depends what you mean. If you think of it as a "replacement" of another launch they could have sold, then yes, it's the same cost. Lost profit opportunity is lost profit is a cost.
But if it means they can increase the # of rockets they build, they might pick up some efficiency gains on the back stretch. I'm pretty sure they're already struggling to keep up with demand, tho.
They're getting to the point where they're demand-limited rather than supply-limited - plowing through the backlog quite fast, and the GTO launch market is in a downturn.
SpaceX keeps rockets other customers "paid" for after they've landed (the customer pays for the flight, not the rocket). They've amassed a fleet they never had to pay a dime to construct.
I believe they have eight block 5 Falcon 9s that landed successfully. More if you count previous generations, but those likely won't be reused.
It does, for the competition, and there is no reason for SpaceX to go much lower as long as they don't build excessive overcapacity that needs to be filled.
Yes. They actually improved a lot of rocket construction and that's why they were cheaper then everybody else BEFORE re-usability. Now re-usability they just increase the profit.
Until somebody else challenges their price, they can get huge profit from every launch.
So then make the competitor pay for it: each time they launch for a competitor, add a margin equating to the total cost of deploying a Starlink satellite.
I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel, I'm guessing they'd be hit with anti-trust laws pretty quickly.
Yeah but with the volume we're talking about here, SpaceX is definitely going to be extremely constrained by launch capacity. I doubt they'd be hit with any antitrust lawsuit over not cancelling their own launches in order to take orders from their competitors. In any case, there's no chance that all of those companies are going to be able to launch their constellations in anywhere close to their targeted timeframes. There's just not enough launch capacity in the world to handle that in such a short amount of time.
>> I'm not too sure about this, given the highly limited market options and high regulation of space travel
The government grants monopolies (patent) on very important things (drugs and treatments for all sorts of things) and then lets companies charge different rates to different customers - even higher prices to the uninsured. It seems unlikely they'd make SpaceX launch for a competitor at anywhere near their own cost. But then politics....
They get to launch* their own stuff for only the rocket cost, that part is fine.
I mean if they have Boeing, NASA, etc. as paying customers at a standard $X they can't just go "Well Google you're launching a competitor to us so we're gonna charge you 20 * $X instead to prevent you from launching".
Could they? When you're launching such a large constellation the key metric is $/kg. All of ISRO's rockets are at least double as expensive as SpaceX's prices for customers. Plus, they're smaller rockets and it'd remain to be seen if ISRO could produce enough of them to launch an entire constellation.
