[brandonagr2]

Are you trying to equate the cost of the entire development program with a single launch?

Hint, SpaceX has an assembly line and is cranking out new starships and boosters every couple months while SLS will launch only every few years and then be chunked into the ocean with a hardware cost in the billions PER launch.

[sashahrzg]

No I'm not equating the two. A current starship launch with all the testing and support systems is likely well above a billion dollars right now. Eventual launches will bring the price down, but as we haven't seen a full launch it's hard to tell.

[jlmorton]

Note that SpaceX has received ~$10 billion in total investment since inception, and receives about $2b in revenue annually from launches.

We don't have insight into SpaceX finances, but this should give you an upper bound on how much money SpaceX is spending on something.

This $10 billion in total investment and annual revenue has financed the development of Falcon 9, Dragon, Dragon 2 and Crew Dragon, Starship, launch pads at Vandenburg, Boca Chica, and two at the Cape, Merlin, Raptor, Starlink development, thousands of Starlink satellites, and all the associated ground infrastructure, recovery and recovery ships, and everything else.

While we don't have any hard numbers on what the Starship development program has cost thus far, it's not likely to be in the billions.

[Isinlor]

SpaceX is contracted to deliver people to the Moon surface for 2.8 billion dollars total (development + actual mission).

To do it they need around 6 launches for refueling in orbit.

The very upper limit on a single Starship launch is 0.5 billion.

[exsf0859]

That's shortsightedly frugal accounting.

Developing a working Starship is worth a lot to SpaceX. They could go deeply into debt on the first six launches, and make it up later.

[Isinlor]

You can invent elaborate conspiracy theories about how Musk is laying to everyone including NASA.

And how SpaceX does pro-bono work for NASA in hopes of ripping them up later.

How NASA, Jeff Bezos, Government Accountability Office as well as courts are blind to it.

(Bezos already dragged NASA trough GAO and courts with regard to HLS)

And Musk is doing that instead of doing it in the honest and straightforward way like Bezos by just lobbing the Congress and asking for a lot of money.

Or you could just accept SpaceX track record on space programs and that SpaceX delivers cheap services.

[panick21_]

Its a huge difference designing a system that you know can only launch 1 a year at best and maybe 2 in a decade compared to a system architecture that is designed for 100s of launches.

For SLS, the hardware cost alone is 1.5 billion. Starship has development cost, but I can guarantee you that the pure cost of ordering the hardware didn't cost 1.5 billion $.

[fallingknife]

> Eventual launches will bring the price down

And this is not even a possibility with the non-reusable SLS, which makes continuing it seem kind of crazy.