SpaceX's goal was, as I recall, at least 2 orders of magnitude cheaper per kilogram to orbit. We know they've had trouble with that, they're producing bigger and simpler rocket engines to try to boost that. One article I found suggests they're at around 2% of the cost of a ride on the Shuttle, but the Shuttle was never the cheapest way to orbit. 25x cheaper is still front page news, but it's not the 100x they hoped, and it's certainly not 4000x.
> If that mission is successful, SpaceX will have taken its super heavy-lift vehicle from the drawing board and into space in far less time than it took NASA to do the same with the SLS. SpaceX's goal is to build an entire fleet of Starships and launch multiple vehicles on a daily basis, at an average launch cost of $1 million or thereabouts.
Yeah so the problem with that is that Falcon Heavy launches cost 97 million, which is 42x cheaper, not 4000x times cheaper. This means SpaceX thinks they're going to get another 2 orders of magnitude out of the launch costs? Okay Elon.
Also I think they may be comparing the cost of the launch in fuel and manpower, hopefully for launch and recovery, but ignoring the cost of the rocket, and possibly the cost of cycling the rocket back to the pad.
Everyone is taking Starship reuse as an assumption because of SpaceX’s earlier work. It will likely be less easy than people think with such a massive vehicle, but even fully expended mode Starship will loft far more mass at less than an eighth of the cost of a SLS launch.
Starship hasn't yet reached even the Kármán line.
we don't get to go to space with what we'd like to have, we go with what we have. It's costing a LOT yes, but time is of the essence. Arguably we waited too long to do this again.