As much as I dislike Musk, this is really not true at all. It is a order of magnitude cheaper post-SpaceX to launch things into orbit then it was pre-SpaceX
> As much as I dislike Musk, this is really not true at all. It is a order of magnitude cheaper post-SpaceX to launch things into orbit then it was pre-SpaceX
Indeed - not only has SpaceX lowered the cost to get payload to space, they've also pushed other companies like ArianeGroup and ULA to lower their prices in order to compete.
Wouldn't the cost of anything only significantly decrease after a second competitor becomes competitive? Why would SpaceX decrease costs further when they are already the cheapest? Unless the increased market gained by going lower increases total income after expenses, it would be net negative to do that.
> Wouldn't the cost of anything only significantly decrease after a second competitor becomes competitive? Why would SpaceX decrease costs further when they are already the cheapest?
That's certainly the textbook economics answer.
And yet, SpaceX has had industry leading low prices since they debuted the F9. And that was true even when they had a de facto monopoly on medium-heavy launch when both ULA and ArianeGroup discontinued their rockets without having working replacements.
As to why - I guess you'd have to ask them.
It does seem to have helped to enlarge the market. I think SpaceX does on the order of 30 non-Starlink launches every year, and a lot of those are commercial. But I think everyone recognizes that they could probably charge more, and make more money if they wanted to.
That's a silly assertion. Fuel can only cost so much.
Starship is about as large as a 747; Falcon is quite a bit smaller. Neither is completely full of fuel, but fully fueling a 747 takes a couple hundred grand.
Even if Starship is 100% fuel, you're talking about $1M or so max. Less than even one of the engines.
> NASA pays the same price per seat in the Dragon as the Soyuz because they prefer not to fill up all the seats.
That is incorrect. There are now a maximum of 4 seats in Crew Dragon.[1]
While it's true that NASA had plans to take down 6 Astronauts in an emergency, 2 of them would have basically been strapped to cargo pallets. Not something NASA would engage in under normal circumstances.
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1. > After SpaceX had already designed the interior layout of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA decided to change the specification for the angle of the ship’s seats due to concerns about the g-forces crew members might experience during splashdown.
> The change meant SpaceX had to do away with the company’s original seven-seat design for the Crew Dragon.
> “With this change and the angle of the seats, we could not get seven anymore,” Shotwell said. “So now we only have four seats. That was kind of a big change for us.”
Paying for a full-service crew launch service including ground handling for payload and crew, space suits, life support, docking, and retrieval of the crew/capsule on landing is very different than paying for kg of payload launched to orbit.
The latter has gotten significantly cheaper.
NASA's price to SpaceX for the crew missions also includes development costs of the capsule and suits because there wasn't one on the market available for NASA to use.
And above all of that, price to a customer, especially a government customer with a lot of specific requirements and paperwork, is not the same as the actual cost.
