SpaceX Falcon Heavy costs $150 million at most

Thom Baur | Reuters

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from historic launch pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., February 6, 2018.

SpaceX is even further out in front of the rest of the space industry than previously thought, according to CEO Elon Musk, who claimed on Monday that a “fully expendable” Falcon Heavy would cost only $150 million — about $250 million cheaper than the closest competition.

The company’s Falcon Heavy rocket became the most powerful commercial rocket in the world after SpaceX successfully completed its first launch on Tuesday.

SpaceX has said previously the cost of each launch Falcon Heavy launch starts at $90 million. But that price tag — a fraction of the cost of the next biggest rockets from competitors United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Arianespace — was a best case scenario. It was unclear how much above the $90 million price tag a fully expendable version of Falcon Heavy would cost.

Then, on Monday, Musk tweeted: “A fully expendable Falcon Heavy … is $150 [million],” Musk tweeted.

@elonmusk: The performance numbers in this database are not accurate. In process of being fixed. Even if they were, a fully expendable Falcon Heavy, which far exceeds the performance of a Delta IV Heavy, is $150M, compared to over $400M for Delta IV Heavy.

That’s about a quarter of a billion dollars less than the next best thing.

A fully expendable rocket is the maxed-out version, in which SpaceX would not try to conserve fuel or weight to recover parts of the rocket. The company built Falcon Heavy out of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets, which has now completed dozens of successful launches over the last few years. By landing the rocket’s first stage, SpaceX is able to recover and reuse the largest piece of each vehicle, which had traditionally been discarded after a launch.

Part of last week’s successful launch was the recovery of two of Falcon Heavy’s three rocket boosters, which landed side-by-side on concrete pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It is unclear how ULA, a Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture, will respond to Falcon Heavy. ULA’s most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, costs upward of $400 million per launch.

Musk said after Falcon Heavy’s launch that he wants “a new space race,” saying he thinks the rocket’s success will “encourage other companies and countries” to be ambitious in the same way as SpaceX.