[haspok]

"That means they drop launch costs to $20/kg at scale..."

Yeah, probably not in your lifetime, buddy: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/background/facts/...

"NASA’s goal is to reduce the cost of getting to space to hundreds of dollars per pound within 25 years and tens of dollars per pound within 40 years."

Starting a business based on that _now_ seems to be a bit... premature :)

"...start building permanent installations on Mars and the Moon."

Not in this century, unless there is a very high incentive for doing so (think: WW3 or something equally disruptive).

[Ajedi32]

That's NASA's goal. SpaceX has historically been much more ambitious than NASA: https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m...

(($2M/launch) / (100 Mg / launch) = $20/kg

Now obviously those are aspirational numbers; Starship is too early in its development cycle for anyone to be making truly accurate cost projections. Furthermore the cost per launch to SpaceX isn't necessarily the same as what they'll actually be charging their customers. But even if Elon's guess is off by an order of magnitude, it'll still be way cheaper than "hundreds of dollars per pound", and it'll happen much sooner than "25 years".

[Ajedi32]

Also, that NASA article is from 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20101013052045/https://www.nasa....

I have to imagine that with the advent of reusable launch vehicles, even NASA has to be a bit more optimistic about future launch costs now than they were 9 years ago.

[Klathmon]

To be fair, people have been saying "not possible in our lifetime" to a lot of things that SpaceX has done or is doing.

While I'm not convinced it will happen in the timeframes they are shooting for, I'm also not convinced it won't.

[DennisP]

NASA's big project for launch is a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle technology. It will cost at least a billion dollars per launch.

SpaceX's project is a fully reusable rocket, with rapid turnaround because it uses methane fuel in the world's first clean-burning full-flow engine. They expect to be able to launch three times per day. On top of that the rocket is built of cheap stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.

With that amount of reuse, each launch basically pays for fuel and ground support, each of which costs about a million dollars per launch. Given their payload of at least 100 tonnes, that's $20/kg. They've already done a single-engine hop test, and hope to reach orbit within six months.

Here's a great video on what makes the new SpaceX engine revolutionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbH1ZDImaI8