>>13668766I wouldn't say that's entirely fair because you'd arrive at a final cost for each SS/SH stack by dividing it's initial build cost, probably somewhere in the ballpark of 200 million, by the total number of launches plus 2 million per flight. If a SS/SH stack performs twenty flights then spread out over it's lifespan and including refuels it would only cost 50 million per launch. That is an extraordinary reduction in cost of course from SLS, which will cost 2 billion+ per launch with it's engines alone costing close to three times as much as Starship+Superheavy will even if it only flew once.
This would put Starship's payload cost at $333/kg, or 163x as cost efficient as the shuttle, who's payload cost was $54,500/kg, or 46x as cost efficient as SLS who's payload cost would be $15,384/kg. For beyond LEO operations where Starships have to be refueled multiple times in orbit, assuming a full refueling, Starship is 20 times as cost effective as the shuttle and 5.75x as efficient as SLS.
Obviously this assumes that Starship cannot get any cheaper, which is fallacious since the economies of scale involved in mass-producing at least one thousand ships will likely significantly reduce it's cost, if say Raptor costs are halved over their production lifetime that could chop another 34 million dollars off Starship's price alone, not to mention mass production of tiles and increasingly automated assembly of ring segments, etc leading to reductions in man-hour costs.
