Because of a relentless focus on costs and cheap building materials, such as stainless steel, SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.

This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Bluntly, this is absurd.

For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA’s Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That’s nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it’s almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The moment of true amazement came about 45 minutes into the flight, as Starship descended an altitude of 100 km and began entering a thicker atmosphere.

It’s one thing to know about the perils of plasma and compression as a spacecraft falls back to Earth at 27,000 km/hour into thickening air.

For the last 40 years, NASA has used a small constellation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites to communicate with spacecraft, beginning with the Space Shuttle.

Today, we’re seeing this promised future as some Falcon rockets fly 20 times, and SpaceX is likely to approach a truly unprecedented 150 launches this year.

This high launch cadence enabled Starlink, through which SpaceX has delivered high-speed broadband around the world and in space.

No longer will we need to worry so much about mass or volume, which have been tyrannical overlords to mission planners since the inception of spaceflight nearly seven decades ago.

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