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Comment by hankman86 | Hacker News Reader

Nobody except SpaceX has developed reusable rocket stages, including other US-based aerospace companies. And it is very unclear how much SpaceX really saves in launch costs.

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SpaceX has already reused some Falcons 16 times. They're aiming for 20 and Elon, being Elon, thinks they can do 100x. At this point, the biggest expense will be fuel.

How much cost is there to get a reused stage ready for the next flight? E.g. where does it land on the scale from "replace 30% of the parts due to wear and tear, and do a full disassembly reassembly, saving only 5% of the cost of the booster" to "full up the gas tank like a car and yolo the next ride"?

All I know if is the one tweet from musk years ago that said 90% savings. But ... musk tweets a lot of bullshit so idk

For all we know, SpaceX could be taking a page of out Amazon's book and undercutting competitors while losing money and sustaining it long enough to monopolize the market. Then they raise prices.

Almost all of spaceXs launches are to launch their own sats. Simply put if their costs were as high as other providers they couldn't afford to do it. Other providers costs are out of control.

That story had been told forever. First time over heard it about Amazon.

Amazon lost money for nine years after its founding. <https://www.computerworld.com/article/2575106/amazon-records...>

And it undercut its sellers <https://www.npr.org/2023/10/11/1204264632/amazon-sellers-pri...>

The money has to come from somewhere. Where's this place?

Intesa Sanpaolo banking and Saudi Arabia, among others. $9.8B in funding over 31 rounds, and 84 different investors.

They didn't invest until recently and 9.8 billion isn't enough to cover what SpaceX has done and still cover selling launches at a loss

SpaceX has a median turnaround time between landing and re-launch of about 8 weeks, with some as low as 3 weeks. That includes time for returning the landing platform to port, unloading, payload integration of the new payload, etc, so refurbishment is some fraction of that.

There's no way they're stripping the whole thing down and replacing 30% of parts in that short of a timeframe. Especially given they do it in Florida, and don't bring them back to the factory. So it's hard to say for sure, but the time can give us some sense of what they must be doing.

Right, those were two extreme ends of a spectrum I presented, both of which are obviously not true. What I don't know is where on the spectrum their savings are.

It’s hard to compare because the rocket is designed to be reusable, but as someone that is both a fan of launch of vehicles and in/adjacent to the industry: 30-85%, and I’d bet it’s the high end. Falcon 9 is a really, really big deal in launch capability and affordability.

If you're only saving 5% you just let it burn up on the way down since you lose the much in landing fuel weight and legs. While Musks numbers are likely over optimistic the saving are large enough that it's worth the weight.

This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/a-historic-falcon-9-is...

I suppose the biggest expense is going to be not fuel (methane and LOX are cheap commodities), but the time of the spaceport, of all the people doing the integration and testing of the stack, which takes weeks if not months with trickier payloads.

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