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ricardobeat06/27/20251 replyview on HN

The launch costs in the article look quite off from the outset.

A Falcon Heavy launch is already under $100M, and in the $1400/kg range; Starship’s main purpose is to massively reduce launch costs, so $1000/kg is not optimistic at all and would be a failure. Their current target is $250/kg eventually once full reusability is in place.

Still far from the dream of $30/kg but not that far.

The original “white paper” [1] also does acknowledge that a separate launch is needed for the solar panels and radiators at a 1:1 ratio to the server launches, which is ignored here. I think the author leaned in a bit too much on their deep research AI assistant output.

[1] https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf


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angadh06/27/2025

please read Table 1.

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