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