Well to me the only milestone that matters is the cost of launching to orbit, and that hasn't improved.
Indeed - not only has SpaceX lowered the cost to get payload to space, they've also pushed other companies like ArianeGroup and ULA to lower their prices in order to compete.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
That's certainly the textbook economics answer.
And yet, SpaceX has had industry leading low prices since they debuted the F9. And that was true even when they had a de facto monopoly on medium-heavy launch when both ULA and ArianeGroup discontinued their rockets without having working replacements.
As to why - I guess you'd have to ask them.
It does seem to have helped to enlarge the market. I think SpaceX does on the order of 30 non-Starlink launches every year, and a lot of those are commercial. But I think everyone recognizes that they could probably charge more, and make more money if they wanted to.
That's a silly assertion. Fuel can only cost so much.
Starship is about as large as a 747; Falcon is quite a bit smaller. Neither is completely full of fuel, but fully fueling a 747 takes a couple hundred grand.
Even if Starship is 100% fuel, you're talking about $1M or so max. Less than even one of the engines.
NASA launches payloads on falcon 9 and falcon heavy for a third of the cost it was before.
NASA pays the same price per seat in the Dragon as the Soyuz because they prefer not to fill up all the seats.
That is incorrect. There are now a maximum of 4 seats in Crew Dragon.[1]
While it's true that NASA had plans to take down 6 Astronauts in an emergency, 2 of them would have basically been strapped to cargo pallets. Not something NASA would engage in under normal circumstances.
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1. > After SpaceX had already designed the interior layout of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA decided to change the specification for the angle of the ship’s seats due to concerns about the g-forces crew members might experience during splashdown.
> The change meant SpaceX had to do away with the company’s original seven-seat design for the Crew Dragon.
> “With this change and the angle of the seats, we could not get seven anymore,” Shotwell said. “So now we only have four seats. That was kind of a big change for us.”
https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/12/07/after-redesigns-the-fi...
The latter has gotten significantly cheaper.
NASA's price to SpaceX for the crew missions also includes development costs of the capsule and suits because there wasn't one on the market available for NASA to use.
And above all of that, price to a customer, especially a government customer with a lot of specific requirements and paperwork, is not the same as the actual cost.