Comment by dpark
7 days ago
I think the onus is on you to explain why costs would drop by >3 orders of magnitude (>4 accounting for the 10x launch armor). It’s something like $1500/lb on a fully loaded Falcon Heavy and all indications are that SpaceX isn’t making money at that price.
Plus even if this were free, “shoot 180k tons of nuclear waste into space” seems like a terrible idea in general. It’s one of those ideas that make sense only until you think about the ramifications. What happens when inevitably one of the 3 thousand Falcon heavy rockets explodes and the armor fails and we spread nuclear waste over 3 states?
Falcon Heavy is more expensive per kg than F9, because it throws away more things. SpaceX flies it for certain military missions but you will note they launch their own stuff on F9.
A full launch on F9 (with recovered S1) is estimated to cost $15M and can put up to 17,600 kg into LEO, or $850/kg.
> (>4 accounting for the 10x launch armor).
You're double counting there. 3x would be just fine even with 10x launch armor.
> seems like a terrible idea in general
And here's the problem: you started from an emotional reaction and are trying to rationalize that.
> A full launch on F9 (with recovered S1) is estimated to cost $15M
Estimated by who? SpaceX charges 74 million for this. Nothing credible I can find indicates that SpaceX is running an amazing 80% profit margin on Falcon 9 launches.
> And here's the problem: you started from an emotional reaction and are trying to rationalize that.
No, your premise is “just launch the trash into space” and you’re hand waving away the complexity, costs, and danger.
SpaceX charges what the market will bear, and because they have no good competitor their profit margins can be very large.
Anyway, the number is from fairly old Musk interviews. Costs have likely decreased since then.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/02/spacex-falcon-9-true-c...
> No, your premise is “just launch the trash into space” and you’re hand waving away the complexity, costs, and danger.
At least I didn't trot out a string of obvious errors like you did.
When people do that, it's a strong tell they're engaging in broken thinking. What you did, I think, is believe something, then try to rationalize it. When your thinking reached a justification you liked you just stopped thinking (because, after all, thinking more could break the pleasing argument you just constructed, and that would feel bad).
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