Things Aren't Adding Up

"Musk Math" strikes again!

Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash

Starship will eventually work… Right? I mean, they only have to figure out how to prevent it from exploding, dramatically increase its thrust and payload capacity, establish how to land the upper stage 100% of the time, and figure out in-orbit refuelling with a near-zero per cent chance of a mission-ending explosion. Once they pull an engineering miracle out of their hat and solve all of these issues, Musk’s promised paradigm-shifting launch vehicle will finally enter service! Well, about that…

Starship was initially targeting a $2 million launch price, but Musk has since revised that figure to $10 million per launch. Musk has also repeatedly stated that a fully stacked Starship (comprising the Super Heavy Booster and the Starship upper stage) costs just $100 million to build.

However, this narrative has recently been blown to pieces.

An insider source told Bloomberg that each fully stacked Starship actually costs hundreds of millions of dollars. How many hundreds of millions? They didn’t say, but this is more evidence to support my estimated build cost of a fully stacked Starship at $500 million. This figure didn’t come out of thin air. It was derived by scaling up Falcon 9 build costs to Starship’s weight to obtain a rough estimate and then verifying it against SpaceX’s Starship expenditure, minus overheads, and dividing it by the number of launches (read more here). This suggested a build cost of $500 million. Now, this is still a very rough estimate, but the fact that it aligns with this SpaceX insider’s statement suggests we are at the very least close.

That means that Musk’s claim of a $100 million price tag for a shiny new Starship is around 80% less than the actual price!

It also means that Musk’s target of a $10 million launch cost is impossible. Let me explain.