Thread: SpaceX pricing
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Old February 13th 18, 01:50 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Default SpaceX pricing

Jeff Findley wrote:

SpaceX has revealed a bit more about pricing for Falcon Heavy. They've
also announced another barge for the east coast. When used with a
Falcon Heavy, this will allow two booster barge recovery and expendable
core stage flights. This will result in only a 10% performance "hit"
compared to fully expendable mode, but a huge cost savings.

These are the Falcon Heavy numbers I saw on Twitter last night:

Fully Expendable $150 million
Booster Recovery Only $95 million
Booster and Core Recovery $90 million

Also, Troy Bruno got a bit miffed on Twitter that Musk tweeted that
Fully Expendable was $250 million cheaper than the "nearest
competition". Troy tweeted back that Delta IV Heavy only costs about
$350 million. So, if we do the math, it's only a bit more than 2x as
expensive as Fully Expendable instead of Musk claiming it was a bit more
than 3x as expensive as Fully Expendable. I'm not sure how that really
helps ULA's message here, but I'm not paid the "big bucks" like Tory
Bruno is.


How much Delta IV Heavy costs depends on which cost numbers you use.
ULA charges USAF around $450 million per launch, but part of that is
the fixed cost of 'maintaining launch readiness'. A commercial launch
costs around the $350 million number given, but gets a lot of the
'fixed costs' free based on USAF funding.

Since SpaceX includes the fixed costs in their commercial launch
price, the USAF cost per launch should be used and Musk's statement is
the most nearly correct.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
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