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Comment by afgasgbui | Hacker News Reader

I used to be confused by SpaceX marketing. Why do they talk about 90%+ cost reduction per KG to LEO? Maybe the general public will fall for it, but the general public doesn't often launch satellites. The actual experts will just laugh them out of the room. There's no way their marketing can fool anyone who is in a position to give them money.

Apparently I was mistaken. There are people working at the JPL who seriously believe we'll be able to send payloads to the Martian surface using a human-rated vehicle and bring it back to Earth for $1,000/kg. There are people working for NASA who actually believe we will be able to launch to LEO for $55/kg.

What the Hell?

I guess it's no wonder NASA is doing so badly if these are the sorts of people they're hiring.

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For those of us not expert in the commercial space industry, it might be more helpful to point out some reasoning outlining the impossibility of these claims or pointing to resources that do instead of simply scoffing at them. An eyeroll is not a very educating comment (especially coming from a relatively new account with low karma and no clear expert credentials on this matter presented, though I am assuming you have them) and this is an area I think many of us on HN would like to learn more about as well as improve our critical thinking on such matters. We'd love to hear more about why you think what you think.

Agreed, I'm curious if the scoffing was at the claim of 100 metric tons to LEO or the pricing for such a launch ($55/kg would mean a $5.5M/launch cost). I'm assuming the latter since the Saturn V could put 140 metric tons in LEO, but the F9 costs roughly an order of magnitude more.

The latter, of course. Launch prices have been fairly consistent for about 50 years. Promising a sudden 20x cost reduction over SpaceX's already exaggerated figures without any real innovation is ludicrous.

Yeah, it's not like you could say double the number of transistors on an IC every two years - those things are tiny. Totally impossible.

> Launch prices have been fairly consistent for about 50 years

Is the claim that Falcon 9 and Heavy prices, total and per kilo, are comparable to any platform from before 2010?

Yup! The Saturn V cost $5k per kg to LEO. Best case, SpaceX has a ~2x savings over the tech we had in the 1960s. The Soyuz 2.1a is competitively priced and it's still launching, though we can't really compare since we only know the price and not the actual cost of the launch.

The tradeoffs SpaceX has made have some real cost savings. Problem is that it's not anywhere even remotely close to what they want you to believe it is.

> Saturn V cost $5k per kg to LEO. Best case, SpaceX has a ~2x savings over the tech we had in the 1960s

NASA begs to disagree, showing Falcon 9 at $2,720 per kg and Falcon Heavy at $1,400 per kg [1]. This is the cheapest launch platform on the planet, apart from, perhaps, the PSLV [2].

And those are their prices, not costs. The runners up are Proton, Long March 3B and Ariane 5G at $4,320; $4,412; and $9,167 per kg respectively [3]. There simply isn't competitive pressure to push SpaceX's prices down. Particularly in heavy.

Ignoring the tremendous leaps we've made in launch economics over the past two decades, largely as a result of SpaceX, is naïvely dismissive. Yes, they talk a bigger game than they bring. But they're still bringing some big fucking game.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...

So far I've seen them achieve everything they set out to achieve. But I'm not an expert, or even a knowledgeable amateur, in this area.

What's the reasoning behind your scepticism? More information would be good, it's an interesting subject.

>So far I've seen them achieve everything they set out to achieve.

They built competitive rockets. That's a big deal and I don't wish to diminish that. They promised magic 99% cost savings and are nowhere close.

I googled. It seems they're at a 40% reduction as of Oct 2020 [0] for Falcon launches of government satellites, and could go lower but there's politics involved - as always in government-funded anything.

Is that correct? If so, then that's not "nowhere close", it's another order of magnitude away, for sure, but the high-volume approach of Spaceship could do that? Or not?

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/05/how-much-cheaper-a...

Do we know their costs though? Even if they did achieve 99%, whats the incentive to reduce prices that far while the volume is this low?

They're getting closer. If they achieve rapid reusability with Super Heavy Starship then it'll be close to 99% reduction in costs.

Market competition sets prices. Marginal cost = price only when you have competitive. Otherwise, you cannot use the advertised mission prices to determine their costs.

They could invent a rocket that does $500/kg to LEO and it wouldn't matter one iota to their actual costs if 1) demand doesn't go up and 2) competition doesn't exist.

I don't remember if they promise 99% cost saving as you mentioned, but even if that's correct it's about Starship, at some unspecified point in future once they have flown regularly. They definitely didn't promise any such saving for 2021 launches. If Starship hasn't flown, how can they be "nowhere close"?

> So far I've seen them achieve everything they set out to achieve.

That's not true. They've achieved parts of what they set out for, yes. The important parts, too. But far from everything.

Just one example, because that irks me every time someone brings up nonsense like Starship point-to-point as a realistic option: SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.

I won't get into why faster turnaround times are actually irrelevant for F9, but it goes to show that reality and plans don't always align even with SpaceX.

Now with regards to the turnaround time, people with be quick to point out that this beat the Shuttle record of 54 days, but then again the F9 in question wasn't a crewed mission and doesn't reuse its upper stage, so...

Another reason for healthy scepticism is the lack of cold hard numbers regarding the system. We cannot know the total system cost yet or the launch cost, because neither the final spec system nor its launch infrastructure exists. The number can also be very deceiving: the STS had an estimated $2000/kg to LEO goal and that was realistic back in he 1970s. Why? Because the calculation assumed ~50 launches per year and lots of cargo missions.

Instead, the shuttle launched only 4.5 times a year and the launch cost increased dramatically after the 1986 Challenger disaster and again after the 2003 Columbia accident due to safety procedures and maintenance.

In addition all launch facilities, infrastructure costs and R&D are priced into the Shuttle launch cost (e.g. total program cost divided by number of missions), which is impossible to do for Starship since we don't know the R&D or infrastructure costs.

Just throwing a number like $1000/kg into the ring is pretty meaningless as you need to provide context as well (number of launches per year, unit- and infrastructure costs, R&D costs, etc.). It's also important to keep in mind that this is the number SpaceX wants to achieve eventually, e.g. not with the first launch.

F9 launch costs haven't decreased either and NASA and the DoD in particular still pay a hefty premium compared to business customers. We'll see.

F9 launch costs haven't decreased for customers. That in no way implies they haven't decreased for SpaceX. Why would Space X reduce the cost for customers below what they are willing to pay?

They're not going to decrease them unless they have competitive. As it stands, every decrease is just more margin. As long as they keep winning contracts by being slightly cheaper than the competition, they can just pocket the benefits.

Look, they've flown block 5 boosters 10 times with minimal refurbishment. Given the cost of Merlin engines, it's obvious they're saving money over expendable designs.

> SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.

SpaceX's original plan was to further evolve F9. Then they decided to build Starship instead, at which point they decided to stop making any more than minor improvements to F9. If they hadn't decided to work on Starship, they probably would have made further improvements in F9 turnaround time, and other metrics. Citing they fact that they are now never going to deliver on their original objectives for F9 doesn't tell us anything about whether they can deliver on their objectives for Starship.

> SpaceX planned to achieve a turnaround time for F9 of 24 hours. So far, the best they could do is 27 days.

They didn't plan to achieve this. It was an Elon's tweet when they only started recovering F9 booster, even before B5 (please correct me if I remember incorrectly).

SpaceX can be anything, but they're still a business. There is no reason whatsoever for 24 hour turnaround for F9. First of all they have a fleet of eight F9 boosters. Boosters are waiting for payloads, not the other way around like in the past. Even with Starlink, 2021 cadence has only been a launch every 10 days so far, and with that SpaceX already put more payloads into space than everyone else combined in 2021, governments or commercials. Why invest in something with no return, just for bragging right?

Second of all, and this is more important, F9 is the past, Starship is the future. Why invest in a dead end product when the future is such a game changer? They are on the cusp of launching SH/SS in the near term, according to Gwynne Shotwell just a few days ago.

> There are people working for NASA who actually believe we will be able to launch to LEO for $55/kg.

I mean, that works fine if you have something like a space elevator:

  $ units # assuming 10cent/kWh[0]
  You have: 300 km gravity * (.1$/kWh)
  Definition: 0.081722083 US$ / kg
  You have: sqrt(G earthmass/earthradius)
  Definition: 7911.1468 m / s
  You have: (9km/s)^2 * (.1$/kWh)
  Definition: 2.25 US$ / kg
  You have: ((9km/s)^2+300 km gravity) * (.1$/kWh)
  Definition: 2.3317221 US$ / kg

So lifting stuff to LEO should cost ~2.50$/kg in energy at current retail prices. Adding (merely) a factor of twenty in overhead to actually deliver that energy is significantly more iffy, though.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail...

SpaceX doesn't have to hit those price targets in order to be successful, they just have to have the cheapest per-rocket costs versus their competitors.

They also don't have to pass all those costs savings to their customers: they can charge exorbitant prices and people will still happily pay if it's the best deal around. I'm sure many people at NASA and JPL are aware that SpaceX has some pretty good fallback positions if their marketing materials turn out to be inaccurate predictions of the future and that their bargaining position against SpaceX is weak up until they have multiple vendors and competitive bidding.

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