Dtiffster Ars Praefectus
8y
3,075
Subscriptor

expand...As has been pointed out by others they have gotten cheaper on an absolute basis inflation adjusted as well. And there isn't much competition that is cheaper than them on an absolute basis, and all of it with only a fraction of their capacity. You got Electron at 200/300 kg for SSO/LEO for 8.5 mil, PSLV for 1.6/3.2 tonnes SSO/LEO for 18 mil, Vega C at 1.45 tonnes SSO for 37 (very subsidized) mil euro, and GSLV for 2.5/3/6 tonnes GTO/SSO/LEO for 47 mil. F9 does that with a droneship landing 5.4/12/18+ tonnes GTO/SSO/LEO for 69.5 mil. If all you need is exactly the performance of one of those rockets for one payload, then yes they are cheaper. And that is true for some payloads, but not for a substantial amount of the market. Otherwise those rockets would be out launching SpaceX right now, right? And rocket lab wouldn't be building neutron, right? Sounds like you are the one falling victim to hater math.

And you've got plenty of their commerical (i.e. non starlink) missions use a pretty substantial amount of F9 and FHs capabilities. They've launches F9 with expended boosters and FHs with expended center cores many times in the last few years. Most of the GTO birds are bigger than GSLV can handle, and F9 can handle most upper birth GTO sats to synchronous and the smaller lower birth GTO to supersynchronous that Ariane V used to handle for a fraction of what customers used to pay for the ride share without a hassle. Crew and Cargo dragon missions obviously need SpaceXs vehicles and use about 2/3 of the F9s capacity.

And although we haven't yet got substantially better rockets on the market yet, SpaceX has driven competitors to try. An Atlas V 551 used to cost 250+ mil, and DIVH over 600 mil. The top of the line Vulcan with 6 boosters which is roughly on par with DIVH is being sold for 200ish mil. There are a whole mess of at least partially reusable rockets that are only going to exist because of SpaceX. Fanboy math or not the market is working and it's thanks to SpaceX spurring innovation. Hate all you want, things are going swimmingly, and notice that it is not launch customers that are complaining about SpaceX.

Edit: forgot Alpha at 630/1030 kg SSO/LEO for 17.5 mil, which is again too small to eat many launches. //

expand...We've seen reporting recently that SpaceX appears to execute a Starlink launch for an internal cost of about $20M. That suggests they could offer ASDS launches profitably for $30M and RTLS launches for even less. If they were doing that, who the hell would invest in Stoke Space or Rocket Lab or any company not backed by Jeff Bezos? //

You'd think they had promised to make launch free at this point. They're 17% lower per-launch than they were just seven years ago and well below half of what the industry norm was prior to their entrance on the market.