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The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.

They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.

Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".

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jve 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Feels weird to read such comments on HN.

10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.

As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.

Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition

> ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.

I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.

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tsimionescu 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> 10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible.

Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.

> Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.

Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.

> Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition

Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.

> As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.

This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.

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TrapLord_Rhodo 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.

>More expensive, but not by some huge margin.

Obviously no matter what it costs them, they are going to price themselves slightly under the going rate to fill their launch manifest. Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.

Reuse is cheaper... the fact that you can even begin to contemplate that makes no sense. They lose the upstage with only one engine and they even recover the fairing. The combined cost for RP-1 and LOX is approximately $300,000–$500,000. Relative to total launch cost the fuel cost makes up a tiny fraction (~0.5–1%), which is about $67 million for a Falcon 9 commercial launch.

Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.

The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10, where the next nearest competitor is the Proton-M by Khrunichev at 4300. Which puts them in a completely different league of the space shuttles Cost Per kg to LEO of $18,000 to $54,000.

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tsimionescu 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.

I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.

> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.

Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.

> Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.

You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.

First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.

Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.

> The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10

These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).

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TrapLord_Rhodo 11 hours ago | parent [-]

so, what your saying is that you admit SpaceX is a world class provider of launch services, but you don't like it cause it's not THAT much better than everything else?

	▲	tsimionescu 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm saying that SpaceX is a world-class provider of space launch services, and leads the market on virtually any metric, but they aren't, as some are claiming in this thread, orders(!) of magnitude cheaper than others in the business. I'm just trying to counter balance some of the narrative here that presents SpaceX like some savior almost sent from the future.

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thsName 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's so convenient for you to live in an imaginary world where spaceX is deceiving everyone and hasn't really achieved anything and it's all just empty hype, right?

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templeOSdotcom 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas

considering the US has earmarked hundred of millions of dollars to expand rural internet with nothing to show for it-- I don't know how true this is.

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burnerthrow008 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Half the cost is not "some huge margin"?!?

So, like, if you found a 50%-off sale on a car, you're telling me you wouldn't test drive it because it's not a very good deal?

What color is the sky in your world?

	▲	tsimionescu 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Given how little we know about the cost structures of any of these space launch systems, yes. Consider that Russia was charging less per seat to the ISS in 2007, back when they ahd to compete with the Shuttle, then SpaceX is charging NASA today. And not a little less - almost half ($25M in 2007 dollars, $38M in today's dollars, vs SpaceX charging $55M today). Does this mean that the Soyuz was much cheaper than Falcon 9? Probably not, it just means that there is so much margin on both sides that we can't estimate much.