Comment by davedigerati
21 hours ago
um, they've got 2 years before the basket is retired during which time they can always extend if they need to. why would they want to keep a less capable, more $/lb into orbit system going after Starship becomes a viable, reliable upgrade???
But they have already stopped taking orders, which means they’re already clearing their pipeline and it will take some time to restore. Launch contracts don’t happen overnight.
$/kg to orbit is not as important a deciding factor as many people assume it is. It’s typically a small portion of overall costs, and there are often cases where a launch provider that’s less expensive in terms of $/kg to orbit is actually more expensive in terms of total cost.
Starship is going to be a particularly weird one to adapt to. The “deploy out the side” design may make it straight up incompatible with a large subset of spacecraft. For those where it is workable, migrating commercial payloads to it may still require the development of new satellite buses, which is something SpaceX doesn’t seem to be working on for the benefit of anyone other than Starlink. And such a large rocket means most potential customers will have to plan on ridesharing with even more co-passengers, which means even more room for scheduling conflicts, compromises on initial orbit (and therefore cost to reach destination orbit), etc.
That’s just assuming Starship development goes smoothly from here on out. Which seems optimistic considering that, even by the standards of spaceflight, its development thus far arguably qualifies as cursed. Considering the gap between original design goals and reality is already historically large, I certainly wouldn’t be taking any cost estimates at face value right now. Like for any launch vehicle program, we won’t know its true capabilities and costs until it’s operational.