[sc68cal]

When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more.

It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing.

Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?).

[1]: https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

[jaywee]

Don't confuse launch _price_ with launch _cost_. It's been estimated the internal F9 launch costs are around $15M-$20M.

The $5M is a marginal cost-target for fully reusable Starship.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch

I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.

[indolering]

Spinlaunch is also promising drastically reduced cost per launch. The payload size for their first launcher is pretty small and they appear to be struggling to get the kinetic launcher online.