Here's an interesting analysis of the economics of SpaceX, and calculations as to the financial costs involved. Also, a sobering view of Starship economics.
Space Review SpaceX Analysis
I find this entirely uninteresting.
"Are Falcon 9 launches and Starlink operations profitable?"
Falcon 9 is cheaper than the competition, but not by that much. They charge 50 or 60 million, the competition charges 10-20 million more. Experts estimated internal launch costs for SpaceX to be around 4-5 million per launch.
YES, Falcon 9 is OBVIOUSLY highly profitable.
Years ago SpaceX or Elon stated that Starlink is profitable. Starlink has a TAM of like 30 billion.
It's the moneyprinter to finance the Mars adventure.
"It is therefore reasonable to estimate that the profits generated by commercial launches do not cover the cost of Starlink launches. To do so, the profits generated by each commercial launch would have to be twice the launch costs."
It's not hard to have really high margins if you re-use your boosters 25 times while the rest of the industry is using disposable single use boosters. The upper stage is not reusable, but that's a single engine, the booster has 9 engines. The majority of the cost is the booster and that gets reused to absolute death and thus per-launch booster costs are barely anything.
"have to ask ourselves, will we really need such a launcher?" (Starship)
"The case of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket currently available, is particularly interesting. Launched for the first time in 2019, this rocket has only been used 11 times (mainly for the Department of Defense) as show in Table 5. Curiously, SpaceX does not use it to launch its Starlinks."
Falcon Heavy was a victim of Falcon 9 improvements. When SpaceX started development on the heavy, Falcon 9 had only half of the payload capacity it eventually would have. SpaceX relentlessly optimized Falcon 9 and increased the payload capacity, making heavy relatively obsolete.
Development seemed sensible at the time since there were many lucrative contracts for a rocket above Falcon 9, and development seemed straightforward with a lot of reuse. This arguably hasn't paid off as well as planned.
Using falcon heavy for starlink launches is entirely unfeasible. The starlink stack of 20-ish satellites almost fills the payload fairing, and the payload fairing for the falcon heavy is not that much bigger as the one for falcon 9. Falcon heavy is used to lob satellites into high geostationary orbits or probes to other planets, to utilize it fully to lob satellites into LEO it would need a new, gigantic payload fairing. There would not be any efficiency gain using it over a normal Falcon 9.
The advantage of starship is also not the size. It is FULL reusability, including the 2nd stage. Most of the (already low) falcon 9 and heavy launch costs is the 2nd stage which is not reusable.
Starship aims to reduce launch cost to fuel cost which are remarkably low (2-300k$)
Arguments about a lack of demand are also null and void. It would be cheaper to underutilize a starship to launch a single small satellite, than to launch a falcon 9 and expend a 2nd stage.
SpaceX is ultimately creating their own demand, with Starlink they are their own largest customer.
The article pretends there wouldn't be enough satellites to fill a starship, conveniently ignoring the fact that SpaceX supposedly mass produced 8000 satellites, launched them, and pushed the cost down to 1.2 million while regular satellites cost 20-40x as much and then pretends that a malfunction of starship would lead to a loss of these satellites which would be catastrophic.
An absolutely absurd argument. These launches are insured and Falcon 9 is the rocket with the best reliability track record, it's not like SpaceX will have great issues insuring the launch of satellites for their customers. With such cheap launch costs the market will shift to cheaper and more satellites eventually once someone manages to push the price down by also offering reusable launch capability - something no other company has managed for quite some years to copy, and nobody outside the chinese and one small startup is even seriously persuing.
Meanwhile spaceX is testflying their THIRD reusable orbital class rocket.
People think SpaceX rocked the launch market by grabbing 90% of it with a partially reusable rocket. The real big change will be full reusability pushing prices even harder.
Another unintelligent hitpiece aimed at an overused target. Disappointing how lenient society as a whole is towards such behaviour.
www.earth.com
newatlas.com
www.syfy.com
en.wikipedia.org
