[lquist]

What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.

[augusto-moura]

I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.

People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.

[quotemstr]

Even $50 is within "going to the moon for my honeymoon" range. Wow.

[augusto-moura]

$50 is a number for LEO (Low-earth orbit). $/kg to a Moon orbit (or flyby) might be significantly more expensive. Not only that, because it is further so it needs more fuel, but also it is a few days trip which would need a bunch more kilos in provisioning food, water and other things. So yeah, unfortunately not that cheap to have a honeyMoon in the moon (heh)

There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.

This will probably take a few more decades, though.

[Valgrim]

Artemis by Andy Weir dwells a lot on this kind of infrastructure, but I never could understand the orbital mechanics described in the book.

[rkagerer]

Yeah it wasn't explained well in the book, but I did some reading of third-party sources and diagrams about the Uphoff-Crouch Lunar Cycler orbit, which helped (Wikipedia and the like).

[mr_toad]

Even if it cost 10x as much to reach the Moon it would bring the costs within range of mere multi-millionaires instead of billionaires.

[augusto-moura]

That is true, I guess some weird multi billionaire might have a honeymoon there. We should see some other media as well, like movies perhaps, and of course p*rn

[itishappy]

Only if you don't care about coming back!

[moffkalast]

This might be the best time to get into cubesat development as a hobby, lol.

[jackcviers3]

What is a good estimate of the number of times these boosters and engines will be reusable?

[asadotzler]

Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.

[TMWNN]

Besides what 55555 said, in the near term SpaceX has indeed passed at least some of the cost savings onto customers. NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads. <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>

On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.

[cryptonector]

Sounds like those savings exceed the subsidies that some love to point out SpaceX has gotten from the government.

[season2episode3]

If only the military budget went down by 40b in response to these new cost savings.

[55555]

Over the extremely long term in competitive industries, prices asymptote at ~costs. So it's still a generally useful measure, and in ~all cases, it's at least a directional indicator.

[tempfile]

Why would the extremely long term be a useful measure, when we have no way to know how long that will take to happen, and no way to know what will happen in the meantime to disrupt it?

[IshKebab]

Sure but currently this is not a competitive industry because nobody else can do this.

[thinkcontext]

The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.

[acover]

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1bgmsm9/cost_...

[JumpCrisscross]

> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?

All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.

[thinkcontext]

We can't give any estimate. The costs depend on how many times the stages are reused. They have targets but we don't know what will actually happen.