do you have a source for this? Wikipedia data in the Launch vehicle estimated payload cost per kg table disagrees with you. By a factor of ~20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
Cargo flights are different, and you should also look at total program costs from the deal with NASA. The NASA contract [1] was for ~12 launchs, minimum 20T of cargo for $1.6B. That puts the total program cost at $80,000 per kg. The space shuttle program costs were about $60,000 per kg.
But don't take my word for it, here's a quote from a NASA scientist saying their payload cost per pound went up. [2]
"My cost per pound went up with these rockets," Margasahayam told Tech Insider. "On the shuttle, it would be much less."
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/CRS-Announcement-Dec-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-rocket-cargo-price-by...
Average cost of a SpaceX resupply is $152 million. That's the total amount the US government pays per mission.
You couldn't send the shuttle up with 10% of the cargo capacity and only pay 10% of the cost. The Shuttle was $1.5 billion whether it was 16,000 kg to the ISS or 2,000 kg.
Nor could you just use it to send two people to the ISS and only pay $170 million for two seats (Really $400 million - the actual cost for two seats.)
> Their own numbers say that in the fullness of time they may be 10% cheaper. So far, not so.
How do you reconcile these two statements? Are the costs now 10% cheaper per kg or not?
Also from the link 2
> Margasahayam points out that, while the space shuttles were more expensive — a whopping $500 million per launch (or possibly $1.5 billion, according to one analysis we've seen) — each mission carried about 50,000 lbs. (plus seven astronauts!). That means each pound of cargo used to cost about $10,000 to ship on a shuttle.
Some estimates are even higher than that, close to $2 billion, inflation adjusted
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/03/first-spacex-astronaut-launc...
So the low estimate is not really fair, SpaceX has to pay off their R&D costs as well.
> So far, the average costs of launching cargo remain on par with the space shuttle at about $US30,000 per lb. (The space shuttle cost about $US1.5 billion per mission, including development, and could carry up to 50,000 lbs of cargo.)
Also not to mention that the Wikipedia table is probably irrelevant, because for the Space Shuttle launch cost is just the total cost of the entire program (including R&D and everything else) divided by how much it actually carried, while SpaceX figures are literally just Elon's marketing material. Look at the citations.
> The development of commercial launch systems has substantially reduced the cost of space launch. NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg.
The fact that SpaceX advertises that figure doesn't make it true.
To my understanding several times the federal government has special requests that can and will drive the launch cost upwards for many (if not all) launch providers.
Every launch contract is bespoke and the customers can request additional (sometimes significant) amounts of documentation of part providence and the rest. The US government often requests significantly extra documentation so it increases costs quite a bit.