Btw, I was under the impression that Starship couldn't do GTO missions while being reused and would need a refueling mission or kick stage. Apparently that is not the case. According to SpaceX's Starship User Guide, they can put 21t into GTO while still recovering the booster and upper stage at the launch site.

By comparison, Falcon Heavy can only put 26.7t into GTO while being fully expended. And the heaviest payload to GTO so far (by SpaceX) is only 7t, according to SpaceXStats webpage. And it appears that the heaviest payload ever by SpaceX is only 17.4t back in January, according to SpaceFlightNow.

Starship is likely to do something different with GEO and further missions. Payload to LEO is just so huge and cheap compared to anything else that it will likely do a kickstage or just larger satellite thrusters. Falcon Heavy can only send 26.7t to GTO fully expended and doesn't have the volume to handle too large of a payload. Starship is 100t and likely more to LEO while fully reused with a massive volume as well. Elon himself doesn't care about Falcon Heavy, so I expect SpaceX to find ways to push everything away from FH as soon as possible.

Also keep in mind that once Starship is able to fly and be recovered reliably, it becomes more beneficial for SpaceX to fly Starship more often. A fully reusable Starship should be nearly 1/5th to 1/10th the cost to fly as a Falcon 9, and well past 1/10th to cost of Falcon Heavy.

>SpaceX is not lowering prices until they don't have other option.

We won't see SpaceX lower Starship prices until they are pushing for a very high flight cadence and are ready to replace Falcon 9. At that point, I would expect Starship to drop to $50M with F9 raising to $60M minimum and possibly much more. Falcon Heavy is going to be pushed back immediately after Starship starts flying as well.

One final thing, SpaceX has no reason to rush faster on Starship as there is no competition. Rocket Lab is not competing with Starship and never will. They will take the scraps that fall off the table once Starship hits it's goals. Starlink alone is liking to make more profit this year than Rocket Lab. And it isn't even at 1/10th it's final goal.

Try to keep that in perspective. SpaceX won't be making a push for customers for Starship as it simply has no reason to.

>They will have to learn to do it by themselves.

True, and I didn't otherwise. But SpaceX was extremely opened about many of the issues that Falcon 9 had.

>SpaceX has no reason to go slow with Starship.

Again, SpaceX has massive reasons to delay customers. They need the first several launches themselves with Starlink. That matters more to them than getting customers on Starship. And they need to focus on reusability first, which may mean many changes. Those changes have a chance to cause a flight failure. SpaceX would absolutely want to avoid damaging a customer payload. Not putting on customer payloads allows them to make more risky changes.

>Customers also don't care much about reuse at first, only for their payload to go to orbit, as they didn't care with F9 landing attempts.

They care about reliability. Period. Starship has none at the moment. That won't be the case for long, but a single failure would push customers back for a long time.

Plus why would any customers choose Starship over F9 right now? If Starship is more expensive per flight, they are choose F9. Starship won't be cheaper until it starts rapid reusable flights. The only other reason why someone would choose Starship is payload capacity. And if they are building something that big, they wouldn't have gone with RL anyways.

>Or Rocket Lab may move slower than expected, since even from first successful landing to reuse it took SpaceX 2 years time... And Starship can go a lot faster since its design has lessons learned from F9 landings and reuse.

RL could go slower and SS faster. However, that is unlikely. It took F9 two years as SpaceX was still learning to fly altogether. RL isn't going through the same issue. And again, RL has the ability to see the failures that F9 ran into to avoid the same. SS is trying to achieve something never before done. They will hit issues and delays. That's perfectly fine. SpaceX understands and accepts that.

You are making up crap in your head. Look, 3 execs confirmed at multiple different times in multiple different interviews the cost. People have also gone through to verify numbers as best as possible. The Execs have no reason to lie. And reuse is not some gimmick. It's actually making a meaningful difference. Not just price, but cadence.

And yes, we do know the funding reasons. They specifically made a big deal about both Starlink and Starship. Plus we can see with our own eyes the huge production being done. Factories ain't cheap, nor is the huge amount of construction for Starship and the massive number of satellites for Starlink.

And of course common sense clearly shows that reuse is making a huge financial difference. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have reduced the cost of reusable launches, they wouldn't push customers towards reused rockets, and they wouldn't fly Starlink missions entirely on reused boosters. You are effectively accusing SpaceX of being a pyramid scheme when it clearly isn't.

Also don't forget that SpaceX has very little reason to lower Starship's pricing at first. Sell more expensive flights to first for super heavy launch needs (Falcon Heavy and SLS replacement options). Once they are ready to start replacing the Falcon 9, then expect prices to come down.

RL has something SpaceX didn't. They can see in hindsight all of the failures SpaceX made and learn from them. SpaceX only had the Shuttle's failures to really learn from. SpaceX was also trying to improve as a launch provider in general during that time. RL has already had a decent bit of experience.

With Starship, SpaceX actually has reasons to take it slow before signing up customers on it. Not positive they will of course. But they have a huge amount of flights for Starlink first. They also really need to get reusability nailed down, so waiting on customers allows them to take more risks.

When it all comes down it, Rocket Lab may move faster than expected and Starship may take longer before signing up customers even if it's flying a bunch first.

Starship is focused heavily on reusability. While they may launch some Starlink missions early, they likely won't focus on customer payloads for a while, at least until reuse is working well. I would also expect SpaceX to take a while before lowing the price, both to focus on Starlink and to bring in some extra funds. And they need to put a lot of early focus on HLS for NASA.

All of this might give RL time to get Neutron going and to grab customers. Customers are also likely to grow as more try to compete with Starlink and try going away from SpaceX, similar to how OneWeb has been going with other launch providers (at least until Russia screwed them over).

We don't know all of SpaceX's financials, but we do have very good info on the cost per launch of the Falcon 9. Three execs have spoken about the F9 launches being well under $30m with everything counted. All of these were prior to the massive launch cadence and reuse they started hitting in 2021. Cost are very likely down to $15m-$20m per F9 launch and easily under $25m now.

As for the rounds of funding, we also know what that is for. The vast majority of the funding SpaceX has received came after Starship and Starlink development began. And that is what it is for. Not Falcon 9 which basically had to freeze it's development in 2019 for final crew rating. And if F9 wasn't much cheaper to fly reused, then we would see SpaceX take it easier on launches and they would ramp up production of new boosters as mass production also reduces cost.

Not on the ground. Remember, even at this low amount of thrust, it was still more than the Saturn V produced when it sent humans to the Moon. Full mission duration isn't needed as each engine is already tested that way individually.

Correct. Engines throttled down to around 50%.

Typically 4 but frequently more (going off memory). Up to 8 at a time.

>nd if you plotted number of people sent into space instead of launches, the Space Shuttle era would really stand out.

I'm wondering how that would have looked in the last two years as well? Dragon is now sending 4 at a time frequently vs 2-3 at a time on Soyuz. Not going to make a drastic difference, but should look interesting as well.