Comment by tsimionescu

> Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.

I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.

> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.

Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.

> Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.

You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.

First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.

Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.

> The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10

These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).