How much starship cost?

Starship is the largest rocket ever built, standing about 120 m tall with 33 Raptor engines in its first stage, Super Heavy. However, it doesn't appear in any commercial catalog with a public rate. The payloads it has carried so far have been Starlink satellite simulators and internal experiments, so there is no list price comparable to that of the Falcon 9.

What is public is the goal. SpaceX designs Starship so that both stages return to Earth and are reused with minimal refurbishment; with that premise, the company has repeatedly said the marginal cost per flight could drop to a few million dollars, a figure that would only make sense with a very high flight rate.

The most solid reference is NASA's Human Landing System contract: in 2021 the agency awarded SpaceX $2.89 billion to develop a lunar version of Starship and carry out a crewed demonstration within the Artemis program. That amount covers development, testing, and a landing, not the price of a single launch, and it was later expanded with a second mission.

Three concepts should be kept separate: the program's development cost, which SpaceX funds mainly with Starlink revenue and private funding rounds; the cost of building and flying each unit, which today includes vehicle losses during testing; and the future commercial price, which will depend on demonstrated reliability and competition. Until Starship enters regular service and publishes rates, any number circulating is an estimate.