[tintt]

People were optimistic about LEO shipping costs when the Space Shuttle program just started, but it didn’t exactly work out economically. Partially reusable F9 was meant to decrease lunch costs, and it did, but not to the extent some hoped. Starship, no doubt, will bring prices down, but then again, even $1k/kilo to the moon surface sounds kind of… an aspirational stretch.

[dwaltrip]

Ah, my bad. I somehow got mixed up and thought we were talking about LEO prices. I agree, going below $1K/kg to the Moon's surface may be hard even for Starship as it looks like it requries multiple tanker Starship launches to refuel the payload Starship waiting in orbit. I do think LEO prices will probably be lower than $1K/kg.

I believe Falcon 9 could be priced a good amount lower and still be profitable on a per unit basis (ignoring ongoing R&D) but SpaceX has little pressure to do so as there isn't a competitor with a similar offering. It's interesting, as once Starship is out it may somewhat cannibalize the Falcon 9 marketshare.

You raise a good point about the shuttle, however SpaceX can learn from that. I'd bet they are striving hard to make Starship more effectively and efficiently reusable than the Space Shuttle was. We shall see how successful they are with that. I'd be very surprised if it was not a significant improvement over the reusability of the shuttle.

Perhaps the real paradigm shift will occur once there are two or more companies with fully reusable rockets such that there is more competitive pressure to cut margins and lower prices.

[tintt]

Agree on all points.

I’m pretty sure Starship is going to be more economically viable than Space Shuttle ever was, I didn’t mean to compare them directly. And you’re right, $1k/kg to LEO doesn’t sound unattainable even for F9.

With the ride-sharing Starship is totally going to cannibalize Falcon rockets, but I thought that was the point all along? I wouldn’t be so quick to retire F9 though. Even if Starship adoption is smooth, it’ll take years to certify it for crewed flights. And there’s always market for smaller launch systems (Electron seems to be doing well).

[sfifs]

The Space shuttle program was run by people who were in the taxpayer wealth extraction business. As we've seen already, no one really imagined how we could progress on costs when companies actually get into space transportation business

[tintt]

You’re totally right, Saturn V, Space Shuttle, SLS – all of them are great technology, but financially speaking, they were all doomed from the get go. I weren’t trying to compare NASA and Space X, I was trying to point out that optimistic outlooks on large reusable rockets usually don’t fully consider implications of increased complexity of such project.

[tsimionescu]

SpaceX money is also made the same way. It's US gov money that funded much of the research anyway, US launch facilities that handle the launches, and SpaceX is charging the US government many times more per launch than it charges for commercial launches (they claim the government has extra requirements) .