Starship is heavy lift / heavy expense. If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper. Or you wait until you find 600 other small sat users who want to launch into the same / similar orbit.
The talk I heard was that New Glenn was supposed to be BO's answer to Starship (or more likely Falcon Heavy) that could launch a bunch of Project Kuiper satellites into LEO so Amazon could compete with Starlink and feed Amazon's Ground Station as a Service offering.
If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO, Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons and Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.
I'm not a heavy lift sales-person, but I've been in the room when they discussed what they thought they could sell to govt / mil / commercial customers. So take this with a little bit of salt... Seems to me BO was targeting a slightly smaller launch vehicle than SpaceX was going with so they could decouple schedule with Amazon's Kuiper Project. You don't want to have that cool new rocket you developed dependent on a satellite constellation that gets delayed. So you have a rocket that would be easier to fill with a number of small to medium sized satellites to LEO or (fewer) to GEO.
And like other people on the thread have commented, it seems BO is a decade behind SpaceX, so... yeah... a big rocket that competes with Starship is pretty risky for BO.
And yes, I understand that BO is independent from Amazon, but from what I've seen this is just so they can execute on a schedule that isn't determined by AMZN's board of directors. They seem pretty closely related, just from talking with Kuiper, GSaaS and BO engineers.
I don't work for any of the above mentioned companies and have no insider information. YMMV. Just my guesses from watching some of the personalities involved for the last 30 years.
- "If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper."
I don't buy this. I think small startups like that can't get the economies of scale that would let them compete on price, for any payload. So long as they are targeting low-value niche markets like one-off smallsats, they won't have the revenue to support that.
At what Rocket Labs is currently charging, $7.5 million [0], it's within the realm of possibility you could even launch an entire reusable Starship with a one-cubesat payload for less than that. (The target figure Musk uses is $2 million/launch; take that with the appropriate bucket of salt).
How many tens of billions of R&D have gone into SpaceX, and how many launches are they able to amortize that cost over? How many decades have they invested in their manufacturing processes? Do their competitors' engines roll off factory assembly lines?
I think the $2m per Starship launch is "asperational." As in... they "aspire" to have launch costs that low. I do not believe Starship launches are currently as low as $2m (or $10m, which is the other figure I saw mentioned.) I believe their current launch cost (cost to launch the rocket, not the price they charge people to launch their payload) is considerably higher than $50m.
But... yes... if you can re-use your launch vehicle, then per-launch cost SHOULD go down. But at the current time, after 6 launches, only one booster has been snagged by the chop-sticks. The Starships themselves have NOT been re-used.
So if you're going to compare Starship with Electron, you should compare costs of Starship after it's fully re-usable with Electron after it's as re-usable as it's intended to be.
Rocket Lab claims they're at 7.5m per launch, but again, THAT price may come down as they use re-usable components on subsequent launches. So instead of comparing costs of Starship sometime in the future with Electron now, compare Starship sometime in the future with Electron sometime in the future.
"As an auditor I review public company financial statements. These financial statements are prepared in Rocket Lab's case based on US GAAP. Adjacent to US GAAP figures companies also provide NON GAAP disclosures for informative purposes. Formally these are not audited, but auditors sanity check them anyway.
Since Adam and Pete are CEO and CFO of a public company, each time they give you a number in interviews / press releases etc., they will be based on US GAAP and if explicitly stated NON-GAAP basis.
Why is this relevant Tim?
Well if Adam and/or Pete give you a number, that number will includes ALL the (estimated) costs in accordance with US GAAP for what it takes to build something. In this case Adam/Pete on numerous ocassions told investors roughly the following:
We aim to have 50% gross margins on Neutron with a similar flight cadence as Electron. Electron has 50% gross margins at roughly 20 annual flights. Adam specifically also said they will probably arrive there even sooner with Neutron since its first stage + fairings reusable and Electron till this date is expendable.
With a $55 million sticker price and a 50% gross margin, the cost of sales under US GAAP will rougly in the $25-30 million ballpark based on a cadence of 20 flights. NOTE: If Neutron launches more then 20 times per year, cost of sales are going to even drop lower to the point where the build costs rougly resemble those of Falcon 9.
But for now let's keep it simple (20+ flights is the bull case scenario) and let's go with the 20 flights base scenario. In this case it costs between $25-$30 million to build/operate one Neutron rocket. Under US GAAP the main cost components to operate a rocket launch include:
Per flight:
> Fuel costs for the rocket
> Fee to the launch range
> Seperation system
Per build: (allocated based on the number of annual launches)
> Material costs for building the rocket
> Salaries for the factory employee hours
> Machine hour costs
> Depreciation for factory buildings
> Transportation costs
Per launch facility (allocated based on the number of annual launches)
> Depreciation for launch infrastructure
> Salaries for the launch staff
> Security for the launch range etc.
SPB and Adam also said many times, that the per flight costs including material costs to build the rocket are only a FRACTION of the total cost of running a rocket program. The real costs are the fixed ones relating to factories, facilities, employees, depreciation etc (mainly the launch facility and build mentioned in the paragraph above) AKA the JOKE ADAM RUNS IS WE RAISE MONEY TO POUR CONCRETE. Why does he make that joke? Well more then 80% of the total rocket program cost are not related to the LAUNCH VEHICLE ITSELF
Now let's go over to our friends at SpaceX. Remember SpaceX is a private company and in the US there are zero reporting requirements for private companies nor obligations for CEO to quote US GAAP approved figures. Instead since Elon is not bound to any of these regulations, unlike at Tesla for all his SpaceX endavours he employs something what I will going forward refer to as Elon GAAP.
The most important rule of Elon GAAP is that there are NO accounting rules.
Let me illustrate that with this example:
Elon was quoted on multiple occassions about what Starship would cost to build. Basically he said it is the long term goal for a Starship launch is to cost $10 million. This $10 million figure is based on the following assumptions:
> A Starship is fully reusable and will assume aircraft like operations.
> It takes no refurb between flights between each vehicle, similar like an aircraft. In order for that to happen the heatshield tile issue will need to get solved, but ok let's go with his narrative.
As such if you assume the above Elon then says that the only costs for each flight that you will have mainly relates to fuel costs and if you build 100s-1000s of Starships each build will not cost a lot. Elon estimates this to be $10 million per flight.
Caveat are we really comparing a 20 flight Neutron cadence with a 1000 flight Starship cadence?
Yep we are which is totally insane it itself and non apples to apples comparison, but let's go with the leading narrative on X.
So what your finfluencers and SpaceX fanboys on X do is they compare the Starship $10 million number to Rocket Lab's $25-$30 million number and conclude Rocket Lab's Neutron is way to expensive to build and will run out of business long term.
Why is this not correct then Tim?
Well thats because we are comparing Adam's US GAAP cost to launch with Elon's Elon GAAP cost to launch. Its not an apples to apples comparison.
Why?
Because under Elon GAAP you only have to account for direct rocket material and fuel costs and don't have to account for these costs:
Per flight:
> Fee to the launch range (assuming a Cape launch)
> Seperation system
Per build: (allocated based on the number of annual launches)
> Salaries for the factory employee hours
> Machine hour costs
> Depreciation for factory buildings
> Transportation costs
Per launch facility (allocated based on the number of annual launches)
> Depreciation for launch infrastructure
> Salaries for the launch staff
> Security for the launch range etc.
Why you don't have to account for these costs Tim?
Well you see, under Elon GAAP all the employees and suppliers work for free and buildings and launch infrastructure remains in perfect condition and never has to be replaced.
Well Tim Elon GAAP must be wonderful right?
Yes, it truely is an amazing place.
Especially since a large part of the costs of running a rocket program are not directly related to the rocket itself AKA the largest part of the costs are not included in Elon's 10 million number)
After Adam read this he is probably also going to apply Elon GAAP for the Rocket Lab financial statements. This means he just has to account for material and fuel costs for each Neutron launch and can leave everything else out. Under Elon GAAP a Neutron rocket launch will the same or less then $10 million (assuming a 20 Neutron cadence and 1000 Starship cadence), because Neutron is a significantly smaller vehicle then Starship and as such way cheaper to fill. This is partly offset by fact that the second stage is expendable for Neutron.
So the conclusion of this accounting rant is:
No matter the GAAP (US GAAP or Elon GAAP) Neutron will almost always be cheaper to operate then Starship on a dedicated ride basis. You just have to do an apples to apples comparison. Sure Starship will be the king of price per kg, but Neutron is not in the price per kg business, but in the DEDICATED RIDES BUSINESS. For other this will become more obvious in the years to come, when Neutron will ramp cadence well above 20 flights per year.
Why?
Because Starship is a significantly larger vehicle and rocket program costs don't scale LINEAR, they grow EXPENONENTIALLY with the size of the vehicle. How else can the entire Starship program cost $10 billion (Payload estimate) versus Neutron $300 million?
Also Starship is optimized to go to Mars, Neutron is optimized to require minimal infrastructure (no launch tower and other optimizations due to vehicle size.
Remember infrastructure is the largest cost of a rocket program. SPB is very smart and exactly knows what he is doing. So don't let yourself get fooled by finfluencers and fanboys.
Next time you see someone quoting Elon GAAP for rockets, you can refer this post :)
Full disclosure: I love Elon, as a Tesla shareholder, I just don't like Elon GAAP "
I am going out on a limb and say that Project Kuiper satellites themselves are nowhere near ready. Amazon is supposed to launch 50% of the constellation of ~6000 into orbit by July 2026 or risk losing frequencies. So you would think there would be some urgency.
Amazon purchased pretty much all remaining Atlas 5 launches from ULA. This is a proven rocket and ready to fly. Why aren't the satellites being launched? The only thing I can think of is that they are not ready yet.
I am unfortunately skeptical. As you say theyve got two test units in orbit and every day the frequency allocations tick closer. Whats the launch schedule look like for 3000 successful units inside 18 months? What about the in house build process. I havent heard anything that reflects the exponential process growth & delivery theyll need.
That first real launch also starts the recurring costs ticking on the limited orbit lifetime of that hardware. I havent thought through the numbers in a while, but something like a billion or three per year to maintain the constellation? Swag (an optimistic?) $2m satellite and $2m launch cost and 7 year lifetime, thats an yearly average of $1.7b in “maintenance” to keep the very minimal constellation up there. Easily double if their
Im also pretty skeptical of their business. AFAICT its a bunch of ex telecoms and space/defense contractors. So theyre going to try and soak US DoD for connectivity with a more uh, “reliable”, company and a consumer side of “space comcast.” Im pretty skeptical on consumer space “broadband” due to the density problems. And I use comcast as a perjorative for their business & network interop coming from CDN & ISP land.
Lastly on a positive note, I dont expect the same employee resignation bloodbath that AMZN at large is going through at the moment. Kuiper (afaik) has been pretty top down “you shall come in to the office” the whole time, so any rto mandate is unlikely to change the existing experience.
>If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO
Well 45 tons, but this is in a reusable configuration.
>Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons
This is definitely not a reusable configuration. Maybe 150 tons if they are lucky.
>Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.
60 tons for Falcon Heavy means zero reuse, that is a fully expendable launch. Falcon heavy also hasn't carried payloads heavier than 18 tons so far. So this number is something you can whip out to pretend that New Glenn sucks and yet completely miss the mark.
I was going off data from the wikipedia, so yeah, it may not be the most current or most accurate. It's in the ballpark, though.
And most of what I care about is small-sats, so Falcon Heavy's are more than enough lift for me. But yeah, other people may have have a completely different set of requirements and see the Heavy in a different light.
> If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship
Why not? Unless you need a custom orbit that nobody else is interested in then Starship will be by far the cheapest way to put a small satellite in orbit, as part of a ride-share mission.
Give me a phone number. Electron and NanoRacks have phone numbers (email, actually.) I can contact them and get info on dates and costs. SpaceX will give me info on Falcon launches but not Starship launches (and they pick the orbit.)
Smaller launch to a specific orbit. As an analogy, freight trains are one of the most efficient, cheapest ways to move freight. But moving my laundry to the laundromat is better served by another vehicle.
Yeah, that's the main proposition Starship has for the market. Going to analogy with laundromat, you need to include the cost of single-use laundry cart and remember that your laundromat is on another end of the same asphalted road which the truck nearby can easily drive on.
Not sure at all if costs - and hassles, of course - of buying a cart are less than some change for the costs of the fuel - the truck is autonomous, of course.
I believe this is factually inaccurate. What's your source? Though admittedly, we have to depend on BO's predictions for per-kg launch costs, and those may be a lot higher for the first few missions and gradually ease off.
Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to LEO. I see a blurb that says Musk says Starship launches will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while before it costs $10m to launch a Starship.
This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is. But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well.
Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost. If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves the mission profiles?
An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which will cut costs considerably.
Are you arguing in good faith? What are you based on to say $100mil is vaporware? Most commercial flights (i.e. non-Starlink) are priced starting at $70 millions - [0], increased from $60m previously. That’s not for the press, although government customers such as NASA often pay much more. SpaceX is very dominant at this point that they’d be foolish to charge under cost.
And then there are Starlink launches. They made money on it on 2024, according to Shotwell, so launch cost must be way lower than external price.
SpaceX is mass-producing the engines, mass-producing the heat shield tiles, the fuel is cheap, the structure is stainless steel (cheap), payload capacity is huge, and full rapid re-usability seems well under way. There is no way Starship will not be the cheapest launch platform (per kilogram) if and when it is operational. It will definitely have a launch price tag for under $100m.
> Starship rocket to less than $10 million. However, Starship is still very much a development program, and Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39 Raptor engines and labor expenses.
So it's going to be somewhere over $100 for a fully disposable launch. What happens when they start reusing the booster? What happens when they have optimised production further?
Are you sure that your anti-musk bias isn't clouding your judgement?
$100m might be correct though. Elon Musk himself has said that just the hardware for each Starship test flight has cost $100 million. This doesn't count all the hardware that hasn't flown so in practice each test flight was even more expensive than this, but there is no reason to argue that Starship will cost more than $200 million for an expendable launch and maybe a quarter of that assuming reuse via booster catch.
2 billion at the high end isn’t actually unreasonable when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.
There’s a have a fairly linear relationship between rocket payload and size, and for large structures going big tends to increase cost per pound so ~10x the size resulting in ~20x the cost is just mildly pessimistic.
If and only if they the thing is both rapidly reusable and individual starships are actually used for hundreds of launches do those highly optimistic numbers become vaguely possible. Even just a 0.2% failure rate would represent a massive increase over their optimistic estimates.
> when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.
SpaceX's financial situation argues very differently. They have raised relatively little money for a company that is spending multiple billions on two very expensive development programs (Starship and Starlink).
If Falcon cost $100M per launch the 134 launches this year would have bankrupted the company. The $1.7B they raised in spring 2022 was their last major capital injection, and have been self funded since.
If Falcon cost substantially more than $20M to launch SpaceX would need to be getting external money from somewhere. They aren't. Their revenue is well understood and is around $10B per year, and salary costs fot 13,000 people are going to consume most of that. What NASA and the Space Force pay is public knowledge, what they charge for a private launch is known, and the number of Starlink subscribers has been revealed.
SpaceX has several million Starlink customers providing around 6.6 Billion dollars of revenue in 2024. It not clear if it’s profitable yet, but it’s been stated to kick off 100’s of millions in positive cash flow.
As to the salaries of its employees, that’s a major component of launch costs. You can’t point to it and say launch costs must be cheap because they are paying all these people when a large fraction of them are directly or indirectly working on launches.
They are spending ~2 billion per year on Spaceship, but what they charge per launch varies widely. 5 crewed falcon 9 flight cost the government ~260 million each, and the 2 ISS missions where 145 million each. https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2024-revenue/
2 billion is ridiculous, and I can only imagine that number was a misunderstanding SpaceX/Musk saying that they were spending 2 billion in a full year of R&D on Starship.
That doesn’t justify why it’s ridiculous, it’s just a coincidence.
I doubt SpaceX’s internal costs are ~100m/falcon 9 launch, but companies need a markup to be profitable. 100m - 2B is a huge range covering everything from giving up on reusability and paying back R&D over a small number of flights to significant success resulting in a 90% reduction in costs per kg to LEO.
Also, having spent 5B on R&D and doing 5 test flights up to this point works out to 1 billion per flight. That’s not the actual marginal cost per flight, but when people say how expensive each shuttle flight was that’s the number they use. Nothing guarantees they continue to do Starship launches, they could fail it’s among the potential outcomes.
It's ridiculous because the much ridiculed SLS has a launch cost of 2 billion dollars. If you think SpaceX is throwing billions of dollars into developing a vehicle that costs thisuch to launch, you clearly haven't been following SpaceX at all.
You know there is going to be more that 5 flights, and you know people in this thread are not amortizing total R&D into flight costs. People are talking about 68 million per flight for New Glenn, which no doubt has has many hundreds of millions on R&D spend, and hasn't flown one time.
Yes. An estimate for 2 billion is laughable. I did not say the cost WAS $2 billion, I said the Google AI gave me a range from $100M to $2B. Maybe the total cost of the program for the 1st launch was 2 billion? But you're going to amortize that cost over (hopefully) several launches.
I think you misunderstand my argument. Let me restate it.
Someone, sometime said the Starship launch was $2b. The Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer. Someone, sometime said it was around $100m. The Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer. There is a lot of range between 100m and 2b, which implies there's a lot of data getting thrown around and we don't have good numbers.
If observing that we don't have good numbers is arguing in bad faith... I don't know what to tell you.
Musk at some point said $10m for a Starship launch. I think I found a reference for that in a CNBC interview... I'll look it up later. But my point is... It is unlikely that Starship launches are $10m RIGHT NOW. But sure... maybe they will be in the future. I take Elon with a grain of salt because of his comments regarding Full Self-Driving Mode and Robo-Taxi deployment dates.
I said we should not compare New Glenn estimated launch costs RIGHT NOW with Elon's asperational price target of $10m. We should compare Starship's cost per kg to LEO RIGHT NOW with New Glenn's estimated cost per kg to LEO RIGHT NOW. Or we could compare them at a particular point in the project history. We could compare per-kg costs at first launch or estimated per-kg costs at the 10th launch.
Both companies are saying they want to do a lot of launches, so we'll eventually have MUCH better data.
I'm suggesting we compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges and not apples to oranges.
At the current moment, all Starship launches have been fully disposable (though yes, one booster was caught by the chopsticks so it's probably more accurate to say the whole system is about 1/12th re-usable.) At this point in the program, you have to pay for each vehicle that lands or crashes in the water. I agree with you when you say "100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch." Starship is currently more disposable than it is reusable.
When SpaceX re-uses the boosters and the Starships, then it will not be fully disposable and the price per launch will go down. We are not at that point at the moment. You can tell this because a number of boosters and starships have fallen into the ocean, some crashing, some coming to a controlled stop just over the ocean and then falling over.
But the important part here is that the equipment that wasn't caught by the chopsticks doesn't get to be re-used. So if you want to do another launch, you have to build new equipment. That new equipment will cost money.
So if the current, mostly non-reusable Starship launches cost $100m a pop, that's after several launches. Even though we have someone estimating the first couple of New Glenn launches cost $68m, let's wait until it has 6 launches and THEN compare costs.
Dudes. You don't have to down-vote me 'cause I'm just asking for where you got your numbers. I'm not saying you're a horrible person and that SpaceX sucks. I'm saying I have numbers that don't match yours. Let's compare numbers / sources and see what the most likely values would be near-term and long-term.
