i guess it’s theoretically cool that Elon can build a thing for cheaper than the government can
I’m not even positive that part is really true. I mean the cost to the government is lower, but SpaceX is spending billions of dollars a year. We don’t really know what starship or their lander costs them to make. All these Musk fans always talk about how much cheaper it is, but I’d like to see the numbers.
No one will really be able to answer that until Starship has commercial pricing. In the meantime, all we have is stray interviews and tweets from “the founder” about the engines being <$1m and the total investment being $2-3b so far, plus another $2b this year. They really need to start flying any payloads before I feel good about it, though.
For Falcon, NASA said years ago that it would have cost them at least an extra $1.5b to develop in-house, and we can see that the commercial pricing and cost/kg beats the rest of the market.
I’m not even positive that part is really true. I mean the cost to the government is lower, but SpaceX is spending billions of dollars a year. We don’t really know what starship or their lander costs them to make. All these Musk fans always talk about how much cheaper it is, but I’d like to see the numbers.
No one will really be able to answer that until Starship has commercial pricing. In the meantime, all we have is stray interviews and tweets from “the founder” about the engines being <$1m and the total investment being $2-3b so far, plus another $2b this year. They really need to start flying any payloads before I feel good about it, though.
For Falcon, NASA said years ago that it would have cost them at least an extra $1.5b to develop in-house, and we can see that the commercial pricing and cost/kg beats the rest of the market.