[Retric]

2 billion at the high end isn’t actually unreasonable when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.

There’s a have a fairly linear relationship between rocket payload and size, and for large structures going big tends to increase cost per pound so ~10x the size resulting in ~20x the cost is just mildly pessimistic.

If and only if they the thing is both rapidly reusable and individual starships are actually used for hundreds of launches do those highly optimistic numbers become vaguely possible. Even just a 0.2% failure rate would represent a massive increase over their optimistic estimates.

[bryanlarsen]

> when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.

SpaceX's financial situation argues very differently. They have raised relatively little money for a company that is spending multiple billions on two very expensive development programs (Starship and Starlink).

If Falcon cost $100M per launch the 134 launches this year would have bankrupted the company. The $1.7B they raised in spring 2022 was their last major capital injection, and have been self funded since.

If Falcon cost substantially more than $20M to launch SpaceX would need to be getting external money from somewhere. They aren't. Their revenue is well understood and is around $10B per year, and salary costs fot 13,000 people are going to consume most of that. What NASA and the Space Force pay is public knowledge, what they charge for a private launch is known, and the number of Starlink subscribers has been revealed.

[Retric]

SpaceX has several million Starlink customers providing around 6.6 Billion dollars of revenue in 2024. It not clear if it’s profitable yet, but it’s been stated to kick off 100’s of millions in positive cash flow.

As to the salaries of its employees, that’s a major component of launch costs. You can’t point to it and say launch costs must be cheap because they are paying all these people when a large fraction of them are directly or indirectly working on launches.

They are spending ~2 billion per year on Spaceship, but what they charge per launch varies widely. 5 crewed falcon 9 flight cost the government ~260 million each, and the 2 ISS missions where 145 million each. https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2024-revenue/

[zizee]

2 billion is ridiculous, and I can only imagine that number was a misunderstanding SpaceX/Musk saying that they were spending 2 billion in a full year of R&D on Starship.

https://spacenews.com/spacex-investment-in-starship-approach...

[Retric]

That doesn’t justify why it’s ridiculous, it’s just a coincidence.

I doubt SpaceX’s internal costs are ~100m/falcon 9 launch, but companies need a markup to be profitable. 100m - 2B is a huge range covering everything from giving up on reusability and paying back R&D over a small number of flights to significant success resulting in a 90% reduction in costs per kg to LEO.

Also, having spent 5B on R&D and doing 5 test flights up to this point works out to 1 billion per flight. That’s not the actual marginal cost per flight, but when people say how expensive each shuttle flight was that’s the number they use. Nothing guarantees they continue to do Starship launches, they could fail it’s among the potential outcomes.

[zizee]

It's ridiculous because the much ridiculed SLS has a launch cost of 2 billion dollars. If you think SpaceX is throwing billions of dollars into developing a vehicle that costs thisuch to launch, you clearly haven't been following SpaceX at all.

You know there is going to be more that 5 flights, and you know people in this thread are not amortizing total R&D into flight costs. People are talking about 68 million per flight for New Glenn, which no doubt has has many hundreds of millions on R&D spend, and hasn't flown one time.

[Retric]

> You know there is going to be more than 5 flights

No, I don’t actually know the future. I can make predictions, but we could have a thermonuclear war tomorrow etc.