Elon Musk has long stated his desire to make space travel cheaper and remove all the unnecessary cost spikes from the space programs. His Space X has made great strides towards achieving that, and they finally seem to have their act perfected as they have landed three rockets back onto their barges with no damage, effectively making them reusable. A large part of the rocket launch money used to go to the rockets as they had to be designed and manufactured anew every time but now they can be reused. As a direct implication of this improvement, Elon Musk said that up to 30 percent of the costs were reduced, and the future missions could benefit from that. But, news has reached us that Space X has actually increased the launch costs for a geostationary orbit like a satellite, from $61.2 million to $62 million. Why would it do that? Corporate hypocrisy?
But things aren’t always the way they seem to be. What Space X has actually achieved that it has increased the total payload capacity of the rocket by almost ninety percent. Using supercooled Oxygen to carry more fuel and the efficiency of the nine Merlin engines, the space company was able to increase the payloads of Falcon 9 rocket from 13,150 kg (28,991 lb) to 22,800 kg (50,265 lb). So, effectively, the price has been increased only a little while the payloads have been increased resulting in the cost per pound launch decrease from $2,111 per pound to $1,233 per pound for a Lower Earth Orbit.
So, in reality, the costs have come down more than forty percent due to the recent success of relanding of Falcon 9 space rockets. Also, in a single mission, more equipment, provisions and other stuff can be transported into orbit or the international space station. We are living in the next Space Age people!
