Running the numbers here, and assuming Musk reaches his goal of $2 million per flight for his Starships, the flights alone will cost an astronomical fortune over the course of the project. $10 a pound? Wow.
$10 a pound is dirt cheap, but the staggering amount of launches he's talking about breaks the bank.
Current prices per pound could be 100 times as much.
Even the US government would flinch at such a price tag.
Where will all the money come from?
The article says that to run 100,000 Starship launches per year would mean 10 million tons per year to orbit. That's 100 tons per launch in order to get to 10 million tons---run the numbers. Three launches per day means a thousand launches a year per bird. One hundred launchers in total. Three hundred launches per day!
Two million per launch is $200 billion per year. That is just to get to Earth orbit. It doesn't count the costs of anything else.
Ten million tons to orbit each year would be like launching the weight equivalent of 100 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers into Earth orbit.
Er, really?
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