do you have a source for this? Wikipedia data in the Launch vehicle estimated payload cost per kg table disagrees with you. By a factor of ~20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
Cargo flights are different, and you should also look at total program costs from the deal with NASA. The NASA contract [1] was for ~12 launchs, minimum 20T of cargo for $1.6B. That puts the total program cost at $80,000 per kg. The space shuttle program costs were about $60,000 per kg.
But don't take my word for it, here's a quote from a NASA scientist saying their payload cost per pound went up. [2]
"My cost per pound went up with these rockets," Margasahayam told Tech Insider. "On the shuttle, it would be much less."
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/CRS-Announcement-Dec-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-rocket-cargo-price-by...
Average cost of a SpaceX resupply is $152 million. That's the total amount the US government pays per mission.
You couldn't send the shuttle up with 10% of the cargo capacity and only pay 10% of the cost. The Shuttle was $1.5 billion whether it was 16,000 kg to the ISS or 2,000 kg.
Nor could you just use it to send two people to the ISS and only pay $170 million for two seats (Really $400 million - the actual cost for two seats.)
> Their own numbers say that in the fullness of time they may be 10% cheaper. So far, not so.
How do you reconcile these two statements? Are the costs now 10% cheaper per kg or not?
Also from the link 2
> Margasahayam points out that, while the space shuttles were more expensive — a whopping $500 million per launch (or possibly $1.5 billion, according to one analysis we've seen) — each mission carried about 50,000 lbs. (plus seven astronauts!). That means each pound of cargo used to cost about $10,000 to ship on a shuttle.
Some estimates are even higher than that, close to $2 billion, inflation adjusted
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/03/first-spacex-astronaut-launc...
So the low estimate is not really fair, SpaceX has to pay off their R&D costs as well.
> So far, the average costs of launching cargo remain on par with the space shuttle at about $US30,000 per lb. (The space shuttle cost about $US1.5 billion per mission, including development, and could carry up to 50,000 lbs of cargo.)
Also not to mention that the Wikipedia table is probably irrelevant, because for the Space Shuttle launch cost is just the total cost of the entire program (including R&D and everything else) divided by how much it actually carried, while SpaceX figures are literally just Elon's marketing material. Look at the citations.
> The development of commercial launch systems has substantially reduced the cost of space launch. NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg.
The fact that SpaceX advertises that figure doesn't make it true.
To my understanding several times the federal government has special requests that can and will drive the launch cost upwards for many (if not all) launch providers.
Every launch contract is bespoke and the customers can request additional (sometimes significant) amounts of documentation of part providence and the rest. The US government often requests significantly extra documentation so it increases costs quite a bit.
List price of Falcon launch is <$70MM.
Shuttle launches were about $450M per launch, with 7 people and 50,000lbs of cargo. Came to about $10,000 per kg, vs SpaceX Falcon 9 at $27,000 [edit] and the Dragon around $9,000.
For the Roscosmos costs, mass to LEO seems to be $4270/kg [0].
Falcon 9 is at $1270/kg [1]. This link also has the comparison with the Space Shuttle.
[0] $35 MM / 8200kg [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210801024432/https://ntrs.nasa...
Looks to me like falcon 9 is considerably better value on those numbers even at twice the price.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-hitches-its-final-ride-to...
which is still 1.5 billion per flight in 2021 prices. So Elon needs to get the price down to $15mil to hit his target.
5% is still pretty good tho. And it may go lower.
Imagine if Tesla gave me all their R&D and manufacturing know-how and offered to help me out whenever I hit a snag, wouldn't I look great by showing everyone how much cheaper I can build an EV? That's why I think it's a bit of a faulty comparison. Still great, but some of these comparison border on the edge of hype
I'm confident SpaceX would still be substantially lower than NASA if they had, but we need to be consistent in the methodology or it just becomes the equivalent of cherry picking data to underscore an already valid point.
"Dirt cheap" is from the article, not Elon.
Even if he could (he can't), what business sense would it make? Why would you cut the prices of launches to 1% of the current ones, if you could also cut them by just 10% and supposedly have an absolutely insane margin, because you'd still get all the business.
There is usually 1-2 order of magnitude cost difference between vehicle price and the gas in the tank.
Space exploration is great, we should do it, and this rocket sounds cool. We should do it even if it is expensive.
But "dirt cheap" is probably an Elon-ism, closer to "full self driving by 2018."