[Hayvok]

> What Thursday's revelatory reentry footage promises is a world in which launch is cheap and abundant. No longer will we need to worry so much about mass or volume, which have been tyrannical overlords to mission planners since the inception of spaceflight nearly seven decades ago.

Using the metrics in the article, Starship costs come out to around $300 per kilogram launched.

This is an order of magnitude drop over existing launch costs, which are already lower than ever courtesy of the Falcon rockets.

(Wikipedia estimates Falcon costs are $3,000 per kg. Other providers still significantly higher.)

Any time you change such a fundamental pricing unit in a market, there is going to a huge amount of change in market opportunities.

People dismissing this have their heads in the sand.

[avmich]

Yes, and even $300 per kg on orbit seems rather conservative.

> SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.

So, $30m per 100t is $300 kg. If Starship is reusable, the flight could cost closer to $10m. If the payload is 150t, the cost of kg is lower still. And all that is in relatively short term.