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Comment by ericmsimons | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what SpaceX's target cost per launch is compared to these guys (4.9M)?

Also, I'd never heard of Rocketlab before but it turns out that they're back by Khosla Ventures. Pretty cool.

SpaceX lists the launch of a Falcon 9 to be $61M. But they can put 13,150 kg into LEO. Rocketlab's is much smaller, only sending 100 kg into LEO. So a Falcon 9 is ~12x more expensive, but delivers more than 125x payload to orbit. Plus you can send stuff into GEO with a Falcon 9, but Rocketlab doesn't have a chance with one their size.

So Rocketlab comes out sounding like a worse deal in the cost/payload ratio, but if Rocketlab can deliver on their launch frequencies then they can capture the market of smaller companies having to buy a secondary spot on a large rocket, and then wait for the whims of the other people to be ready to launch. The smaller company can fork over $5M and have the #1 priority and only payload on the rocket.

SpaceX source: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

Won't that $61M figure get slashed by a tremendous amount once they achieve re-usability?

The cost is expected to go down from $56M to just 5-$7M http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-04-15/how-huch-doe...

SpaceX will achieve reusability in multiple steps, first recovering the first stage, then the second stage and so on. The cost will go down, but probably not very soon and not so fast.

Electron here is advertising 125kg to low-earth orbit for $4.9M.

SpaceX Falcon 9 is the only current offering, with 13,150kg to LEO for $62M; it's a major difference in capability.

SpaceX Falcon 1 (no longer offered) was demonstrating 185kg up to a claimed 670kg to LEO for (contract numbers vary) between $7M to $11M USD.

Another point of reference is Planet Lab's Dove cubesats are ~4kg and fly in LEO (~400km). This would be an ideal launch platform for ongoing maintenance of the constellation. Falcon 9 still makes sense for the initial launch as they normally ride up in large groups. The most recent Falcon 9 carried 14.

I'm just reciting this from memory but I think spaceX launches are currently $50-100 million per launch. If they can achieve reusable rockets it'll be on the order of a few hundred thousand per launch though.

" If they can achieve reusable rockets it'll be on the order of a few hundred thousand per launch though."

Do you have any sources I can read on that? I know reusing some of the hardware will have cost savings, but you are more than an order of magnitude cheaper than I have heard claimed. I would be very surprised that even if all of the hardware was 100% free that there would not be a few hundred thousand in labor costs alone for analysis and launch operations.

Looks like it'll be more like $5-6 million per launch.

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/01/14/shotwell/

I think the above comment of it cost only a few hundred thousand dollars is just the cost of the fuel. Ancillary costs like moving the rocket, repairs, refueling, launch planning etc would also cost some money but it is still orders of magnitude cheaper than building new rockets or heavy repairs from crash landings.

Thank you for the response. However, that is exactly my point. Orders of magnitude, plural, means the rocket will be 1% of the current cost. That means a $61 million rocket is on the order of $610,000.

I do not believe that raw material procurement and manufacturing account for 99% of current launches or 97% or 90%. Even if it did, I believe there would be significant amount devoted to quality inspections and testing before you could trust a used rocket that not only fired, but impacted the ground to be used again.

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