures per launch. I'm inclined to believe that deep analysis over a back-of-the-comment Fermi estimate.

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