this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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It is estimated that currently each starship launch is cost around $90 million, and should be around $10 million once the program is more mature.
Source
For comparison each SLS launch is estimated to be around $4.1 billions. This cost not include development.
So a Starship launch is around 40 to 400 time cheaper than the SLS for similar capacity in LEO.
The Apollo compairaon above is even more ridiculous when you consider that starship made it to orbit and could've deployed a payload. The part that 'failed' was the soft landing and even that didn't fail. Only reuse failed.
Every Saturn v that was launched is currently sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
Taking shots at starship for failing even though Saturn v didn't even attempt the same mission parameters makes no sense.
Starship will have likely had 100+ missions before putting a human on it. Would you rather fly on something that's proven itself 100 times or something that is flying for the first time?