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.
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]
The article there cites per-kg costs at $10,000 on the space shuttle vs $27,000 on SpaceX. With the Dragon it came down to about $9,000 per kg, which is again about 10% below the price NASA was paying for the shuttle.[1] https://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/CRS-Announcement-Dec-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-rocket-cargo-price-by...