SpaceX and Elon Musk can replace SLS, Space Launch System, with the fixed priced $100 million per ton moon missions from 2028 and beyond. This would still be $10 billion for a full 100 ton payload to the moon and $7 billion if the same costs were used but scaled based on fewer refueling launches. SpaceX can get the cost of launching each Super Heavy Starship down to $100 million per launch. Six refueling launches and a main mission launch can be brought down to $1 billion or less eventually. IF SpaceX can get its manned moon missions and combined cargo missions to a fixed price $3 billion, then they could fully kill the $4-6 billion missions for SLS.
SpaceX says it plans to begin Starship cargo missions to the Moon in 2028 and to Mars in 2030, with each mission priced at $100 million per metric ton of payload. That’s $100,000 per kilogram (or $45,359 per pound).
Starship cargo flights to the lunar surface for research, development, and exploratory missions start in 2028, at a rate of $100 million per metric ton.
SpaceX would need to have ridesharing missions to the moon so NASA would not be paying for extra capacity for a clearer economic win over SLS.
Ideally, SpaceX needs to mature its cargo and manned lunar delivery so that it can offer $3 billion or less for crewed and full payload missions to the moon.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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“That’s $100,000 per kilogram”
That’s a LOT. We were sold the idea of 15 dollars per kg to LEO. Are you telling the target is $15 per km to LEO and $100k per km to the Moon?
oops, can´t edit. “per kilogram.” not per kilometer.
SLS and Orion are the only part of Artemis that EXISTS.
And where is Lunar Starship?
On China and spacesuits
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50806.msg2728275#msg2728275
[i]A company in my hometown help make the Apollo space suits. They made the textiles used. They left America in about 2005 and went to China for cheap labor. Laid off 800 workers. Back in the 1980s’ they upgraded the factory, added air conditioning, new looms that were 8 times faster than the original looms, cut the work force by slow attrition, no lay offs, from 1,100 employees to around 800 over time as they upgraded the looms. I talked to an engineer there that is retired, and he said they lost market share here because of the move. They had several factories across the south. They made sheets, towels, Van Husen and Arrow shirts, and Fruit of the Loom underware.
Considering that among recent attempts at robotic landings on the moon, the successful ones were wider than they were tall and the ones that were taller than wide fell over, the lander in the picture at the top looks like a bad idea.
OTOH, SpaceX has more experience with retropropulsive robot landings than everybody else in the world combined, several times over. They can literally take a rocket the size of a cargo ship and land it within inches of its intended destination.
As I understand it, the ones that fell over didn’t fall over because they were tippy. They fell over because they landed with excess horizontal velocity. That’s a problem SpaceX is unlikely to have.
That said, I’m not too keen either on their plan to have narrow landing legs on a craft that’s landing on unimproved lunar surface, even if they can lidar the heck out of it on the way down, and target a spot that’s flat and level. That just seems to be asking for it.