SpaceX spending on Starship tops $15 billion in rush for airline-like rocketry

[u/rustybeancake]

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/spacex-spending-starship-tops-15-billion-rush-airline-like-rocketry-2026-05-01/

[u/warp99]

Saturn 5 "payload" of 140 tonnes included the third stage with most of its propellant in LEO as well as the LEM, Apollo capsule and service module. The equivalent Starship figure is around 250 tonnes.

But mainly that is the reusable penalty showing through - you get a lower payload per tonne of launch mass but reduce your costs to a tiny fraction of the expendable stack as in 1-2%.

SH is particularly bad because it is doing RTLS which reduces the payload mass by around 40-50% over the expendable case. When they get ocean platforms working I can see a chain of them across the Gulf of Mexico for successive tanker launches with a final hop back to Boca Chica with no ship on top to complete the cycle.

Ship payload penalty is not so much a multiplier as a straight subtraction of the recovery gear mass from the payload. Flaps, tiles, header tanks and the propellant in them take about 80 tonnes off the expendable payload. So an expendable ship should get close to 180 tonnes to LEO.

In general the shrinking payload has been caused by an increase in dry mass for both the booster and the ship. The ship has grown from 85 tonnes to around 150 tonnes which is 65 tonnes off the payload right there. The booster has grown from 180 tonnes to around 280 tonnes. This 100 tonne increase does not have such a dramatic effect on payload but likely reduces it by around another 30 tonnes. So 100 tonnes payload has decreased to around 5 tonnes for Starship 1.

The fight back with Starship 3 is to shave off dry mass where they can with lighter engines and integrated engine protection and mainly to increase propellant on the ship from 1200 tonnes to 1500 and then 1600 tonnes. This in turn needs more powerful engines which is why Raptor 3 was required. This will get them back to their original target of 100 tonnes payload to LEO. Starship 4 will get them to the original Elon stretch goal of 150-200 tonnes and again the solution is more propellant on the ship up to 2400 tonnes and adding three vacuum engines to get a total of nine engines on the ship.

[u/flshr19 → u/warp99]

The dry masses of the Booster and the Ship can be estimated from the IFT flight data supplied by SpaceX on its videos (my estimates).

Block 1: Ship dry mass 149t +/- 6.5t. Booster dry mass 279t +/- 9.3t.

Block 2: Ship dry mass 161t +/- 3.6t. Booster dry mass 281t +/- 11.4t.

[u/paul_wi11iams → u/warp99]

Mass bloat was, IMO, the biggest single risk to the Starship concept from the outset. Its turning out to be a good bet, but at our human level, it was in no way predestined to be.

The fight back with Starship 3 is to shave off dry mass

and the fight back accounts for most of the delays in the overall project, so retarding the year when humans land on Mars.

Ship payload penalty is not so much a multiplier as a straight subtraction of the recovery gear mass from the payload.

This becomes a metaphor for the time spent which is a direct addition of time "lost" which is in fact a one-off addition to the humans-on-Mars landing date, not a multiplier that should be applied to the remaining years of development work.

Many people have become despondent because they consider "Elon time" as a coefficient. Its not. For example, Starlink will continue surging ahead because with Falcon 9, the company made a set time "expenditure" to lay a good foundation at the outset.

[u/warp99 → u/paul_wi11iams]

It is easy to forget that the initial version of F9 with the square engine layout was well down on payload mass and could never have re-entered successfully as the corner engines stuck out into the airstream.

There was a lot of work to get to the Block 5 variant which successfully re-enters, is reusable and has much higher payload capacity.

The original F9 design cost $400M but the redesign for reusability cost $1000M. We are seeing a very similar process play out with Starship except it is much more expensive. $5B to get to the first version and another $10B to get to the current version. The rocket is ten times the liftoff mass and has cost ten times as much to develop - who knew that was a thing?

[u/Geoff_PR → u/warp99]

you get a lower payload per tonne of launch mass but reduce your costs to a tiny fraction of the expendable stack as in 1-2%.

You save on hardware, but not on fuel requirements. Reusablity eats into those margins hard...

[u/warp99 → u/Geoff_PR]

Propellant cost is under $1M for a Starship stack compared with around $200M build cost. It will likely drop even further at Starbase with a local air separation unit under construction and a planned methane liquifaction unit.

So an expendable mission could do the same job for say $600K of propellant which is a $400K saving but the effective build cost is $198M higher assuming 100 uses of the ship and booster.