SpaceX has already reused some Falcons 16 times. They're aiming for 20 and Elon, being Elon, thinks they can do 100x. At this point, the biggest expense will be fuel.
How much cost is there to get a reused stage ready for the next flight? E.g. where does it land on the scale from "replace 30% of the parts due to wear and tear, and do a full disassembly reassembly, saving only 5% of the cost of the booster" to "full up the gas tank like a car and yolo the next ride"?
All I know if is the one tweet from musk years ago that said 90% savings. But ... musk tweets a lot of bullshit so idk
SpaceX has a median turnaround time between landing and re-launch of about 8 weeks, with some as low as 3 weeks. That includes time for returning the landing platform to port, unloading, payload integration of the new payload, etc, so refurbishment is some fraction of that.
There's no way they're stripping the whole thing down and replacing 30% of parts in that short of a timeframe. Especially given they do it in Florida, and don't bring them back to the factory. So it's hard to say for sure, but the time can give us some sense of what they must be doing.
Right, those were two extreme ends of a spectrum I presented, both of which are obviously not true. What I don't know is where on the spectrum their savings are.
It’s hard to compare because the rocket is designed to be reusable, but as someone that is both a fan of launch of vehicles and in/adjacent to the industry: 30-85%, and I’d bet it’s the high end. Falcon 9 is a really, really big deal in launch capability and affordability.
If you're only saving 5% you just let it burn up on the way down since you lose the much in landing fuel weight and legs. While Musks numbers are likely over optimistic the saving are large enough that it's worth the weight.
For all we know, SpaceX could be taking a page of out Amazon's book and undercutting competitors while losing money and sustaining it long enough to monopolize the market. Then they raise prices.
Almost all of spaceXs launches are to launch their own sats. Simply put if their costs were as high as other providers they couldn't afford to do it. Other providers costs are out of control.
I suppose the biggest expense is going to be not fuel (methane and LOX are cheap commodities), but the time of the spaceport, of all the people doing the integration and testing of the stack, which takes weeks if not months with trickier payloads.
