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Comment by ternnoburn | Hacker News Reader

100m is vaporware pricing. It's the $30k Tesla that drives itself. Or any of the numbers on the hyperloop. It's a made up number for the press.

I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do some basic analysis and not just believe everything they hear from that guy!

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Are you arguing in good faith? What are you based on to say $100mil is vaporware? Most commercial flights (i.e. non-Starlink) are priced starting at $70 millions - [0], increased from $60m previously. That’s not for the press, although government customers such as NASA often pay much more. SpaceX is very dominant at this point that they’d be foolish to charge under cost.

And then there are Starlink launches. They made money on it on 2024, according to Shotwell, so launch cost must be way lower than external price.

[0] - https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

SpaceX is mass-producing the engines, mass-producing the heat shield tiles, the fuel is cheap, the structure is stainless steel (cheap), payload capacity is huge, and full rapid re-usability seems well under way. There is no way Starship will not be the cheapest launch platform (per kilogram) if and when it is operational. It will definitely have a launch price tag for under $100m.

But it's not just that guy.

> Starship rocket to less than $10 million. However, Starship is still very much a development program, and Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39 Raptor engines and labor expenses.

So it's going to be somewhere over $100 for a fully disposable launch. What happens when they start reusing the booster? What happens when they have optimised production further?

Are you sure that your anti-musk bias isn't clouding your judgement?

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/rocket-report-a-new-es...

$100m might be correct though. Elon Musk himself has said that just the hardware for each Starship test flight has cost $100 million. This doesn't count all the hardware that hasn't flown so in practice each test flight was even more expensive than this, but there is no reason to argue that Starship will cost more than $200 million for an expendable launch and maybe a quarter of that assuming reuse via booster catch.

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