this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
35 points (100.0% liked)

Space

7287 readers
36 users here now

News and findings about our cosmos.


Subcommunity of Science


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i guess it’s theoretically cool that Elon can build a thing for cheaper than the government can

I'm not even positive that part is really true. I mean the cost to the government is lower, but SpaceX is spending billions of dollars a year. We don't really know what starship or their lander costs them to make. All these Musk fans always talk about how much cheaper it is, but I'd like to see the numbers.

[–] zhunk@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

No one will really be able to answer that until Starship has commercial pricing. In the meantime, all we have is stray interviews and tweets from "the founder" about the engines being <$1m and the total investment being $2-3b so far, plus another $2b this year. They really need to start flying any payloads before I feel good about it, though.

For Falcon, NASA said years ago that it would have cost them at least an extra $1.5b to develop in-house, and we can see that the commercial pricing and cost/kg beats the rest of the market.