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hmm, you might be right. Over lifetime of the Space Shuttle program, money spent equates to $1.7 billion (2017 dollars) per Shuttle launch. https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-launch-c...

Incremental cost of each Shuttle flight was $18,000 per kg to LEO (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...). Price per KG of a FH launch is about $1411 to LEO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy.

So on incremental costs its about 12 times cheaper per kg to LEO

Or if you think thats still not fair, and want to treat the shuttle orbiter itself as payload - a bit abstract, but lets go with it - the shuttle launch comes out as about $4400 per kg of orbiter-and-payload, so Falcon Heavy is still 3 times cheaper than that.

edit: And its still not really a fair comparison because Shuttle could do more and carried people etc. But there it is.




It's not fair because a lot of the Space Shuttle missions included a lot more than just simple payload delivery.


Fair point.




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