In article ,
says...

Jeff Findley wrote:

We're a long, long way from fuel costs being an issue. The first Falcon
9 first stage to refly cost SpaceX refurbishment costs less than half
the cost of building a new stage. As far as I know they didn't say
exactly how much, but we can guess if it was really 1/4 the cost they
would have said 1/4 instead of 1/2. At any rate, fuel is less than 1%
of launch costs, so refurbishment costs are still the lion's share of
reflight costs.


External estimates in the past have put the cost of reusing the stage
at around 10% of the cost of the original stage. That feels high to
me. If you judge by what Musk has put forward for ITS operation,
reusing the booster costs about 0.1% of the original cost. This
ranges up to 5% for the actual spacecraft (2nd stage). He also
expects to get 1,000 launches out of the booster. The spacecraft gets
around a dozen relaunches, so that 5% figure may be about right for
Falcon stages.

For this first reflight of a Falcon 9 first stage they reportedly did a
lot more work and replaced more parts than they likely needed to. But,
they weren't going to take any chances with this first reflight. If it
had gone "boom", it would have cast serious doubt on their credibility
to refly hardware.

Plus, SpaceX is still flying Block 4 versions of the first stage.
Sometime this year the Block 5 version will start flying. Block 5
incorporates changes to improve reuse (i.e. reduce inspection and
refurbishment costs). So, SpaceX will hopefully be spending a lot less
time and money refurbishing the Block 5's.

ITS is supposed to be much more reusable than Falcon 9 first stages
since ITS will have all of the necessary reusability features built into
it. Falcon 9 first stage has had to change quite a bit over time to get
to where it is today. I'm sure compromises were made along the way.

Jeff
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