Things Aren't Adding Up
"Musk Math" strikes again!
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.
Even after over a decade of constant development, the Falcon 9 booster still fails to land 3% of the time and destroys itself. Yet, it has a far easier job landing than Starship or its booster.
The Falcon 9 booster has a dry mass of about 22 tonnes. By comparison, the Super Heavy Booster has a dry mass of over ten times that! This makes it far larger and far harder to control. It also has more failure points, as its size necessitates the use of “chopsticks” to enable a safe landing. As such, the Super Heavy Booster will almost certainly have a worse safety rate than the Falcon 9 booster.
But, while the Super Heavy Booster never leaves the atmosphere and peaks at 5,000 miles per hour, Starship lands at orbital speeds of around 17,000 miles per hour and has to re-enter the atmosphere. That means it has to scrub off 72 times more kinetic energy than the Super Heavy Booster (read more here) under significantly more challenging circumstances. As a result, Starship landings will inherently fail more frequently than Super Heavy Booster landings, let alone Falcon 9 landings.
This means that even if, by some astonishing miracle that goes against all engineering sense, SpaceX somehow manages to make Super Heavy Booster and Starship landings as reliable as Falcon 9 landings, we can still expect to lose a Super Heavy Booster and a Starship every 33 launches (when you account for both having a 3% landing failure).
So, that is a fully reusable rocket that costs $500 million to build, with an (insanely generous) expected lifespan of 33 launches. That means the build costs per launch are $15 million, or 50% higher than Musk’s revised target launch costs.
Let’s not forget that you also need to include fuel, operations, inspections, and repair costs. Indeed, Musk seems to think that a fully stacked Starship will eventually have a near-endless lifespan. As such, his $10 million estimation only included these costs, given that he expects build costs to be practically zero per launch.
But even that estimate seems wildly off. SpaceX sells Falcon 9 launches for $70 million and has a razor-thin profit margin of just 3%, equating to approximately $2 million per launch, which gives them an operational cost per launch of $68 million. However, we know that a Falcon 9 costs around $30 million to build, meaning that the fuel, operations, inspections, and repair costs for this far smaller and less complex rocket are approximately $38 million.
So, again, let’s be wildly generous and assume a fully stacked Starship has an average lifespan of 33 launches before it fails a landing and blows itself up, has a build cost of $500 million that averages out to $15 million per launch, and has the same $38 million fuel, operations, inspections and repair expenditure per launch as the Falcon 9. That would mean a total cost of $53 million per launch.
Sounds good, right? That is cheaper than a Falcon 9 launch by some margin!
Well, yes, but so far, Starship has failed to take even a tenth of its promised payload to orbit. Even after nine test flights, a period during which, by SpaceX’s own timeline, they should have moved on to 100+ tonne payload tests, such as in-orbit refuels, they are still desperately trying to get the payload higher than zero. The latest round of test flights all had sub-20-tonne payloads, and each one exploded in orbit from stress-related issues with the rocket engines and fuel systems. The fact of the matter is, the Raptor engines in Starship are suffering from serious thrust shortfall and reliability issues. Usually, these are problems that engineers develop a workable compromise to work around, so it is practically impossible to have both. As such, there is a serious chance this issue will never be resolved.
Okay, let’s be quite generous again and say that our hypothetical Starship has a payload capacity of 20 tonnes to LEO, the same payload used in the past few tests.
That is a 20-tonne payload for $53 million, or a cost per kilogramme of $2,650. That is significantly more than the $1,500 cost per kilogramme to LEO of SpaceX’s seven-year-old Falcon Heavy!
Now, all these figures are estimates, but they are supported by SpaceX’s own tests and informed by reasonable engineering principles. So, while they might not be totally accurate, they heavily suggest that Starship could be a dead end.
And even if, by some miracle, SpaceX engineers manage to solve the long list of critical issues with Starship and make it work, we now know that SpaceX can’t reach its mythical $10 million launch cost, as the build cost per launch is significantly higher than that.
Let’s not forget, this fictitious launch cost was what secured Starship its Artemis contracts, which have poured billions of dollars of taxpayer money into Starship development.
Starship is really beginning to look like a house of cards, set to fall apart any day now.
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Sources: Futurism, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Scientific American, The Orkney News, NASDAQ, SpaceX, Next Big Future, NASDAQ
Figure the engines are a couple million each.39 engines per starship sets a minimum price
Oof!