Can anyone break down the economics of this? How can they afford this over and over again?
They lose 3 raptor engines per crash and that hurts. A lot.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1179107539352313856
It makes sense at $10 mil since they are pumping these out like mad.
Also NASA awarded $135 mil for the starship design so it can’t cost $100 for each of these sn’s right!?
The best assumption would be that the author of the $180M figure has no idea what they're talking about and derived at this number from a lack of information and through bad analogies and misapplication of scaling laws.
That'd mean a Raptor engine would cost less than $1 mil and that just can't be true - that'd be about half the price of a much smaller and less complex Merlin engine...
But even if it were $2m, there's 3 engines, that's $6m, leaving $4m for a bit of steel out of that $10m budget.
The Starship prototype cost is a big variable, but assuming it's somewhere in the (log scale) middle of the 10 to 180 million range it's not unreasonable to think that SpaceX can afford to keep producing these things at a rapid rate for quite a while without going broke.
Well, they are shooting at a per Raptor cost of 100k long term 250k short term. Even assuming it is 4x as much now, that is about 3m for the engines.
The stainless steel only cost a couple 100k$ at most.
Add in some bits and pieces, like flight termination system, thruster system and tanks, sensors and so on, add another couple 100k$, lets say 1 million. All of these are already produced by SpaceX in pretty large numbers.
Then manufacturing cost, is a bit hard to calculated, they are producing one prototype every couple of weeks and most of the labor is in welders and most of the machines are welding robots. Labor cost being the dominate cost.
A large part of the cost would likely be the launch site construction itself, and how you want to amortize to an individual prototype is hard to say.
Then there is another bunch of cost for operations and fuel add another couple 100k.
So I would assume a cost of 3 million to 20 million. I'm giving this a pretty large range because its a guessing game. Over the course of a year they tested about 10 increasingly complex prototypes. That would at the high end be a cost of 200 million for one year of this process, if we ignore the design cost.
Consider that NASA SLS has a budget of about 2.5 billion a year including ground system (and that has been going on for 10+ years and will go on for many more), SpaceX is basically nickel and dimming a launch vehicle of that size.
Elon Musk has a couple of saying along the lines of 'if its long its wrong' regarding development. Spending 50% less time while blowing up prototypes regularly is cheaper then spending longer on the project overall. A lot of the things SpaceX does is novel, so no matter how much design work, nobody has ever flipped a deep cryo methane tank and started a full flow staged engine with torch igniter.
Working the perfect design for this on paper would take incredibly long and even then you might have to start over again and once you finally test it.
This is certainty an expensive program, but compared to Starlink is seems less insane in terms of cash burn. Doing both together is a bit extra insane, but on the other hand if you have Starship, the cost of Starlink drops to pretty absurdly low level.
That's some super optimistic numbers you chose there. There's no reason to believe that at this point in time a Raptor engine is only half as much as a less complex Merlin engine.
The loss of three engines per test is by far the most costly part of the operation. How much an engine costs right now, I don't know of course, but I'm very confident it's more than $2 million a piece.
And in the next tweet, he mentions his concern is about "secondary structure", which I take it to mean all the infrastructure that you would need to build and operate to make that rocket fly.
Find me a tweet where he actually states that Raptor is at V1.0.
Raptor already seems to have a production rate comparable to Merlin.
And btw, in my final estimate I gave a larger range. Even assuming 3 million per Raptor, that would fit within the 20 million I mentioned.
Starlink has an insane cash burn during deploy, indeed, but after that it's a cash cow. People are paying through their noses for shoddy satellite internet, and Starlink is orders of magnitude better quality and way lower priced...