• BioMan@awful.systems
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    8 hours ago

    I mean Starship is a VERY questionable financial decision the way they are running it. The falcon program is another matter. It’s actually remarkable how the two of them are almost diametrically opposed in how they are run.

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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      8 hours ago

      @BioMan Falcon 9 launches are reportedly sold for $60-80M (or $160-200M for Falcon Heavy). But an F9 launch in Starlink configuration is billed internally at just $12M, for the same payload as a Saturn 1B. Which is just insane (S1B cost $55M per flight in 1972, or $425M today).

      • BioMan@awful.systems
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        7 hours ago

        I mean I dunno if any internal numbers are meaningful at all as anything but accounting fictions. But the cost of the falcon 9 to external customers is on the believable end of things, even if they are potentially subsidized by funding rounds, and impressive. Near as I can tell it comes from accepting trade-offs: they accept low specific impulse and thus declining performance at high velocity for cheap engines, they accept an overpowered oversized upper stage to have only one engine assembly line and to shift some of the burden to the upper stage that optimally would be on the first, they accept that entering at 2 km/s is way easier than entering at 8 km/s and don’t try to recover the second stage, they accept the steep payload penalty of recovering the first stage. Starship on the other hand tries to brute-force through every trade-off - meaning theyre trying to push their engines through all sanity, the second stage is heavy and bulky and comically oversized, and theyre trying to have a big empty fuel tank be a heat shield which not even the shuttle ever tried.