NEW YORK, November 7. /TASS/. US entrepreneur Elon Musk expects that in the future delivering 1 kg of cargo to orbit will cost less than $100.
"I think we get to under $100 a kilogram to orbit," he said in an interview with entrepreneur Ron Baron, who quoted the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration as saying that it stood at $18,500 in 2010, and that after the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, this figure decreased.
Musk explained that the Falcon 9 launch vehicle has "around 80% usability. The booster comes back and lands. We do not refly the upper stage and the cost of the upper stage is roughly the cost of a medium-sized jet. So that means the minimum cost per flight for Falcon 9 is a medium-sized jet. Now that's still much better than anything else, but it's safe to say that there wouldn't be a lot of air travel if every time you flew somewhere you had to throw away a medium-sized jet," he said.
Musk added that with Starship "the entire system is designed for reusability." According to Musk’s forecast, SpaceX will be able to launch the Super Heavy rocket booster every hour in the future.
In August, Musk said that SpaceX expects to deliver up to 10 million tons of cargo per year to orbit in the future using the Starship space system.