SpaceX launches are on hold after a booster rocket toppled over in flames while landing. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the company's Falcon 9 rockets and ordered an investigation following Wednesday's accident off the Florida coast.
There are myriads reasons to be skeptical of that claim.
For a start, SpaceX is a private company and we can’t see their financials so claims about the true launch costs of SpaceX rockets are impossible to verify. You’re trusting Musk on that and you should know by now not to trust Musk.
Secondly their actual launch prices are not much lower than their competition. SpaceX claims this means a high profit margin but this cannot be verified.
Their competition have alleged unfair pricing practices, using debt and government loans to subsidize launches, claiming this is the reason why SpaceX can undercut the competition.
Very very very frequently when arriving at cost per kilo comparisons, people fudge the numbers due. For example, it’s extremely common to see price per kg derived from reusable launch cost but assuming the payload of a non-reusable rocket. Actually the reusable configuration has a dramatically decreased payload (about 2/3rds) and this has an important impact on price per kg that gets overlooked.
Another common error is comparing LEO vs geostationary launches or even more nonsensical comparisons such as claiming SpaceX LEO is dazzlingly cheap by comparing it to the cost of getting to the moon and back.
And reusable isn’t really reusable. Major maintenance and refit is required between each launch. The cost of labor is the most important factor here rather than the materials cost, plus the most expensive parts like engines would often only be worth their scrap metal costs, so the saving isn’t easy to quantify without seeing their books, which we can’t.
NASA and government contracts with SpaceX are juiced and NASA seems fine with this so it amounts to a public subsidy to a US company, which would explain how they are able to undercut rivals more directly than the questionable economics of rocket reuse.
Other private companies and government programs going back decades have looked at this problem and the answer has always been that the economics of massively reducing payload to save on boosters just doesn’t work out. No one has ever identified why SpaceX cracked the economic side of this problem other than Musk magic.
There probably are some use cases where rocket reusability moves the needle, specifically LEO for Starlink and small comms satellites really, but it isn’t a game changing or critical development and it definitely is not relevant for Mars or Lunar missions or for larger launches and probably not for geostationary either. It’s not that big a deal.
Reusable boosters were never a particularly important problem to solve
Reusable rockets is a pretty important step in bringing down the cost to orbit
There are myriads reasons to be skeptical of that claim.
For a start, SpaceX is a private company and we can’t see their financials so claims about the true launch costs of SpaceX rockets are impossible to verify. You’re trusting Musk on that and you should know by now not to trust Musk.
Secondly their actual launch prices are not much lower than their competition. SpaceX claims this means a high profit margin but this cannot be verified.
Their competition have alleged unfair pricing practices, using debt and government loans to subsidize launches, claiming this is the reason why SpaceX can undercut the competition.
Very very very frequently when arriving at cost per kilo comparisons, people fudge the numbers due. For example, it’s extremely common to see price per kg derived from reusable launch cost but assuming the payload of a non-reusable rocket. Actually the reusable configuration has a dramatically decreased payload (about 2/3rds) and this has an important impact on price per kg that gets overlooked.
Another common error is comparing LEO vs geostationary launches or even more nonsensical comparisons such as claiming SpaceX LEO is dazzlingly cheap by comparing it to the cost of getting to the moon and back.
And reusable isn’t really reusable. Major maintenance and refit is required between each launch. The cost of labor is the most important factor here rather than the materials cost, plus the most expensive parts like engines would often only be worth their scrap metal costs, so the saving isn’t easy to quantify without seeing their books, which we can’t.
NASA and government contracts with SpaceX are juiced and NASA seems fine with this so it amounts to a public subsidy to a US company, which would explain how they are able to undercut rivals more directly than the questionable economics of rocket reuse.
Other private companies and government programs going back decades have looked at this problem and the answer has always been that the economics of massively reducing payload to save on boosters just doesn’t work out. No one has ever identified why SpaceX cracked the economic side of this problem other than Musk magic.
There probably are some use cases where rocket reusability moves the needle, specifically LEO for Starlink and small comms satellites really, but it isn’t a game changing or critical development and it definitely is not relevant for Mars or Lunar missions or for larger launches and probably not for geostationary either. It’s not that big a deal.