How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
getmeflyingcars.medium.comAre these numbers inflation adjusted? The difference would be far more dramatic if not.
Thanks for asking this, it's super-important to understand it. If they're not infation-adjusted, then there's already been a (very slow) exponential reduction in the cost.
I think they are inflation-adjusted. Here's an inflation-adjusted source that explicitly lets you pick FY2021 dollars as the reference:
https://aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-or...
It puts the Saturn V at $5k USD/kg, the same as this article.
What's interesting is that it shows a general downward trend a little more clearly than this one does, but the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still very shocking outliers.
It's surprising not to see that anywhere — it's the natural question.
Not at my computer, but this function in mathematica would help:
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/InflationAdjust.h...
They seem to be unadjusted. The source link under the picture links to this dataset:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbR...
There's a column there for inflation-adjusted prices, but not much data in it.
This seems to support it being adjusted not unadjusted. There is no unadjusted column and the Saturn V is listed as 5400 adjusted which lines up with the graph, if it were the unadjusted number it'd be ~7x off.
There is a source link in the article that shows a spreadsheet that claims to be inflation adjusted
Edit looks like it was updated minutes ago
Just updated the figures to be inflation adjusted.
For the smallest possible missions, the price per kg is fairly constant in recent years - $50,000/kg. SpaceX does indeed offers the best price: $5000/kg, but only if you are buying in bulk.
Or can get a ride share to a suitable orbit.
In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
Trash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.
I was just watching a video where they made the claim that the slag from steel production 100 years ago has more metal than some ores, so it's becoming worthwhile to re-mill slag.
Video games have largely misled us here. Iron ore is incredibly common, it’s not a rare resource at all. The limiting factor for steel production has historically been energy, not ore, and in the modern context the ability to produce pure oxygen for carbon reduction. Historically iron mines were put near forests for fuel, not wherever the richest ore was.
The advantage of re-using slag isn’t that it’s richer in metal, iron oxides being pretty easy to get, it’s that it would take less energy or Oxygen to finish refining.
Recommended reading: Bret Devereaux’s blog series about iron & steel production. https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
It might also be that slag might be closer to smelters than ore, reducing transport costs.
That also seems quite likely.
That or slag is much lighter per lb of refined product, reducing the transit cost. Iron ores are incredibly common, but they’re also very heavy, what with them being literally rocks.
of course I can't find the original video I was watching, but since the slag is directly outside the steel mill, transit is about as low as it could get.
If you search on YouTube for "deskulling slag pot", you'll find a bunch of videos showing slag trains going maybe a couple miles from the mill to a pit to deskull?
I wonder how much silver comes from recycling old copper, lead and zinc.
Only about a quarter of « new » silver comes from silver mines. The rest as a byproduct of other mineral mining where they separate out the silver.
Or a rail gun.
My understanding for why we don't use those for spacecraft is because people and fine machinery can't take the Gs.
Trash could.
The main issue with concepts like rail guns and what-not for orbital launches is atmosphere. Your atmospheric drag is a function of velocity squared times the density of the atmosphere- a very non-linear function of how close to the ground you are.
Rockets have a huge advantage in that they go slow near the ground, where the atmosphere is thick. They're not dealing with as much air resistance. As they reach altitudes with less atmosphere, they can throttle up. This saves a lot of fuel, mass, energy.
A rail gun, however, can only add velocity, energy, at the beginning, and will slow down every moment for the rest of the launch. This is the worst possible condition. You're at your highest velocity while you're in the thickest part of the atmosphere. You'd need to put an incredible amount of extra energy into the system because of that.
So maybe you put the end of your rail gun on the top of a very high mountain. But the construction costs, the transportation costs, all of this, probably makes it simpler to just use rockets instead.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
[Edit] Also the German V-3. An important note is that the V3 and Babylon (unsure of HARP) were designed to have multiple charges go off as the projectile proceeded down the barrel, which gives an acceleration profile more like a railgun than a traditional cannon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon
Solid-fuel rocket boosters were used instead of explosive charges because of their greater suitability and ease of use. These were arranged in symmetrical pairs along the length of the barrel, angled to project their thrust against the base of the projectile as it passed. This layout spawned the German codename Tausendfüßler ("millipede").
I'm interested to see what's viable to send to orbit now. Can a solar shade be put up which blocks light from hitting our poles and prevent some climactic change? How about rocketing asteroids back to LEO for processing into valuable minerals?
Geoengineering projects will probably require a lot of haggling in committees, mining asteroids does seem to have some momentum (pun intended)[1] though I would personally worry about moving some big metallic asteroid to LEO, wouldn't want to make any mistakes...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_minin...
Trash isn't full of valuable materials though. It's full of food (mostly water by weight I guess) and paper and plastic with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.
True, I was being hyperbolic (oof, the pun material is just too good). But the organics pretty much take of themselves, leaving behind just the bits we might want to reuse. Of course, we could be composting the organics and reusing them now, my city does that, though they give the compost away to any takers, which suggests the economics are still a work in progress.
Right, I understood you were exaggerating and replied because the energy investment will probably never make sense if the goal is material recovery (a landfill is the worst ore for anything interesting).
It might happen for other reasons like remediation or whatever.
Isn't water a valuable resource?
Not really no. Clean water is valued where it is scarce, but it is relatively cheap to conjure (expensive desalination costs $0.004 a gallon).
In a modern landfill it already gets recovered (there's a liner underneath, so they have to have a way of dealing with water).
It is $2 a sticker (1 sticker per normal bag, 1.5 stickers for large ones) here in Western Massachusetts, USA and you have to drive your trash and recycling yourself to the "dump" (town transfer station).
I dunno if environmentalists are going to want to send all our trash into LEO
I feel a situation like this would almost guarantee a Kessler Syndrome style event.
If you keep sending trash to space, earth will disappear
I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it.
Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (but a very reasonable amount, like $2/tire).
Swiss trash bag fees pay for garbage collection and improvements to the recycling infrastructure. They aren't meant to offset the damage to the Earth or some abstract puffery like that.
Paying by the bag is good. In the USA, if you live in a detached house there's normally a fixed price to get a large barrel collected weekly. The barrel is large enough to hold a week's trash from a family of four who puts no effort into reducing trash output. If you live alone and are conscious about generating trash, you get ripped off.
> In the USA
Hold up.. This not only varies by state, but by county and city. Some places have this built in to special assessments on property taxes, some contract with a trash company that collects fees directly, and some are a bit of a free for all with multiple trash companies providing pickup and or/dumpster service (this is more common in rural areas).
I had a place up in the mountains where we had to buy special $6 trash bags and haul it to a central dumpster ourselves, and there are those in large cities who have to deal with mob-run collection companies who bribe local politicians for monopoly rights.
TLDR; To generalize "In the USA" for something like this is impossible.
True, I should have said "in places I have lived in the USA".
If you want every negative externality to be precisely captured by a fee, you will be paying fees all day long.
One approach is to capture a number of related issues in one fee at a natural point of contact that is easy to measure. It's not a crazy idea.
They open non taxed bag looking for letters with your name on it and send you a fine if they find it.
Its the strange intersection of conspicuous consumption and virtue signaling. Only we are good enough people and wealthy enough to pay a bizarre tax.
I was wondering, so in case you were too, that other recently introduced rocket that has a <$5k/kg launch cost is the Russian Angara A5. It has flown twice. Falcon 9 has flown over 100 times. SpaceX really does have an incredible lead on the competition.
The dataset doesn't include options to buy during a good chunk of 1990-s a Proton launch for some $30 millions. That's a carrier with upwards of 20 tons payload capabilities to LEO. Soyuz rocket family also has periods in history when prices were quite low; SpaceX phenomenon touches only the last 10 years at best - and it's in last 10 years when Proton became particularly unreliable and Soyuz maybe more expensive.
How much useful payload did the A5 deliver in those two flights?
None. Both launches were of mass simulators.
Nice charts !
I was a bit sad not to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family) in the list ! I'm really not expert enough into space race matters to know if it's relevant, or if the tiny french LEO platform would be worth charting ?
Ariane isn't competitive at all price-wise for commodity satellites.
What it has going for however is a near perfect track record.
Ariane is still somewhat competitive to geocentric orbits and when dual berthing.
Falcon 9 and Heavy lose most of their performance advantage when going to higher orbits, IIRC because their first stages stage lower, and their upper stage has an ISP disadvantage vs. hydrogen rockets.
To maximize payload percentage to both LEO and higher orbits the most optimal rocket configuration is a first stage burning a dense fuel like RP-1 or Methane to minimize your largest tankage size/weight, and use hydrogen on your upper stage to maximum ISP without incurring too large a cost in heavier tankage. That’s how the Saturn V could lift 150 metric tons to LEO and 50 to translunar injection.
But instead SpaceX decided to use the same fuel and engines for both stages to get economies of scale in engine production, and dense fuels to save the most dry mass.
They could have optimized the next generation Falcon platform with a cryogenic hydrogen upper, and increased their GEO payloads 10-20%, at the cost of dual engine designs with less economies of scale and increased fueling complexity and infrastructure.
Instead they decided to brute force the same simple design architecture and build a 10x larger booster/second stage with Starship/SuperHeavy with 3x times the engines. One engine type, one fuel type and bigger rockets with enough brute lifting capacity that you can still put 100 metric tons in LEO while conserving enough to fly back your first stage and make your second stage out of heavy stainless steel so it can re-enter and be reused too.
So probably two thirds the payload to orbit capacity as a Saturn V style rocket, but 1/100th the cost per launch.
Going from the lowest price and highest payload for the Ariane 5... $165,000,000 / 20,000 kg = $8250/kg, or still not really competitive.
And in fact, the source spreadsheet [0] lists a few members of the Ariane family - so I think it's charted.
0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbRDIXu...
That's one of the reasons I'm not really interested in the Artemis program.
I'd rather fund Starship to get that massive launch cost reduction and then start looking at returning to the moon.
Being able to ship more hardware means you don't have to make it as reliable since you have spares. That further drives down the cost of R&D.
Artemis != SLS. Artemis is a program for which the SLS and other vehicles are under development. SpaceX and other commercial launch providers are also being engaged by the Artemis program to develop vehicles.
While Starship (and maybe New Glenn) does look more attractive than SLS now, a effort as large as Artemis is more concerned with capability than immediately driving the cost down. SLS is a capable vehicle moved forward by proven methods by experienced vendors. The lower risk drives higher and more predictable up front costs.
Check out Everyday Astronaut for some interesting perspective on what is going on with SLS and Starship:
The SLS is an badly designed architecture built on obsolete technologies with very limited capabilities. SRBs greatly increase launch costs while reducing safety. RS-25s were designed to be reused, but required such extensive refurbishment that they were like drag racing engines requiring full rebuilds after every race.
Using hydrogen to fuel the first stage required building a massively heavy cryogenic tank, impairing performance so greatly the RS-25s cant lift the SLS without SRBs.
And not only will it cost $20B before it’s first launch, but each flight will destroy over a half billion in engines alone. So the minimum cost per flight is over $1B without counting the R&D, about $3B to $5B per flight in total depending on how many flights are flown to amortize the R&D.
And with all that, SLS has very limited capabilities. The block 1 will be the largest heavy lift launch system (until Starship launches), but it’s only about 30% more payload mass than a $150M falcon heavy expendable.
But worse is the maximum possible cadence for the SLS is twice yearly, making it both useless and unnecessary for more ambitious missions that will rely on in orbit refueling. It’s just an archaic dinosaur built out of nearly 50 year old parts.
These are all fair criticisms of SLS. Given SLS’ limitations, it will require multiple launches to get everything needed to land and return the moon mission. At the same time, the speed of SpaceX’s success wasn’t a given when SLS was initiated. I don’t think NASA/government in general has the appetite for direct risk that SpaceX represents. However, that hasn’t stopped them from hedging low-risk high-cost with generous bets on SpaceX.
Let’s say you’re a member of congress accustomed to how programs work and someone says to you, pay me to make a rocket that is totally reusable to make the moon so cheap that tons of people will do it.
For one, cheap? Full stop. In whose interest is it to make space exploration cheap? Does the government want access to space cheap enough that someone might do something destabilizing or disruptive in any way?
Ok, let’s skip past cheap and the Congress-critter looks at the shiny Starship and asks, “How much stuff can it take to the moon?” The answer is “lots if we figure out orbital rocket refueling, otherwise nothing.” To get into TLI and beyond, SpaceX or somebody needs to figure out how to do that. Sure there have been some experiments, but nothing concrete yet.
Ok, you skip past the sci-fi orbital refueling and the suited person says, “I love it and I’ll vote for it, but tell me where all is it going to be built so we now which senators will speed this along.” You say, well, design and manufacturing in CA, and a KSC processing facility, engine tests in Central TX countryside and a new space-port in Boca Chica. Response is “oh come on man—CA, FL and TX already have tons of stuff going on and their reps won’t care about something this small! We need Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, the kinds of places where a rep will burn down their grandma’s house for a project this size. Come back when you have a real plan.”
That's fantastic. Makes me wonder what other efficiency gains we're missing out on due to there not being the right incentives.
The y-scale on that graph really makes it hard to understand the true drop in price.
The log scale and the orgin at 0 definitely don't help the readability here...
Highlighting the SpaceX data points would definitely help with readability. But origin at zero is a good thing; charts with Y axes offset from 0 are generally worse than worthless - they're actively misleading (and often purposefully so).
I don't get the automatic dismissal of graphs with offset axes.
Yes, this one is better because it starts from 0, but there are plenty of reasons to offset a graph. For example, when you want to look at curves correlation (you may even want more than one offset at the same time), or study the change behavior.
Given these insanely cheap prices, I have to wonder about the viability of sending your own microsatellites into space to create your own personal communications cluster.
I don't know enough to know what all would be required, how / if you could communicate with other networks, etc., but even just having your own personal LEO satellite-based communications network seems relatively plausible based on these launch costs and piggybacking on other, larger launches.
You're still looking at over a hundred thousand dollars to put a single 1U cubesat in orbit (including development, testing, and certification for the sat itself). And that would be moving at 6-7km/s relative to the ground, so you can see how expensive it would be to put any kind of useful personal constellation into orbit still
> And that would be moving at 6-7km/s relative to the ground, so you can see how expensive it would be to put any kind of useful personal constellation into orbit still
No, I can't see that... because I'm not a satellite communications expert. My training is evolutionary biology and international business.
I don't know how many satellites it would take to provide private communications across the United States, or the globe, or any section of area. It sounds like you might though.
Let's say one wanted to create their own personal satellite communications for telephone and data transmission. How many would you need?
How much would it roughly cost to have a constellation of private satellites?
You probably want to talk to the ham radio AMSAT organization who've been doing stuff like that since the 60s.
I've been a ham a long time and its interesting to see the progress. Back when I was a gen-x kid amsat was about 20 years old and had just barely broken two digits of launched satellites and there were never more than a couple in orbit at a time. Now a days there's two digits of ham radio satellites launched per year...
The satnogs project is pretty interesting to see what goes into the ground station for a small satellite. Maybe start there.
AFAIK other than some obscure situations involving the ISS and some APRS satellites, there has never been any AMSAT multi-satellite networking, but at the current incredible rate of expansion I'd expect to see hobbyists having something like that by 2030 or so.
Cheap means "of a low price", so a price can't be cheap, just low.
You can pay A for B, which you then pay for C. B is the price of C, and A is B's price. If A has a low value, then B is cheap, and thus a cheap price.
Pretty much all money can be bought for very slightly more money. Thus, a price can be cheap.
"Cheap X" means "an X that costs less".
"Cheap price" literally means "a price that costs less".
You can certainly say that, but it makes no sense.
I've just demonstrated that it makes sense. But, really, that's irrelevant. You're telling me that a particular arrangement of 26 symbols “makes sense”, but another “doesn't”, even though both convey the intended meaning perfectly well – as evidenced by your critique describing the intended meaning?
Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
Dennis Tito went as a tourist in 2001 for $20 million. If you can get a turd generator to space for that price, I’d imagine it’s considerably cheaper to get the finished product up there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism
Referring to human beings as "turd generators" is truly fantastic.
I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
They won’t be launching individual turds, instead it would be a turd cluster with thousands of turds which will decay in orbit at the same time, raining an ultra-hot turd rain which will hopefully evaporate prior to reaching sea-level, instead making clouds slightly turdier.
> with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO?
Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.
At a few hundred dollars per kg, I bet you could run a business scattering people's ashes. Maybe even at a few thousand. I wonder if they would turn you down?
Edit -- turns out this is a thing, already, I just didn't know. SpaceX apparently does not mind. Flights to the moon are planned.
Had to have a recent loss to learn this, but in the funeral home's options package was to send some of the ashes to space for $2500. The director skipped over that page quickly, but it was a picture of a Falcon 9 taking off
Until Blue Origin is offering similar pricing with their New Glen rocket, I'm sure SpaceX will keep launch costs at a good premium to their costs while using this moat to make money in other areas like the SkyLink project.
The government of your country will need to approve, since they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite.
Also, you can send the turd alone, you need to attach it to a launcher, and have a deployment mechanism. You are looking at a few thousands $ minimum regardless of the weight.
> they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite
Is that by treaty?
That is exactly what I thought too. As things go cheap, they become encumbered with their local version of « turd ». We are now sending dozens of thousands of microsatellites, which, in 20 years, may well be considered as Earth’s manure floating around.
I wonder if the market or human incentives will increase some other variables which will make it just as inaccessible to the lowly (as it should - Even Elon Musk shouldn’t be able to send non-necessary stuff up in low orbit), such as: Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO, or increasing legal authorizations required.
On the other hand, assuming we could indeed send our manure for $1400/kg, would it be the most reasonable way to get rid of radioactive waste? It sounds like a Simpsons episode, but the cost seems so low that it sounds like the next step.
LEO isn't a great place for radioactive waste as it would be in the path of many satellites plus their is some orbital decay meaning it would eventually fall back to earth. Higher orbits take more energy to reach and thus are more expensive.
There is also politics involved, any country putting nuclear 'waste' in high orbits would be a suspect for putting nuclear weapons in space as well.
>Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO
You actually specifically want things to go to LEO before they die; when they're sufficiently low, atmospheric drag takes care of them quickly.
I agree with the overall direction of your point-that we need to be careful about our space junk-though :)
> On the other hand, assuming we could indeed send our manure for $1400/kg, would it be the most reasonable way to get rid of radioactive waste? It sounds like a Simpsons episode, but the cost seems so low that it sounds like the next step.
It sounds awful at first glance, but I wonder what the environmental impacts actually are of nuclear waste de orbiting and spreading evenly over the atmosphere. Normalized out per kwh, environmental radiation release might be less than the equivalent coal power plant? I'll have to break out an excel sheet later.
I had the exact same thought! LOL
Now I wonder what exactly about the headline made all three of wonder about sending poop to space? I guess poop is a universal answer to "most ridiculous thing that weighs under a pound"?
Not diminishing the technology advancement that SpaceX has been pushing but are these prices profitable? Or is it similar to the Tesla strategy which is to keep margin minimal (even negative) at the benefit of breaking into the market?
In the early days, margin was probably low to negative. However, now, according to wikipedia, the price for a reused falcon 9 launch is $50 million. In reusable configuration this will launch 34,400 lbs to LEO. At this pricing it is around $1450/lb to LEO.
This is speculation to a degree, but I think Elon has tweeted that the internal SpaceX cost for such a mission is around $15m. So yes, even at $1450/lb to LEO, SpaceX is making a significant margin. See this article for more info: https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus...
Remeber that SpaceX still has to recoup the investment in developing the Falcon9 as well as reusability. In the linked article above, they mention that Elon said developing reusability cost about $1 billion. So lots of this margin goes to paying that invest back.
I dont have the link to the price analysis, but I believe the re-usable falcon9 becomes profitable after the 2nd or 3rd launch. The disposable falcon is profitable on the first launch.
We just paid $80 to ship a 1kg package from Canada to the USA.
It seems like it would be cheaper to send it to LEO using the SpaceX Starship.
Is ISRO being considered? I can’t really tell from the chart but they must be highly price competitive purely looking at India’s PPI.
Are there any interesting project's one can participate in by launching say 1 kg in space?
$5k sounds abit accessible
How would these numbers change if we had a proper carbon tax?
Probably not much. Rocket output is practically nothing compared to that of commercial airlines and ocean freight.
Furthermore, SpaceX’s upcoming rocket can be carbon-neutral since it burns methane, which can be extracted from the earth’s atmosphere.
TL;DR - it's a rounding error.
A falcon 9 launch burns roughly 260 metric tons of liquid oxygen [1]. CO2 is 1.375 times the weight of O2, so assuming complete all that oxygen turns into CO2 we're looking at 357 metric tons of CO2 (which is an exaggeration, because a good portion of it turns into H2O instead... but the H2O is actually slightly concerning because it's in the upper atmosphere... so whatever).
Canada wants it's Carbon tax to reach $170 CAD per ton by 2030, which seems to be considered a pretty agressive carbon tax [2]. At this rate the fuel burnt in flight would cost a whopping 61 thousand dollars CAD... or 48K USD. On a multi million dollar launch.
[1] https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...
Ok. How much kg of CO₂ is that per kg of payload?
Seriously? Just google the payload size and divide... Also... Do you have a point?
Fuel costs for a Falcon 9 launch are around $150,000, or about 1/3 of 1% of what SpaceX charges for a reusable launch.
It just isn't plausible that Starship launch costs for LEO could be 1/28th the costs for Falcon Heavy. This sounds like more Musk optimism to me.
Falcon Heavy has a significantly smaller payload bay and the 1st stage will always be lost. If a starship can fly 10 times and requires much less refurb than a FH, it makes sense.
Right, the projected rate is effectively the super-bulk discounted rate if you buy 10 launches worth of cargo at once and actually fill it to max capacity whenever a launch window is open. I don’t think the individual flight rate would be anywhere close to $50/kg for the vast majority of customers.
The more relevant number is the all-in immediate price per launch, the rate where one could simply wire the money and SpaceX would launch next week, divided by the actual thing(s) launched, which will weigh some intermediate amount. And compare that to the same for the other rockets.
Nobody does launches on a week's notice.
Right, in practice prices in the launch industry are not ‘prices’ as a consumer would understand them because any quote comes with certain contractual restrictive covenants, agreements, timelines, etc., that really are more akin to home buying than a typical commodity priced in per kg terms.
For order of magnitude comparisons we can ignore all that, for finer grained comparisons it really is comparing apples and oranges.
In the ideal future world launches should be done without the need for secret contracts, something like the private jet industry where planes can chartered, almost at the push of a button, at short notice.
Soon we won’t remember when SpaceX wasn’t launching every week.
Launching every week is still very different from launching on a week's notice.
Saying it just isn't plausible that ambitious thing will happen without an argument for why it won't happen... doesn't really lead to an interesting conversation. Especially when all the arguments for why it is possible already exist in public forums.
I mildly disagree with you, but I can't even begin to take the other side of the argument without knowing why you think the price estimates given aren't plausible (or even basic facts like what the cost you are using for the Falcon Heavy is...). Other responses to you spew out random facts trying to argue that Falcon Heavy is expensive in ways that Starship isn't, but I really can't tell if those random facts are even closely related to why you think it's implausible.
The reason I thought it was implausible is because in my experience, such dramatic drops in price never happen in only a few years.
The other responses did help clarify how it can occur with Starship.
Part of the problem is that it's not quite that high, and it's also a moving metric. Apparently the cost of a Falcon 9 launch is down to $28 million, which is ~$1,200/kg thanks to reusability.
″[The rocket] costs $28 million to launch it, that’s with everything,” Couluris said, adding that reusing the rockets is what is “bringing the price down.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/16/elon-musk-spacex-falcon-9-ro...
As SpaceX uses their Falcon 9s more, the cost will continue to fall and approach consumables plus the amortized cost of the 1st stage.
The Starship is the same idea, but with larger payload and better reusability. Realistically it'll be somewhat expensive initially, but as they improve the design and reuse, costs will drop.
They are designing for full and rapid reusability (like an airplane) and unlike the Falcon Heavy, the second stage is not thrown away, but also fully reusable. Seems plausible to me. If I remember correctly Musk estimated $2 million cost per launch, with about 1/4 of that raw fuel costs.
The upper stage of an F9 or FH costs $10m and is expended every time. The fairings also cost $6m ($3m per half fairing) and are pretty tricky to recover. No part of Starship will be expended every time, it’s all reusable. The only marginal cost per flight is the fuel and operations costs. They’re not going to reach 1/28x with the early models, maybe only 1/10, but eventually they’ve got a reasonable chance.