Two things, mainly. They do a lot of the production steps in-house, as opposed to having a web of subcontractors (who have their own subcontractors)for each component. But the big thing is just efficiency of scale. Building and launching 100 rockets per year doesn’t cost 100 times more than one launch per year.
Comment on Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
i_ben_fine@lemmy.one 2 weeks agoIt’s not clear to me how SpaceX has managed to do things for cheaper. Are they cutting labor? QC?
thalience@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
greyw0lv@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
They really haven’t yet. The concept is that reusable rockets will be cheaper than soviet era single use rockets… eventually.
On a surface level it makes sense, taking a rocket refurbishing it, and refueling sounds cheaper. But its not. Not yet anyways. Too complex and expensive presently.
meekah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They are axle to reuse the rockets