Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

Re:Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture by somenameforme on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:49AM (#43010125)

You can't know anything for certain but most of every analysis corroborates what they themselves say - they're operating at a healthy (though thin) margin on rocket launches and printing money with Starlink.

The context of this of course is that they've sent the cost of rocket launches from ~$2 billion per launch during the Space Shuttle era, to $0.07 billion per launch today. And the goal of Starship is to chop another order of magnitude or two off that price. By contrast SLS (Boeing/NASA's "new" rocket) was estimated to end up costing around $4.1 billion per launch.

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Re:Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture by varjag on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @07:33AM (#43012058)

To be fair cost per launch was in that ballpark already ($$0.15-0.05) with Ariane, Atlas and Soyuz non-reusable vehicles. SpaceX maintains the cost just about to undercut the competition.

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Re:Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture by eru on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @08:10AM (#43012335)

I think they maintain the price there. They'll want to drive the cost as low as possible, because price - cost = profit for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.

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