[mpakes]

As a former engineer on the Atlas V launch vehicle program, I'm so excited to see the commercialization of spaceflight come to fruition. The latest projections I've seen have the Dragon and Falcon 9 coming in at 20% of the price of an equivalent Atlas V / Delta IV (EELV) launch. Comparative Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs are even lower than that. (I'd love if any SpaceX employees can comment further on any of this with more detail.)

As I've seen firsthand, the waste in typical defense contractor programs is obscene – it's so great to see someone doing something about it. Hopefully with much lower cost to orbit, we'll see a revitalization of the commercial launch market as well.

[pmorici]

It's also worth mentioning that SpaceX is possibly even significantly cheaper than their commercial competitors. If you look up the other company mentioned in the article, Orbital Science Corporation it says they have a contract with NASA for 8 launches for 1.9 Billion to do the same thing. SpaceX has a contract for 1.6 Billion for 12 launches. That's 50% more flights for 15% less cost.

[Retric]

Do you have the Mass to LEO numbers for each of those?

[pmorici]

I don't know what that means, but Wikipedia says that Space Science Corporation's vehicle can cary a "2,000kg / 2700kg" "delivered payload" and SpaceX's Dragon a 6,000kg "launch payload" so they win there too by more than double.

[burgerbrain]

Wikipedia has 9900kg to LEO for the Falcon 9 block 1 and 10450kg to LEO for Falcon 9 block 2 (both from Canaveral).

To GTO those numbers are 2400kg and 4680kg.

The "Launch Payload" of the Dragon spacecraft (6000kg) appears to be approximately the Mass to LEO of the block 2 (10450kg) minus the mass of an empty Dragon spacecraft (4200kg).