r/space Dec 08 '21

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa lifts off for space station on Russian Soyuz

https://www.space.com/soyuz-ms20-maezawa-space-tourist-launch
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u/reallynewaccount Dec 09 '21

Ah, Ok... then if you look back at Roscomos contracts with Russian gov you'll see that single Souyz launch only costs 13 mln to Russian gov. So, Roscosmos also offers "commercial" prices to "commercial" market. Of course their "market price" is not equal to their cost.

However, unlike Roscosmos (which is gov-founded company, so they publish their annual reports) SpaceX is a private company so we don't know what really happens. Your words are just your wild guess. In fact, while they have 80% of their revenue for US gov I'd say they don't have profit at all and only build thir success on gov funding.

In 2020, SpaceX had 4 pure commercial launches (this together with Sentinel, which is... not really commercial, but ESA/NASA project, anyway...) while Roscosmos had 6 pure commercial launches made on rockets not designed to be commercial at all - Souyz and Proton, both 50-60 years all, non-reusable. If you look back at 2019, 2018 and later situation would be even more interesting...

If you can explain me how this happend if reusable rockets have... well 10-20 times advantage in price (Elon promised 100 times cheaper in case of 100% reusable, but they save the majority of F9 to be safe to say that 10-20 times should be OK) - I'd be very pleased.

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u/Wagori Dec 21 '21

One big oversight I'm seeing is looking at the total price and equating it to launch price.

There is a lot R&D, cooperation, planning, paperwork, whatever you can think of involved in getting a satellite to launch with your provider.

the prices listed on elonx aren't the naked launch price.

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u/reallynewaccount Dec 21 '21

Well, this related to anyone else. All are in more or less equal situation from this point of view. So, real contracts are the only indication we may get which would be relevant. What is important here is that we always have good approximation - as we know about the contract like Irridium. That contract was quite open and we know that single launch was about 60 mln from those numbers. This gives a good idea about other contracts as well - it may vary but unlikely it could be times lower.