Having followed the launch industry for 30 years, I can safely tell you that this is the exact line that every competitor (save RocketLabs and the startups fueled by the SpaceX diaspora of engineers) says whenever they are trying to justify their legacy wasteful rockets. Even Rocketlab's CEO had to "eat his hat" when he finally realized that the cost difference was real, that reusability was here to stay, and they had to develop a direct competitor to SpaceX.
SpaceX provides a per-seat, per-launch cost, not a direct government subsidy - That would be ULA. ULA was literally a direct mechanism for transferring tax revenue to large multi-national defense companies to procure "independent access to space" (sound familiar?).
They do use (and pay for and lease) NASA and Air Force facilities - but in America, airports are government institutions as well, that are explicitly leased out to airlines. Reuse of NASA's unused resources, rather than destroying them (or paying for the upkeep) after the shuttle program, was an explicit political decision.
So why isn't SpaceX cheaper? They have kept prices high (but still lower than everyone else) to help fund Starlink. The fact that they can do so is reflective of Falcon's costs.
Reusability is real. Ariane 6 is nothing more then the ULAification of Arianespace.
Another way to look at the price is from supply/demand angle. Even if real cost of falcon 9 launch is much lower than its price, SpaceX can not just lower the price, otherwise they will need to handle even greater demand.
Even with current price their launch cadence grows exponentially year by year. With lower prices they would need to grow even faster.
I think where the economics around that get screwed up is that supply <-> demand are very disconnected from each other here - tens, if not hundreds of millions and in a few case billions of dollars are spent on the payloads for Falcon, and Starlink - SapceX itself is 2/3rds of their own volume. Before Starlink started launching there were clear signs that SpaceX was building more capacity then the market could bear.
If you don't gain any additional volume by lowering cost, it doesn't make any sense to lower your cost.
It also doesn't help that Rockets (for fairly obvious reasons) are highly regulated, which further distorts this market.
Given that ULA historically purchased engines from Russia, are you suggesting that it was a direct mechanism for transferring tax revenue to Russia companies?
Yes. The idea was to keep the engines (and engineers) out of the hands of the other likely buyers. You've seen how soviet military surplus gets around: the same channels work for rocket engines, and those engines work in ICBMs just as well as they work in orbital launch platforms.
I don't know how effective this was. Did it backfire by promoting economies of scale in a program that went on to sell to adversaries anyway? Did it murder the domestic engine programs and did that have knock-on consequences? I don't know if the policy was effective, but I do know that stopping "engine proliferation" was a widely given and accepted reason for those programs.
Well, RD-180 is not really a suitable engine for modern ICBMs due to the need for a cryogenic oxidizer, resulting in the ICBM not being a very responsive design. But you are certainly correct about the engineers.
Good point. Still, I have to imagine that the engines themselves are dual use in some regard. GNSS or spy satellites maybe? These days it seems like everyone and their dog has a GNSS constellation, but it wasn't always that way.
And for anyone who wants to read about Russia in an alien dimension, I can't recommend highly enough Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" and "Empire Games" series!
> Given that ULA historically purchased engines from Russia, are you suggesting that it was a direct mechanism for transferring tax revenue to Russia companies?
I mean, for many years the US bought seats on Soyuz launches, so that was an even more direct mechanism.
Yes. Deliberately so. They wanted to ensure that rocket and nuclear technology did not proliferate in the 2000s and were willing to directly pay for Russian engineers and knowledge to keep them from going elsewhere.
SpaceX provides a per-seat, per-launch cost, not a direct government subsidy - That would be ULA. ULA was literally a direct mechanism for transferring tax revenue to large multi-national defense companies to procure "independent access to space" (sound familiar?).
They do use (and pay for and lease) NASA and Air Force facilities - but in America, airports are government institutions as well, that are explicitly leased out to airlines. Reuse of NASA's unused resources, rather than destroying them (or paying for the upkeep) after the shuttle program, was an explicit political decision.
So why isn't SpaceX cheaper? They have kept prices high (but still lower than everyone else) to help fund Starlink. The fact that they can do so is reflective of Falcon's costs.
Reusability is real. Ariane 6 is nothing more then the ULAification of Arianespace.