Yeah good point re: heat shields & upper stage reuse being hard. They’ve experimented with reusing Dragon heat shields but still they mostly just replace them each time.
Thinking aloud… suppose they never solve Starship reuse, but the Booster basically works great (as it seems to already be working pretty great). So the booster gets reused like 100 times but the Starship has to be scrapped each launch.
...In this world, the Starship could maybe be cheaper due to using old, worn-out engines retired from the boosters (don’t need to be super reliable since it can still complete the mission if a couple blow up, none of them are coming back anyway) and not needing a heat shield or wingflaps. Apparently right now the majority of the cost is the engines, the hull itself is cheap. And again a full stack booster+starship costs $100M. So the starship (having far fewer engines) is probably like… $25M or so right now? And price could drop further due to the aforementioned effects plus simply normal returns to scale… let me see how much does a car cost per kg and how much does starship weigh? Apparently starship dry mass is 85,000 kg. Tesla model 3 is 1600kg and costs like $36,000. So $22/kg. So if they can produce starships for the same cost per kg as model 3 cars, then the cost would be less than $2M. So yeah, obviously they won’t get there immediately but that’s the price they would naturally trend towards.
So that means even if they don’t reuse the upper stage at all, if they use old engines they would have retired anyway then they could get the price down to maybe $30/kg eventually. Assuming they have 150 tons to orbit payload of course, which is unproven. If they use new engines, maybe they can only get to $100/kg.
Also, as a fun bonus, if they are building a space station in LEO, then they can use the hulls of the single-use starships as material for the space station! That’s a free 85,000 kg of steel in LEO with every launch, in addition to the payload! And it already comes formed into a spacious pressure vessel!
Yeah good point re: heat shields & upper stage reuse being hard. They’ve experimented with reusing Dragon heat shields but still they mostly just replace them each time.
Thinking aloud… suppose they never solve Starship reuse, but the Booster basically works great (as it seems to already be working pretty great). So the booster gets reused like 100 times but the Starship has to be scrapped each launch.
...In this world, the Starship could maybe be cheaper due to using old, worn-out engines retired from the boosters (don’t need to be super reliable since it can still complete the mission if a couple blow up, none of them are coming back anyway) and not needing a heat shield or wingflaps. Apparently right now the majority of the cost is the engines, the hull itself is cheap. And again a full stack booster+starship costs $100M. So the starship (having far fewer engines) is probably like… $25M or so right now? And price could drop further due to the aforementioned effects plus simply normal returns to scale… let me see how much does a car cost per kg and how much does starship weigh? Apparently starship dry mass is 85,000 kg. Tesla model 3 is 1600kg and costs like $36,000. So $22/kg. So if they can produce starships for the same cost per kg as model 3 cars, then the cost would be less than $2M. So yeah, obviously they won’t get there immediately but that’s the price they would naturally trend towards.
So that means even if they don’t reuse the upper stage at all, if they use old engines they would have retired anyway then they could get the price down to maybe $30/kg eventually. Assuming they have 150 tons to orbit payload of course, which is unproven. If they use new engines, maybe they can only get to $100/kg.
Also, as a fun bonus, if they are building a space station in LEO, then they can use the hulls of the single-use starships as material for the space station! That’s a free 85,000 kg of steel in LEO with every launch, in addition to the payload! And it already comes formed into a spacious pressure vessel!