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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I recall Elon was hoping to get an order of magnitude reduction in cost per launch, but Wikipedia claims it costs $160 million per launch versus the Soyuz price of $76 million per astronaut. That would “only” be a 3x reduction with a crew of seven, but they’ve configured for a crew of four, which is a hair under 2x.

I wonder how reuse affects the math, and what they’ll be able to do to lower those prices further. Obviously the optics on getting a domestic launch for half the price makes it an easy sale for Congress, but we were all hoping for more. An order of magnitude reduction might have gotten us 20x as many launches.

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Wikipedia is either wrong or out of date but the ratios are slightly worse at 40% cheaper than Soyuz:

https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri...

> NASA will likely pay about $90 million for each astronaut who flies aboard Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule on International Space Station (ISS) missions, the report estimated. The per-seat cost for SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, meanwhile, will be around $55 million, according to the OIG's calculations.

> To put those costs into perspective: NASA currently pays about $86 million for each seat aboard Russia's three-person Soyuz spacecraft, which has been astronauts' only ride to and from the ISS since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded in July 2011.

Per this interview in 2012:

“There were times when I thought he was off his rocker,” Mueller confesses. “When I first met him, he said, ‘How much do you think we can get the cost of an engine down, compared to what you were predicting they’d cost at TRW?’ I said, ‘Oh, probably a factor of three.’ He said, ‘We need a factor of 10.’ I thought, ‘That’s kind of crazy.’ But in the end, we’re closer to his number!

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-changing-the-roc...

This is in response to the engine. Maybe they got the engine price 10x cheaper, but the other components not so much?

I’m guessing the current price has to pay for a whole new rocket, as NASA probably won’t use a used (“flight-proven”) one for humans.

Eventually I expect used ones to be not only cheaper, but also more reliable. Like for (water)ships - they say “it’s new after you’ve owned it for a year”, the implication being that you spend the first year discovering and fixing manufacturing defects.

What happens to the rockets after they're flown for a single mission? Do they belong to SpaceX for later re-use in commercial cargo missions, or does NASA own them?

NASA pays for the mission, transport XY amount of tonnage to the ISS. The rocket remains owned by SpaceX. In majority of situations, owning a rocket means little as it cannot be reused. Also very few customers have the means to "run" a rocket, NASA fits the bill and it's conceivable NASA could buy a F9 and use it after quite a bit of training, but this makes little sense for them and little sense for SpaceX.

I think I'm picking up from context (aka reading between the lines) that the optics of NASA using a refurbished rocket - and it failing - is not good, so let SpaceX do what they want.

Recall that a lot of aerospace budget from the US is defense spending dressed up as something else. Similar to the way the original space race was a proxy war for a proxy war: If you can fly people into space you can fly an ICBM to Moscow/Washington DC.

If they filled the dragon to its capacity of 7 it would be closer. I believe hearing that NASA will only use up to 4 seats.

It would be interesting if they made a seven person variant to serve as the long overdue lifeboat on ISS.

Worth noting that Dragon also carries tons of cargo, whereas the Soyuz “sticker price” is for just a seat.

NASA has also so far insisted on only flying on new (unflown) boosters and only using freshly built Crew Dragon capsules. Both of those are able to refly multiple times, reducing costs further, once their reliability is sufficiently proven for NASA certification standards.

The agreed to reuse human capsules for cargo missions. No people at all.

> Dragon also carries tons of cargo

Does it? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the "trunk" section will be mostly empty on crewed vehicles.

It makes sense. We've seen that Dragon aborts with the trunk attached for aerodynamic reasons. It seems likely that hauling a bunch of cargo together with an escaping crewed capsule isn't feasible.

You could also see that during the Demo-2 launch stream when the Dragon separated from the upper stage. There was a short segment where camera from the stage showed the underside of the Dragon and you could see that it was mostly just empty space inside.

During an abort they would dump the service module, which is where the unpressurised cargo is stored.

The color commentary yesterday suggested that a bit of cargo could be where the other 3 passengers should be, so he might be right.

I think you might be confusing price and cost.

What NASA pays doesn’t necessarily reflect the cost since we do not know the margins.

However, I do agree that it’s valuable to be skeptical of unproven claims regarding cost reduction, though most of what we say is that we do not know much about the current real cost.

I have a suspicion that the discrepancy between the two prices I found is that one has the margins built in and the other is a guess at what it actually costs the vendor.

That's the cost for NASA. It's the price that SpaceX charges.

There's a massive margin on that price, which allows them to fund their other developments such as the Starlink and Starship.

Could not find back the values. By memory (USD/kg), Soyuz is 20k, (futur launcher) ESA 5k or 8k, and SpaceX 2K. (Can someone confirm?)

Whatever the values, what are interesting are the magnitudes.

I would be interested to see the quote. Was he hoping for a 10-fold drop right off the bat for the first mission or rather for that drop "à un moment donné". I imagine the costs will continue to go down with time for the base model as things become more reusable, R&D costs drop, and more business comes their way.

If memory serves, that 10x isn't even really his number, but one borrowed from the enthusiast community. So not only was that number aspirational, but it was also a nod to a bunch of people who are essentially all talk and no action.

Also I found that if you fly on a refurb unit you get a 30% reduction in price, so a budget flier is looking at a 3x improvement in cost, which is quite a lot closer to the goal multiple.

If those numbers are profitable for SpaceX, and not fiction, then hopefully they have enough revenue to fund iterations that improve on what they already have.

"à madné."

Well, we don't know what it costs SpaceX to do these launches. We only know what NASA pays.

SpaceX could have very nice margins.

While Soyuz is nowhere close to the cost of a crew dragon , It does not cost that much for Soyuz either , Russians are charging that much because they could and they also want their margins .

Ultimately it only matters what NASA pays , i.e. how much of the cost savings benefits the taxpayer and how NASA is using that savings

I read once that a lot of the cost NASA pays per astronaut is there to manage the overhead of all the bureaucratic stuff and extra regulations required for sending a NASA astronaut up. I believe that it is (/ will be) cheaper per seat for citizen space tourists.

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