What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
$50 is a number for LEO (Low-earth orbit). $/kg to a Moon orbit (or flyby) might be significantly more expensive. Not only that, because it is further so it needs more fuel, but also it is a few days trip which would need a bunch more kilos in provisioning food, water and other things. So yeah, unfortunately not that cheap to have a honeyMoon in the moon (heh)
There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.
This will probably take a few more decades, though.
Yeah it wasn't explained well in the book, but I did some reading of third-party sources and diagrams about the Uphoff-Crouch Lunar Cycler orbit, which helped (Wikipedia and the like).
That is true, I guess some weird multi billionaire might have a honeymoon there. We should see some other media as well, like movies perhaps, and of course p*rn
Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.
Besides what 55555 said, in the near term SpaceX has indeed passed at least some of the cost savings onto customers. NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads. <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>
Over the extremely long term in competitive industries, prices asymptote at ~costs. So it's still a generally useful measure, and in ~all cases, it's at least a directional indicator.
Why would the extremely long term be a useful measure, when we have no way to know how long that will take to happen, and no way to know what will happen in the meantime to disrupt it?
The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
