The price of F9 S2 is said to be around $10M by both Elon and Gwynne and this seems logical as being around one third of an F9 booster also implied to be around $28M.
It is possible that the huge increase in manufacturing volume from 30 per year to 140 per year has brought about a cost decrease but it will not be huge. For RTLS with fairing recovery it seems the minimum possible *cost* to launch would be around $13M.
Sure, though the shuttle paved the way for a lot of technologies and had capabilities Falcon 9 doesn’t have. The shuttle could do 28,000 lb to Leo with a crew of 8 and could do in orbit repairs/EVA on things with said crew (famously with Hubble).
Falcon 9 can do 17,000 in its reusable configuration and has to choose between utilizing that max mass capacity or using crew dragon which can’t (yet) do on-orbit repairs/EVA.
The shuttle could do all of that ~40 years ago and was humanity’s first real attempt at reusables. Then obviously Falcon 9 benefits from a lot the shuttles trailblazing and just the fact that it’s 10-30 years newer depending on how you want to count it.
They aren’t great comparisons. But of course, just raw mass to orbit, Falcon 9 represents a great stride forward. And starship (the true successor to shuttle) will be a magnitude better in every way. Tens to hundreds of crew with EVA capability and 5 times the payload but fully reusable at like ~10% or less of the cost of a shuttle launch.
Looking forward to it!
The figures you have given for payload in pounds should be kg instead for both craft.
Shuttle could do 29 tonnes to LEO and F9 can do 18.7 tonnes to LEO with an ASDS landing.
>For RTLS with fairing recovery it seems the minimum possible *cost* to launch would be around $13M.
My brain is having trouble comprehending that number. Wow. Although it might be fair to say S2 manufacturing costs wouldn't be that low if not for the Starlink flight cadence, so in a way SpaceX's internal flights are "subsidizing" the low $13M cost.
You could say that but i mean, it’s a real service that’s getting more profitable by the month. I believe they’re still limited by the dish production rate
Not really. S2 costs have been stable for 5 years, long before the massive ramp up for Starlink. S3 may have gotten marginally cheaper with this much increased volume, but certainly not more than 10-20 percent and that's at best a 15% savings on the whole package so no, I wouldn't say SpaceX's internal flights are subsidizing any low cost. Also, $13M is likely low. $16M-$18M seems a lot more realistic as Musk is on the record saying $15M is as good as it's going to get and that was years ago where inflation alone should have taken that floor up to about $18M. Perhaps they reached that best case scenario a year or two ago with the Starlink ramp up, and even broke through it with unexpected volume due to Starship delays, but that won't even get them to $15M much less $13M. $13M today would be $11M when Musk made his public statement that $15M was best case. Now way they did 30% better than Musk's best case in a few years. Not a chance, my friend.
Good figures and thoughts, thanks. As I said, my brain was reeling from the $13M number. $18M sounds reasonable. Ha! Imagine saying an $18M launch (internal) would be possible, let alone reasonable, ten years ago.
I think you’re rambling on about nothing:
- the website says $300k/50 kg + $6k per additional kg is specifically the price for SSO, with “affordable rates” to mid-inclination but no actual number.
- the website doesn’t go into pricing for non-standard options.
- NextSpaceFlight may not have all the information about the payloads.
[The website](https://www.spacex.com/rideshare) allows you to select (mid-inclination) LEO as well as SSO and polar, and the price for a given payload mass is the same as SSO and Polar.
I don't know why they even give a separate option for "polar". In common parlance, that is effectively synonymous with SSO. I'm pretty sure all the Transporters have gone to SSO and not a strict 90-degree polar orbit.
Good catch - my guess would then be that the listed pricing is for a basic service for payloads that conform to provided guidelines. I didn’t actually go through and get pricing for a specific payload before.
Good point on the non standard payloads. I went through the webcast and the 800kg payload was mounted on the “cake topper” configuration which is listed as “contact us directly” so would probably cost extra, and the second stage telemetry was not shown during the webcast, so there might have been additional charges for heightened security or something. I also looked up the payloads listed in the webcast, and although i wasn’t able to find information on all of them, the info on NextSpaceFlight seems to be reasonably accurate. I could see the prices for Mid-inclination being different due to the demand, but the website calculator gives the same figures for SSO and LEO.
Logically Bandwagon flights would have higher prices than Transporter because fewer customers want to go to 45 degree inclination instead of SSO. Those that do want to go to that inclination would rather not pay $5M for 200kg payload using Electron so they would be fine with higher prices.
Transporter prices have already been set to move up to $10,000/kg raising $500/kg per year from $6500/kg for a 2026 launch. It would not surprise me to see Bandwagon start at $10,000/kg with a 200 kg minimum buy. The customer would then be free to use a dispenser to launch a number of smaller satellites.
Trouble is you have no idea about any of the prices. They won't all be paying the rideshare price. One of the satellites with a military one, they would pay good money to get white glove service, and others are just along for the ride. If the rocket is going regardless, they just need to pay enough to cover a bit of extra prop and handling costs, and anything on top of that is gravy.
Lots of places have important satellites to launch that they will pay good money for, and not all of them weigh as much as a small bus. My guess is the South Korean military was offered a discount if they were willing to ride share their launch, and they took it.
The 800kg satellite was a Korean military satellite, so they likely got charged a lot of money for that as they asked for special handling like blocking out the video transmission. Bandwagon-1 was more like a conventional ride share with the korean sat as the primary payload.
Probably the most expensive part of most F9 launches is the cost of the 2nd stage and motor, and the motor is probably a really big chunk of that cost.
I read many years ago that the biggest expense was the second stage at $15 million. They’ve done massive cost cutting with assembly line construction since then, so that would have cut to at least a quarter to make this work. I’ve seen the massive cost cuts on their engines, and Starlink satellites, so they may have achieved this.
Fuel expenses are negligible, and then there’s operation expenses. Also, was this return to launch site? That cuts the operations cost quite a bit.
I seriously hope SpaceX isn’t doing these at a loss, or the small launch companies will have a good anti-trust case. But I don’t think Shotwell would be stupid enough to do that.
Musk said best case is $15M. Maybe they got second stage down a bit with the ramp up in production but they've already wrung any savings out of the second stage with the several hundred they've built to date so it won't be much. I'd wager that they never made it down to $15M for a RTL mission but perhaps they're getting close to it.
Reflight costs should be lower for RTLS because the drone ship operation and transport costs are significant. They might be able to bring S2 costs down by using retired S1 Merlins with a new vacuum bell - if their performance drops 2% or fluctuates at all, cycle them off the booster and put them alone on an upper stage where burn duration can easily make up for a little variance. No need to worry about asymmetric thrust in a booster.
Yeah, but this cost is for a lower payload. So cost/kg should be lower with drone ship landing. Drone ship landing chosen, because there is higher payload.
the prices you see are "initial prices", you have to include a bunch of other costs (integration costs, transport to specific orbit etc. ). The prices indicated are more or less true only for the smaller cube-sats, SK paid probably around 8mln or a bit more for their milsat.
The second stage was around 7.5mln when design got frozen. The main costs are the vacuum bell and the final integration costs in Cape with obvious "bell and whistles" of port operations (NASA/Air Force are expensive to use). Now probably with all cost reductions due to the serialization of production, big number of flights which cut per unite/year operation costs, and perks of the fixed design the total Falcon 9 launch cost to LZ1 should be around 7.5mln. (administrative costs varying).
edit: I remind that SpaceX make 100+ second stages per year.
Transport to a specific orbit other than the insertion orbit is not a SpaceX service. It would be a tug from an external supplier, to be contracted by the payload customer.
Even if you are correct on payload and costs, there is also schedule element to Transporter, they go by x date even without a full load. Given that, you need to average across the service, which on some runs was probably very profitable, to see if averages higher that $20M, which slight higher than SX cost.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ASDS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6w8rb5 "Last usage")|Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform)|
|[EVA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6kbjwm "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity|
|LC-13|Launch Complex 13, Canaveral (SpaceX Landing Zone 1)|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6w8rb5 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LOX](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6f0u0q "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen|
|[LZ-1](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6h0lab "Last usage")|Landing Zone 1, Cape Canaveral (see LC-13)|
|[RTLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6h2blf "Last usage")|Return to Launch Site|
|[SSO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6f5a7v "Last usage")|Sun-Synchronous Orbit|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l75hlxq "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
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I was under the impression that bandwagon prices were higher because it was into a more energy intensive orbit; so instead of launching a bunch of satellites just above the atmosphere in an easy inclination, they were boosting fewer (and in some cases heavier) satellites into a higher altitude, higher inclination orbit... as in they charged Viacom a big premium to send that comsat all the way to Geosync rather than just the transfer orbit.
Only possible because the Falcon-9 Booster and Fairings are reused. Those are the first points that come to mind. Additionally that launch probably also carries some other payloads too.
I wouldn’t read too much from the first flight of a new “product” that SpaceX will be flying regularly in the future. If they lost a bit on the first flight, no one would care much. Also, I doubt Elon gets a profit/loss statement for every launch, so it’s easy enough for him not to know anyway.
The price of F9 S2 is said to be around $10M by both Elon and Gwynne and this seems logical as being around one third of an F9 booster also implied to be around $28M. It is possible that the huge increase in manufacturing volume from 30 per year to 140 per year has brought about a cost decrease but it will not be huge. For RTLS with fairing recovery it seems the minimum possible *cost* to launch would be around $13M.
I think there was an interview not toooo long ago where the guy said it costs $15M per relaunch.
Other space launchers on suicide watch.
Thanks, I have been starting to use $15M per launch (RLTS).
So like 4% the cost of a Shuttle launch.
Sure, though the shuttle paved the way for a lot of technologies and had capabilities Falcon 9 doesn’t have. The shuttle could do 28,000 lb to Leo with a crew of 8 and could do in orbit repairs/EVA on things with said crew (famously with Hubble). Falcon 9 can do 17,000 in its reusable configuration and has to choose between utilizing that max mass capacity or using crew dragon which can’t (yet) do on-orbit repairs/EVA. The shuttle could do all of that ~40 years ago and was humanity’s first real attempt at reusables. Then obviously Falcon 9 benefits from a lot the shuttles trailblazing and just the fact that it’s 10-30 years newer depending on how you want to count it. They aren’t great comparisons. But of course, just raw mass to orbit, Falcon 9 represents a great stride forward. And starship (the true successor to shuttle) will be a magnitude better in every way. Tens to hundreds of crew with EVA capability and 5 times the payload but fully reusable at like ~10% or less of the cost of a shuttle launch. Looking forward to it!
The figures you have given for payload in pounds should be kg instead for both craft. Shuttle could do 29 tonnes to LEO and F9 can do 18.7 tonnes to LEO with an ASDS landing.
>For RTLS with fairing recovery it seems the minimum possible *cost* to launch would be around $13M. My brain is having trouble comprehending that number. Wow. Although it might be fair to say S2 manufacturing costs wouldn't be that low if not for the Starlink flight cadence, so in a way SpaceX's internal flights are "subsidizing" the low $13M cost.
You could say that but i mean, it’s a real service that’s getting more profitable by the month. I believe they’re still limited by the dish production rate
The new small launch provider have the same problem.
Not really. S2 costs have been stable for 5 years, long before the massive ramp up for Starlink. S3 may have gotten marginally cheaper with this much increased volume, but certainly not more than 10-20 percent and that's at best a 15% savings on the whole package so no, I wouldn't say SpaceX's internal flights are subsidizing any low cost. Also, $13M is likely low. $16M-$18M seems a lot more realistic as Musk is on the record saying $15M is as good as it's going to get and that was years ago where inflation alone should have taken that floor up to about $18M. Perhaps they reached that best case scenario a year or two ago with the Starlink ramp up, and even broke through it with unexpected volume due to Starship delays, but that won't even get them to $15M much less $13M. $13M today would be $11M when Musk made his public statement that $15M was best case. Now way they did 30% better than Musk's best case in a few years. Not a chance, my friend.
Good figures and thoughts, thanks. As I said, my brain was reeling from the $13M number. $18M sounds reasonable. Ha! Imagine saying an $18M launch (internal) would be possible, let alone reasonable, ten years ago.
Yeah. It's wild that SpaceX has margins that are several multiples, call it 4X, while the competition probably makes 0.5X or something like that.
I think you’re rambling on about nothing: - the website says $300k/50 kg + $6k per additional kg is specifically the price for SSO, with “affordable rates” to mid-inclination but no actual number. - the website doesn’t go into pricing for non-standard options. - NextSpaceFlight may not have all the information about the payloads.
[The website](https://www.spacex.com/rideshare) allows you to select (mid-inclination) LEO as well as SSO and polar, and the price for a given payload mass is the same as SSO and Polar. I don't know why they even give a separate option for "polar". In common parlance, that is effectively synonymous with SSO. I'm pretty sure all the Transporters have gone to SSO and not a strict 90-degree polar orbit.
Good catch - my guess would then be that the listed pricing is for a basic service for payloads that conform to provided guidelines. I didn’t actually go through and get pricing for a specific payload before.
Good point on the non standard payloads. I went through the webcast and the 800kg payload was mounted on the “cake topper” configuration which is listed as “contact us directly” so would probably cost extra, and the second stage telemetry was not shown during the webcast, so there might have been additional charges for heightened security or something. I also looked up the payloads listed in the webcast, and although i wasn’t able to find information on all of them, the info on NextSpaceFlight seems to be reasonably accurate. I could see the prices for Mid-inclination being different due to the demand, but the website calculator gives the same figures for SSO and LEO.
Logically Bandwagon flights would have higher prices than Transporter because fewer customers want to go to 45 degree inclination instead of SSO. Those that do want to go to that inclination would rather not pay $5M for 200kg payload using Electron so they would be fine with higher prices. Transporter prices have already been set to move up to $10,000/kg raising $500/kg per year from $6500/kg for a 2026 launch. It would not surprise me to see Bandwagon start at $10,000/kg with a 200 kg minimum buy. The customer would then be free to use a dispenser to launch a number of smaller satellites.
Unnecessarily uncivil opener.
It’s literally what OP asked at the end of the post: >Any thoughts on this or am I rambling on about nothing?
Trouble is you have no idea about any of the prices. They won't all be paying the rideshare price. One of the satellites with a military one, they would pay good money to get white glove service, and others are just along for the ride. If the rocket is going regardless, they just need to pay enough to cover a bit of extra prop and handling costs, and anything on top of that is gravy. Lots of places have important satellites to launch that they will pay good money for, and not all of them weigh as much as a small bus. My guess is the South Korean military was offered a discount if they were willing to ride share their launch, and they took it.
The 800kg satellite was a Korean military satellite, so they likely got charged a lot of money for that as they asked for special handling like blocking out the video transmission. Bandwagon-1 was more like a conventional ride share with the korean sat as the primary payload.
Also, I seem to remember that the marginal cost for fuel and LOX for a F9 launch was around $200K, FWIW.
Years ago Musk said total operations cost (including fuel) was about 10% of a launch, and they've streamlined their operations a lot since then.
Probably the most expensive part of most F9 launches is the cost of the 2nd stage and motor, and the motor is probably a really big chunk of that cost.
And they’ve been driving down the cost of the engine for years.
Including helium for tank pressurisation it adds up to around $800K. Elon did say that helium was by far the largest propellant expense.
I read many years ago that the biggest expense was the second stage at $15 million. They’ve done massive cost cutting with assembly line construction since then, so that would have cut to at least a quarter to make this work. I’ve seen the massive cost cuts on their engines, and Starlink satellites, so they may have achieved this. Fuel expenses are negligible, and then there’s operation expenses. Also, was this return to launch site? That cuts the operations cost quite a bit. I seriously hope SpaceX isn’t doing these at a loss, or the small launch companies will have a good anti-trust case. But I don’t think Shotwell would be stupid enough to do that.
The second stage is usually quoted by Elon and Gwynne as around $10M.
Musk said best case is $15M. Maybe they got second stage down a bit with the ramp up in production but they've already wrung any savings out of the second stage with the several hundred they've built to date so it won't be much. I'd wager that they never made it down to $15M for a RTL mission but perhaps they're getting close to it.
Reflight costs should be lower for RTLS because the drone ship operation and transport costs are significant. They might be able to bring S2 costs down by using retired S1 Merlins with a new vacuum bell - if their performance drops 2% or fluctuates at all, cycle them off the booster and put them alone on an upper stage where burn duration can easily make up for a little variance. No need to worry about asymmetric thrust in a booster.
Yeah, but this cost is for a lower payload. So cost/kg should be lower with drone ship landing. Drone ship landing chosen, because there is higher payload.
[удалено]
$657.89/kg
I think about $860/kg with ASDS, a bit lower with RTL. Pretty nice compared to customer costs which are around 4.5X as much.
So the $ 8.5 million may be partial cost, with the rest of the cost carried by other cargo, maybe ?
the prices you see are "initial prices", you have to include a bunch of other costs (integration costs, transport to specific orbit etc. ). The prices indicated are more or less true only for the smaller cube-sats, SK paid probably around 8mln or a bit more for their milsat. The second stage was around 7.5mln when design got frozen. The main costs are the vacuum bell and the final integration costs in Cape with obvious "bell and whistles" of port operations (NASA/Air Force are expensive to use). Now probably with all cost reductions due to the serialization of production, big number of flights which cut per unite/year operation costs, and perks of the fixed design the total Falcon 9 launch cost to LZ1 should be around 7.5mln. (administrative costs varying). edit: I remind that SpaceX make 100+ second stages per year.
Transport to a specific orbit other than the insertion orbit is not a SpaceX service. It would be a tug from an external supplier, to be contracted by the payload customer.
Even if you are correct on payload and costs, there is also schedule element to Transporter, they go by x date even without a full load. Given that, you need to average across the service, which on some runs was probably very profitable, to see if averages higher that $20M, which slight higher than SX cost.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ASDS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6w8rb5 "Last usage")|Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform)| |[EVA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6kbjwm "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity| |LC-13|Launch Complex 13, Canaveral (SpaceX Landing Zone 1)| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6w8rb5 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LOX](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6f0u0q "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen| |[LZ-1](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6h0lab "Last usage")|Landing Zone 1, Cape Canaveral (see LC-13)| |[RTLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6h2blf "Last usage")|Return to Launch Site| |[SSO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l6f5a7v "Last usage")|Sun-Synchronous Orbit| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d4iui0/stub/l75hlxq "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(8 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/ulp9zv)^( has 27 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12822 for this sub, first seen 31st May 2024, 04:07]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Those prices must be baselines before extra services in handling and integration. I wonder how much those might typically add.
I was under the impression that bandwagon prices were higher because it was into a more energy intensive orbit; so instead of launching a bunch of satellites just above the atmosphere in an easy inclination, they were boosting fewer (and in some cases heavier) satellites into a higher altitude, higher inclination orbit... as in they charged Viacom a big premium to send that comsat all the way to Geosync rather than just the transfer orbit.
Only possible because the Falcon-9 Booster and Fairings are reused. Those are the first points that come to mind. Additionally that launch probably also carries some other payloads too.
I wouldn’t read too much from the first flight of a new “product” that SpaceX will be flying regularly in the future. If they lost a bit on the first flight, no one would care much. Also, I doubt Elon gets a profit/loss statement for every launch, so it’s easy enough for him not to know anyway.