Is SpaceX Overcharging?

A few weeks ago, there was a discussion about the cost effectiveness of rockets.

I had understood it, from discussions long ago, that the key to bringing down the cost per weight of space flight was in solving the problem that most of your equipment is lost or demolished during the trip.

In theory, SpaceX has solved this problem by landing the launch bits in a controlled and relatively gentle manner. And yet, they appear to still be charging something like $1000 / kg.

From a business standpoint, you only really need to charge less than your competitors to corner the market, even if you could run profitably at some cheaper rate. General business practice would be to target a price low enough to allow more customers to come in. However, if it seems unlikely that there would be so many more customers then you might choose not to go that path. Likewise, if you fear that others will try to copy your success, hiding the level of success might allow you to maintain the advantage for longer, even if it reduces your customer base.

Do we currently have any reason to believe that SpaceX is or is not pricing themselves honestly?

ISTM as long as there is competition there is some fairness in the cost to launch things into orbit.

China is in the game, NASA is in the game, Space-X is in the game, Blue Origin is in the game(?..not sure), the European Space Agency is in the game. Russia(?..I think) is in the game. India is in the game.

That seems like competition to me which means the costs should be competitive barring government subsidies.

The key is SpaceX is AFAIK so far, the only one to reuse the substantial part of the launch hardware. (The second stage is abandoned).

The other thing is that they have an assembly line for rocket engines and the entire rocket. Where Boeing and whatever incarnations over-engineer and buld one, SpaceX welds up simple cheap hardware, and used the “let’s see what works” approach to fixing engineering issues. As seen with the massive booster, too - they use simple approaches - don’t build an new engine 10 times the size, just use 33 of the ones that are proven.

Whether they are overcharging? I recall something that said they charge about half what other launchers charge (so, $67M or so?), and have a hundred launches a year. I assume some of that revenue goes into building the new spaceships they are playing with, so presumably there’s a profit there. Note Musk is only one of several contractors, too, in the equipment for getting back to the moon.

The cost of launch for a Falcon 9 has been $62 million historically, but it can carry considerably larger payloads up to 50,000 pounds. Per pound launch costs have been as low as $1,200. SpaceX increased the cost of a launch to $67 million in 2022, citing rising material costs and inflation.

The launch of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the USSF-51 mission for the United States Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC) is scheduled for July 30, 2024 from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The cost is $153.0 million .

So is the US government being ripped off by this upstart competitor to the military-industrial complex? Time will tell. Of all the criticisms of Musk (and there are many) costing the government too much money does not seem to be one. Being able to send astronauts to the ISS - on a round trip - without relying on the Russians? Priceless!

It’s not quite clear to me what the question is. If company A charges $10 for a product that costs them $9, and company B charges $8 for effectively the same product that costs them $1, is B overcharging? They’re certainly more profitable. But it’s not really overcharging in any common-sense use of the term.

If there were some kind of further shenanigans going on, like a company being a monopoly or using lobbying to prevent the use of their competitors, that would be different. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with SpaceX. And they only ever bid fixed-price contracts so there’s no room for any kind of extras after the fact. Whatever the winning bid is, that’s what the customer is charged.

Government contracts specifically tend to have a few extras attached and so aren’t always comparable to standard SpaceX list prices (or their competitors, since they sometimes include those extras “for free”). Different payload adapters, extra cleanroom requirements, extra secrecy, that kind of thing. Usually the charges aren’t obscene but they might amount to an extra ~50%, depending.

But that’s certainly not required, and government contracts don’t always need those extras. In that case they get the commercial price, or even less (because every contract goes through a competitive bid). The IXPE mission only cost NASA $50M, for example.

It may be that in a year or two, SpaceX faces some meaningful pricing pressure. Depends largely on the success of New Glenn and some other rockets. I doubt it’ll lead to a price war, however. I don’t think underbidding their competitors by $1 on every contract maximizes their own profit. Starship may change the game, though.

The Tesla business model seems to imply yes they are overcharging, and can and will drop the price steeply once real competition exists to kill the competition’s profit.

What does “honestly” mean? Serious question.

Zact’ly.

If there’s not criminality in the negotiation process (bribery, coercion, etc), then any price the vendor agrees to is an honest price. Whether the price is exactly at, above, below, or far below their costs is immaterial.

I suspect the OP is thinking about this idea:

Which might in fact be a nice way to run a world. But it’s not the world we live in.

I suppose the fact that SpaceX seem to severely undercut other competitors demostrates they are not milking the system for every last penny; but they are making enough profit to fund further R&D. This seems to be a Musk habit (at least until ExTwitter). He did something similar with cars, using the revenue from a sport car to build a sedan, and from that to build an SUV, and the revenue from those to build a mass production car.

The same applies with cars, it produces plenty of revenue to help fund further development, expansion of factories, and interesting sidelines like AI (to help with robotic driving development), robots, tunnelling, etc. The Tesla Semi is a sleeper product with the potential to alter the economic landscape. I’ve seen some suggestions from industry insiders after car teardowns that the profit was in the neighbourhood of 30%. There’s an immediate savings in not having to concede a significant percentage to independent dealers. There’s a big savings in not needing such a large service arm, since EV’s have fewer issues. There’s another savings in not having to advertise. Plus, he’s the only EV company that has actually built a charger network to make his cars practical. Detroit has expected others to do that job. Also, a lot of upgrades can be done over-the-air, and free - very different for example from my 10yo BMW, whose GPS shows me driving through empty fields.

Also, some of the funds from both enterprises presumably add to other endeavours like Starlink. Could he transform wortheless R&D spending into more productive shareholder yatchs and Bentleys? Probably, that’s the usual Wall Street business model. Instead, much of that is ploughed back into the business.

Supposedly some competitors are losing big money on every EV, but then they are catching up to Tesla’s 15 years or so of expertise in the field.

Certainly, they have a profit margin. Nobody would expect a business to run without one. And certainly they could decrease their profit margin. But what profit margin is “honest”? There are some products, in widely-accepted markets with many competitors, that have profit margins over 90%, and nobody complains. And it’s that much harder in a market where none of the other competitors even comes close.

The operative business concept is charging what the market will bear. What this means is that if you’ve got a widget and your customer is willing to pay $11 for it, then you charge $11 for it. That $11 is what you charge, regardless of what it costs you, as well- the point is to charge what the customer’s willing to pay, and lower your own costs to make that gap (profit!) as large as possible.

Overcharging would be when you’re charging $12 and your customer only wants to pay $11. In that case, they start looking for cheaper alternatives, and/or just buying fewer widgets.

SpaceX is definitely not overcharging by that definition.

That’s a sort of… nonsensical concept. Too many people have this really nebulous concept that there’s a vague “reasonable” profit margin or percentage above cost that things “should” cost, and that anything over that is somehow dishonest or overcharging.

It’s not- it’s all about what customers are willing to pay, which is something modified by the presence of alternatives, competitors, and what their own finances look like.

RocketLab, for their part, has sort of vaguely accused SpaceX of undercharging on their Transporter missions. These are rideshare missions that are basically charged by the pound.

How true that is is unclear. Certainly, if you look at some particular missions and add up the known payloads with the public pricing info, it looks like they’re only making $15M-ish on some missions. And $15M is somewhere in the ballpark of SpaceX’s marginal cost for a launch. However:
- SpaceX has been clear that they are operating the Transporter missions like a bus. Sometimes the bus isn’t filled enough to pay its own costs. But part of the value of the bus is that it departs on a regular schedule and it doesn’t wait up for the slowest passenger to arrive. They can just catch the next bus.
- Light missions do costs less, because SpaceX can use return-to-launch-site instead of the drone ships, which is not only cheaper but shortens the turnaround time. They’re also easier on the booster for various reasons (such as only requiring a single-engine landing burn instead of a 1-3-1 sequence).
- It keeps up a high flight cadence, which is itself a cost-reduction measure.
- They might be making a few extra bucks on special handling charges on some payloads.

So SpaceX is probably not actually losing money on these missions, though it is certainly closer than other missions. RocketLab doesn’t like it because the Transporter missions eat their small-sat market. Scheduled flights aren’t quite as nice as having a whole rocket to yourself, but it’s nicer than being dependent on the latest payload.

Also, what if company B charges $20 but people are willing to pay it because “OMG! company B is the best!”

Also, cargo space to space (huh?) is a limited resource and a known quantity. Seems it is a basic economic calculation of how much do you charge to sell exactly X kilograms of space cargo per year.

Well, actual/total cost includes the cost of insurance for the payload.

No, it doesn’t. Payloaders are responsible for their own loss and damage insurance (both for Loss Of Vehicle accident and failure on orbit) for their payload(s), and frankly most payloaders today don’t bother with launch insurance for anything less than a billion dollar satellite (i.e. big commercial telcom birds) because it just isn’t worth it given the costs and ensuing litigation tying up payouts for years (or in at least one case that I am aware of, a couple of decades). Government payloads such as GPS and surveillance satellites are ‘self-insured’, i.e. the government does its own independent risk evaluation and mission assurance activities requiring vehicle design and integration data from the launch services contractor (for which they pay through the nose).

There is so much misinformation in this thread it is difficult to know where to start addressing it but I’ll just note that the supposed cost savings from vehicle (in the case of SpaxeX, just the first stage and sometimes payload fairing) reuse are are not what the general public imagines them to be. SpaceX is privately held and has been adverse to sharing details of actual NRE, manufacturing, and operating costs but they aren’t doing any kind of magic that makes them immune to normal engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain cost estimation even given internal ‘efficiencies’ in their processes (which, to their credit, they embraced early on, particularly in making all manufacturing packages, test data, and signatures electronic, and creating an efficient system for handling deviations and engineering changes). Despite claims that this is more akin to flying an airliner than traditional expendable rocket launch systems, in fact most of the cost of space launch is in the integration and testing (‘touch labor’), launch operations, launch infrastructure and (for launching from US spaceports such as Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Vandenberg Space Force Base) the range operations fees and compliance requirements. (Common propellants such as LOX, RP1, and methane are basically a rounding error in terms of launch costs.) Aside from their landing features the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are very conventional space launch systems albeit with some innovations such as non-ordnance stage and fairing separation systems, and they are not uniquely inexpensive to construct or operate (although SpaceX has streamlined certain integration operations, especially with their own payloads, and has implemented significant automation in testing that makes the process less dependent on the experience of personnel).

The real advantage for reuse for SpaceX isn’t cost savings per vehicle but the ability to maintain a high launch tempo without being as limited by the throughput of engine and first stage manufacture. There is still a large amount of disassembly, inspection, refurbishment, and integration activity that goes on with every reused first stage but that can be done in parallel to maintain availability of stages for flight, which does translate into more launch service revenue, or in the case of Starlink flights, getting. more of their constellation in orbit faster. This also translates into faster amortization of facilities and launch staff as there is less time that they are in a lull between launches, and there is definitely some ‘economy of scale’ in that alone, although it is not orders of magnitude cheaper.

However, it is not clear that SpaceX is yielding large profits from their launch business, or indeed, any net profit at all given how much venture capital investment they are still taking in. Back in the halcyon days before they even lofted the first Falcon 9 vehicle, Gwynne Shotwell was promoting an order of magnitude reduction in launch costs and Elon Musk was making such absurdly improbable claims that it wasn’t even worth taking him seriously (although many investors apparently did). For a while after they got Stage 1 reuse sufficiently reliable that customers were willing to fly with it they offered a very modest 10% discount for flying on a previously flown* stage (with the caveat that in those early days a ‘reused rocket’ was a genuine “Ship of Theseus” with many major components replaced or at least substantially refurbished between flights), which gives some indication of the scale of savings from reusability. Today, a customer doesn’t have any choice between flying a newly minted Stage 1 or one that has been flown repeatedly, and they pay the same launch cost regardless. It should also be noted that the advertised cost for a vehicle that SpaceX puts on their website is what we refer to as a ‘manifesting price’; that is, the money a payloader agrees to pay just to secure a place on the launch schedule notwithstanding any mission-specific costs such as extra couple loads analyses (common in the case of satellites still in development or having difficulty with flight qualification testing), special processing and handling, health & status monitoring, et cetera.

It is pretty clear (to me, at least, and I’ve actually worked on studies for launch vehicle cost reductions from design, scaling, and operations) that SpaceX is operating on pretty thin—and possibly non-existent margins—in the same way that Amazon has run in the red for a couple of decades; to get into a position where they dominate the space launch industry and squeeze out all of the competition, relying on constant ‘capital’ investment and stock valuation to cover any revenue shortfalls. And they have been very successful in this vein, although it also seems clear that they are hinging the ultimate profitability of the company upon Starlink about which I have both doubts and extreme concerns about the risks of having so many satellites in Low Earth Orbit, not to mention the ‘externalities’ of what his does for ground astronomy (both optical and radio). The recent valuation of SpaceX at US$350B seems absurd as there is no way that Starlink could generate that much revenue in decades of operation, and the entire rest of the projected space operations market for the foreseeable future is around an order of magnitude less than that. But I’ve given up making any sense of market valuations of companies for going on the last decade because they are clearly based more on thermalized atmosphere than any kind of rigorous fiscal analysis.

So, to address the question of the o.p., I don’t know that “SpaceX is or is not pricing themselves honestly”, but they are certainly not overcharging, either based on a metric of price per kilogram of payload delivered (a theoretical metric used for scaling studies which is almost never realized because most payloads are a lot of unused volume) or actual cost per launch (the real price that payloaders bear regardless of payload mass). SpaceX has yet to realize some absurdly dramatic reduction in payload costs that they aren’t passing onto customers because, again, the Falcon 9 is a mostly conventional vehicle and the savings from reuse just don’t offer that dramatic of a reduction. Whether they can achieve something like order of magnitude reductions for their ‘Super Heavy’ vehicle by dint of scale remains to be seen, as does the commercial market for a 100+ metric ton payload capacity by the typical user that needs to get their telcom or Earth surveillance vehicle to a specific orbit.

Stranger

Latest word is that New Glenn, Blue Origin’s orbiter, will make its first flight early this month. I forget the exact date it’s expected.

New Glenn is going to be reused as well.

There’s simply no way that their launch business isn’t highly profitable in terms of gross margin. Although they’re private, we can put some bounds on their costs from purely public information.

First, SpaceX has only raised ~$12B in outside investment across their entire history:

That money has had to pay for all of their expenses in excess of what their launch business, NASA contracts, and Starlink income pays for. Most notably, that includes the Falcon 9 reusability program, Falcon Heavy, Starship, their entire Boca Chica complex, and Starlink.

Starlink alone has taken 220 launches! If SpaceX’s internal cost was the same as their list price, the launches alone would have cost over $15B! And that’s ignoring the cost of the satellites themselves or any of the other programs they’re developing.

It’s obvious that they simply don’t have the cash to afford launches that cost anywhere close to their list price. Even $20M/launch would have cost $4.4B, which is on the high side but maybe not totally unbelievable, given that it would mean the remaining launches are now making money. Still, that again comes out of the pool of $12B total outside investment (not per year) that has to pay for all of the other things I mentioned. And every one of those things is a >$1B development effort (I’ve left out the stuff that NASA mostly paid for, namely Dragon development).

$15M/launch or even a bit less is the most believable. The satellites themselves probably double that to $30M/launch. That leaves enough leftover bucks for Starship-related development and a few other things.

Does all this mean that, as a whole, their launch business is highly profitable? Well, that depends on how you count it. If the Starlink division pays list price for the launches, then Starlink is wildly unprofitable and their launch business is doing pretty well. But if Starlink pays cost for the launches, then it’s probably breaking even or is slightly profitable, while their launch business is about the same (only making a profit on <50% of the launches). But that’s just accounting.

As for claims about “order of magnitude” cost reductions, given that the US competition at the time was the Shuttle, Atlas V, and Delta IV, SpaceX has easily beaten those targets–even considering price, not cost. The Shuttle cost ~$60k/kg, the Atlas V and Delta IV around around $20k/kg each, while the F9 is priced at $4k/kg. So in the ballpark of 5x to 15x, though ULA got massive subsidies in addition to these values, making the difference even larger (I am specifically thinking of the $800M/yr given for the “EELV Launch Capability contract”, which gave the government nothing other than some priority in launch scheduling).

I’m looking forward to revisiting this thread in several years, when Starship is launching a couple hundred times a year, and somehow still having to argue that reusability is still of questionable importance…

IIANARocket Scientist, but it seems to me from the news that SpaceX’s major savngs is in avoiding the $10,000-toilet-seat sort of engineering that the other launch companies took for granted with government contracts. At least with the Starship development, they seem to be welding tin cans out of stainess steel (albeit highly technical and precisely engineered) and producing the same rocket engines (IIRC, the third design iteration) over and over on an assembly line. So unlike some of the other companies, they don’t seem to treat each as a one-off and instead deliberately look for places to cut costs.

For example, why is the entire SLS development and testing so complicated and time-consuming compared to Starship? Elon blows up a rocket and they launch another one within a month or three, while how many have Boeing aunched? Which process generates more confidence in proving the reliability of engineering designs?

I’d love to see some sort of discussion about complexities of design and what they cost on the various different rockets.

One thing about SpaceX is that they’ve never been embarrassed about saving a buck. For instance, they bought this LOX ball for $1 above scrap value from the Air Force:

Took some time to clean up and prep for use, but it’s served them well ever since. What other aerospace company would bother with that kind of penny-pinching? One of Eric Berger’s books (Reentry, I believe) mentions the story here and that the other clients at Cape Canaveral were basically laughing at SpaceX for trying to save this garbage. But it would probably have cost several tens of millions to buy a new one. Falcon 9 1.0 cost under $400M to develop, so it wasn’t insignificant for them.

Very poor feedback between design and manufacturing is a major part. Anyone can design a widget that takes a hundred hours on a 6-axis CNC machine. But it takes time and more importantly a fast and effective feedback loop to make something that can be made via casting or other high speed techniques.

You also need to iterate rapidly. We could see in public the poor early versions of Starship construction–the stainless panels were wrinkly and awful at first! But every month they got a little better, and they look extremely clean now.

SLS is just a huge lump of political pork. It costs idiotic money because those in charge of the purse strings want that sort of money spent. (Well spent in their home state.) It doesn’t make sense to compare it to any real space program. Those in charge of funding it would probably prefer if it never flew. That way they could throw money at it forever. The last thing they want is for it to reach usefulness and not need further funding.

The breakdown of SpaceX’s money flows is going to be at best very rough. I suspect that a lot of investors are less interested in the launch side of the game than they are in Starlink. That has the potential to be worth more than any launch company.

Just what the market for 100 tons to LEO will be in the short term is an interesting question. No doubt it will be disruptive, but even if launches were free, the cost of space based technology is far from cheap. There are only so many cheap and cheerful Earth observation satellites you can usefully launch. If Starlink wipes out the civilian sat coms market SpaceX may well have eliminated its best customer base.
There are only so many millionaires willing to pay for a space ride, and getting into that sort of market is going bring a whole new world of safety regulations. Elon might kick back hard on that, but he won’t have the ear of a president by the time it matters. The first fatality will bring a serious reckoning.

Enabling a step up in astronomical science is one big win. We may contemplate some true science fiction level observatories. But the costs of the observatories will still be insane simply because of the environment they must operate in. Yes making mass to orbit cheaper will help, but if we look at say the JWST, the majority of the pain wasn’t the big items, but the instruments.

Mars? That is a loss making enterprise from the get go. An ability to loft big masses makes a sample return mission more likely. Which is a real win. But boots on Mars within the next decade? Maybe, and at significant risk. Way short of a colony. Funding a colony from his private wealth might make Elon SpaceX’s biggest customer, but realistically this is unlikely to happen.

So far we have the big dumb booster that we knew we wanted back before the Shuttle first flew. But nothing else has gotten easier.

I still wonder about the military value. Rods from God would make for a good fit. Experience lofting many satellites at scale, plus controlled reentry capabilities also a useful fit. Lots of reason why not as well. But other than Elon actually being an alien trying to get home, it might be one of the better fits. If you are into conspiracy theories.

In large part, though, space hardware is expensive precisely because launches are expensive. If you can only afford one launch, then you’d best make sure that what you put on that one launch is the absolute best you can get. But if you can afford as many launches as you need, then you just launch a whole bunch of whatever it is you’re launching, and don’t care if some of them fail. That’s part of how cheaper launches could be transformative.

Space hardware mostly isn’t expensive because of the harsh environment of space, because space isn’t actually that harsh of an environment. In many ways, it’s Earth that’s the harsh environment: Everything on the planet has a constant significant acceleration that it needs to withstand, everything is constantly immersed in one of the most reactive substances known, etc. With space, you don’t have to worry about that, which makes a lot of things a lot easier.

And for another example of how cheap launches are transformative, you mention that there’s a limited number of billionaires interested in space tourism. But if you can get it cheap enough, there are plenty of middle-class folks who might be willing to save up for a few years for a space vacation. That’s potentially a huge market.

This sounds similar to the hype versus reality of the Shuttle Program. Promises of reusability and rapid turnaround to a high launch tempo that never manifested.

Space X is different in a lot of ways, but that part sounds familiar.