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#1 2025-05-14 16:18:51
- kbd512
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- Registered: 2015-01-02
- Posts: 8,174
SpaceX's Effect on Launch Services Cost / Availability
Here's a "Compromise and Conceit" blog posting from the user "faustusnotes", who is critical of SpaceX launch cost claims, which I've included for balanced / honest / factual reporting:
How Much do SpaceX Rocket Launches Really Cost?
Conclusion
The final conclusion of all of this is that SpaceX are lying about the price to launch stuff into space on their rockets, and the media are uncritically repeating their fabricated price without checking its validity, comparing it with other prices available on the SpaceX website, comparing it with the prices that would be implied by SpaceX’s government contracts, or looking at the evidence from actual SpaceX flight data. The true price of launching stuff into space on a SpaceX rocket is likely more like $6,000/kg, more than twice the number they are citing.
Furthermore, this price is not a revolutionary drop in the cost of launching, and is in fact entirely consistent with the historical trend in US rocket launch prices. The best prices Falcon X manages to achieve are also not unusual, being simply normal prices for a Chinese or Russian rocket. The claim that SpaceX is doing anything special to drive down rocket prices is just more Muskrat hype, with no basis in reality at all.
It is also clear that reusability has not driven down the price of launches. Reusability incurs a payload penalty, since the rocket needs to be stronger and some fuel needs to be reserved for re-entry. Reusability is also not a radical new idea: the space shuttle’s booster rockets were reusable, and SpaceX’s sole advance on this 1980s technology has been to land them on a barge rather than beside one. This likely speeds up the time to return them to use, and slightly reduces the penalty incurred for robustness (since the rockets don’t need to resist the crash into the water) but it also significantly increases the amount of reserve fuel needed for re-entry. In fact United Launch Alliance (ULA), a SpaceX competitor, analysed reusability and found that it does not necessarily deliver much cost benefit for these reasons. There are formulae for the calculation of how many re-uses are needed for a recyclable rocket to be cheaper than an expendable one, available at the documents linked in this discussion board, and they suggest that in general it only reduces costs in the long-run by about 5%. So no, SpaceX has not revolutionized anything in this regard either.
So in conclusion, SpaceX is not revolutionizing space travel, it has not driven prices down at all relative to the long-term trend, launches with SpaceX cost considerably more than their PR suggests, and SpaceX is essentially a low-quality internet service provider with a side-hustle in military contracting, being heavily propped up by murky venture capital. Elon Musk is not, and never will be, anything except a scammer, and in future decades people will look back on how he was viewed in this period with confusion, scorn and disbelief.
I feel as though the user who posted that is likely unaware of some of the minutia of government launch contracts. One aspect that greatly increases cost is the government's refusal to purchase launch insurance.
When the government doesn't indemnify for liability, launch companies need to purchase more insurance to cover potential losses. This increases their insurance premiums, which they then have to factor into their launch prices to remain profitable, according to the GAO.
As one should know, launching giant rockets is a risky business, the government expects its launches to go off without a hitch, you will be held liable if a rocket that Uncle Sam paid for fails to go into orbit, and any insurance companies concerned with self-preservation will summarily charge Acme Rocket Corp an arm and a leg in order to pay out if their rocket fails in a way that affects mission success as the government defines it. Some of the launch contracts can literally double in price as a result. Communist countries may not and probably do not operate the same way. They probably force the company that paid for a launch to eat the cost of the launch and payload if their rocket fails. We don't do that in the western world, so we're at a financial disadvantage there. However, if we can still bring launch prices into alignment with the communists, then we must be doing something right because even after those additional costs, we're becoming more and more competitive on price. That's not a reflection on the actual cost to the service provider to launch their rocket, rather government bureaucracy with zero-defect mentality.
It's notable that ULA did not lower its launch services prices until competition from SpaceX forced them to.
It's even more notable that virtually every nation that launches rockets into orbit is now developing LOX/LCH4 engines, because Methane / natural gas is the lowest cost fuel that money can buy. Everyone talked a good game about Methane rocket engine development prior to SpaceX, spent untold millions and billions on engine development, but until serious competition appeared that mandated cheaper fuels to remain competitive on price, nothing stopped "business as usual".
As this chart from the same blog post shows:
First, I will readily admit that Elon Musk is a salesman for his company. They are trying to "sell" their product to new prospective customers, after all, because that is their business. That said, their marginal cost to produce a rocket has to be lower than competitors because they don't have to make a brand new rocket from scratch for each launch. Certain Falcon boosters have now flown more than 10 times. If SpaceX chose to do so, they could easily afford to further reduce their contracted price while remaining profitable.
The poster is also engaging in quite a bit of "cherry picking" on launch services cost by way of false equivalence. For starters, many of the modes of operation of Falcon and Falcon Heavy are not even options for the other rockets on the list. He / she is quite correct about reusability being somewhat dubious as a cost savings benefit when it affects dollars spent per kilo of payload delivered to orbit. However, what rapid reusability clearly does affect is launch cadence. No other nation, let alone a specific launch services provider, comes close to matching SpaceX's launch cadence. When you need a rocket soon, SpaceX usually has something available. Furthermore, when comparing like-for-like launch options, SpaceX easily has the cheapest rocket in terms of dollars spent per kilo of payload delivered to a specified orbit. Whether they choose to charge more for specific services like "ride sharing" is something beyond the simplistic analysis of what purchasing a singular rocket launch for delivery of a singular payload, which truly requires a rocket of a given size, will actually cost the customer.
One real clear indicator that SpaceX does provide the least expensive launch services is the sheer percentage of the total global launch tonnage that SpaceX has been solely responsible for delivering to orbit over the last several years. Does anyone truly believe that someone with the tens of millions of dollars needed to launch any kind of satellite into space is not going to "shop around" to find the best launch prices? How does one imagine they became that wealthy to begin with? I can guarantee it wasn't by only selecting the most expensive option to get the same job done. If cost and schedule matters, as it frequently does, then customers who would otherwise choose to use Soyuz or Proton or Long March are now choosing to do business with SpaceX, because they can be reasonably sure that their payload is going to get into space, on-time and within budget.
Long March 5 is comparable to Falcon 9 Full Thrust (FT) in terms of payload to LEO when Falcon 9 FT is launched in expendable mode, and using Long March 5 does in fact result in a reduced launch cost in terms of dollars per kilogram. However, Falcon 9 FT has launched 454 times since 2018. Long March 5 has only launched 14 times since 2016. Regardless of how much cheaper Long March 5 is on paper, the Chinese haven't launched it more than a literal handful of times over the past 9 years. That means it either has significant technical or operational issues or they cannot mass produce it. I'm going with the former because the latter is a ridiculous proposition. The Chinese mass produce all manner of things. To launch anything into orbit, you first need a fully mission capable rocket sitting on the pad. SpaceX is going like gangbusters when it comes to having rockets ready for flight.
If it sounds like I'm tooting SpaceX's horn a little too loudly, I always have been mightily impressed by how the Soviets and Chinese have operated their space programs on comparative shoestring budgets with smaller cadres of dedicated personnel. If anything, I would assert that the communist system, whatever that is, has been more effective at containing costs over their years of being in the launch services business. Unfortunately, the same system that is so good at containing launch costs also tends to stifle innovation. Only the imposition of an unstoppable external force motivates them to pursue something better.
SpaceX's other up-and-coming competitors, far from being "stick-in-the-mud" types, are innovating their way to more competitive market positions, despite claims that nobody else can do X / Y / Z better than SpaceX. I'm genuinely looking forward to the creative solutions that other launch services providers are devising to undercut SpaceX on cost.
One final note is that everyone's prices have gone up since COVID, so using launch prices that might be 10 years old at this point is not very constructive to the discourse regarding current launch costs and cost-competitiveness within the launch services industry. What I would like to see is a drastic increase in launch cadence, because that tends to minimize costs through streamlining of operations to meet the launch schedule.
Only the Soyuz (2,000 launches prior to replacement with the heavily modified current version), Long March 2/3/4 series (492 launches), Falcon 9 (474 launches), and Proton (430 launches) have comparable flight heritage. Every other launcher is a very distant second. Atlas V is the runner-up (102 launches). All other launch vehicles have even fewer flights.
I do not consider the Kosmos, earlier versions of Atlas, Thor, or Titan derivative launch vehicles to be in the same class as purpose-built orbital launch vehicles. Yes, they provide good service in the past, but only the Titan is in the same payload class as these modern launchers, and Titan launch costs became so great that it was discontinued because it was uneconomical. I guess the Delta series and Space Shuttle also qualify as "work horse" launch vehicles, but once again those were so expensive that they were retired.
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#2 2025-05-14 18:44:08
- tahanson43206
- Moderator
- Registered: 2018-04-27
- Posts: 21,380
Re: SpaceX's Effect on Launch Services Cost / Availability
This post is reserved for an index to posts that may be contributed by NewMars members over time.
The argument that kbd512 is having with the anonymous blogger is certainly interesting, and it seems to me there is room for NewMars members to keep a watch for news to further clarify the positions taken by one side or the other.
The difficulty of comparing costs is significant, as each participant concedes.
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