Also for Earth to be a smooth sphere, we must assume zero tidal forces.

Which doesn’t change the answer, but I thought that was an interesting point.

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Yes, you’d also have to be standing on something other than Jupiter and expect to be dead from radiation, storm winds etc.

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Sure.

But when they even only get the booster coming back at the beginning, they are already saving massively on hardware for the next launch.

So it's even less likely they have to sell their launches above $50M to break even.

Can’t magically avoid friction. That’s kinda the whole question here I think. Where would the remaining friction/earth forces move the water if it was rounded off like a cue ball.

Honestly I think the winner is going to be who can actually make the most rockets. Rather than who is the cheapest, achieves reusability or has the best technical metric. As Elon says, Manufacturing is harder than Engineering.

Maybe. Blue hasnt made it to orbit in what, 23 years? ULA's only interested in government launches. Relativity is more interested in 3D printing than spaceflight, its a big question mark wether they'll be competitive if and when they get to orbit.

Correct but that also brings in a sort of fun paradox

The earth cannot be a perfectly smooth exact sphere if the rotational energy is enough to bring the water to the equator first

Yes, you're right. $3.3/kg would mean you can get a ticket to space for $250

They are part owned by a couple big US aerospace companies

Exactly, SpaceX is operating under the start-up model "grow without caring about profits". That's makes it very possible they are just dumping F9, France already accused them of doing so.

** BTW, SpaceX was founded 20 years ago, it should be profitable by now, behaving like a start-up after so long is just a bad sign.

True, but there will be a lot of competition for the number 2 slot. ULA, Rocketlab, Relativity Space, Blue Origin.

>Those rounds were to raise funds for Starship and/or Starlink

We don't know that.. we can speculate though. Isn't it fun?

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If I've only got 12 tonnes to launch, sounds like it's an easy answer.

I would expect them to price Starship at or below Falcon 9 from very early on. That lets them move payloads from Falcon 9 to Starship. Every Starship launch is an opportunity to practice landing of the first and second stages. It makes sense to include commercial payloads for their practice launches even if they do so at a loss, because they need to launch anyway and some revenue is better than none.

They'll charge what the market will bear, and it won't bear more than Falcon 9 (for payloads Falcon 9 can carry) because Starship doesn't have the track record of success.

SpaceX has invested at least 10 billions in Starship related expenses, without having any revenue there. That's way more than any Falcon estimated profit.

Plus all those Starlink satellites are not cheap.

They aren't going to be launching with a reduced configuration unless reuse attempts go very wrong. They will launch relatively cheaply, because some revenue is better than none, but only with configurations that are potentially reusable so they can get reuse perfected.

If reusability didn't save them money I doubt they'd do it. And they've said it's much cheaper to refurbish than to build new. Those rounds were to raise funds for Starship and/or Starlink development. Both of those have been money-sinks.

This is a really smart answer ^

>The purchase price of a Falcon9 launch did not decrease significantly after they achieved reusability, they just increased their profit margins.

We don't know that, SpaceX financials are not public. Given the fact that SpaceX has consistently run rounds of funding, costs may have increased with reusability.

>They did cost a lot more.

Falcon9 did cost more? Well, the price hasn't changed.

>A hundred million dollar per launch starship would be great,

I absolutely doubt that even a completely non-reusable launch would cost SpaceX more than $50M. The hull construction of Starship is extremely cheap. Material wise and manufacturing wise. The most expensive parts are the engines.... and the recovering hardware.

The engines are like 250-500k a piece. Without recovery hardware and return propellant and a 50to payload I guess SpaceX could get away with 25 engines for the booster and 5 sea-level optimised Raptors for the ship (the giant nozzle for the vacuum optimised engines is likely quite expensive)

So that's like $7.5‐15M for the engines. Lets say $10M for each hull, $10M for propellant and launch operation and there is still a $5M profit margin in the worst case if they offer the flight for $50M.

So standing in the shadow, it’d be a solar eclipse?