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Rich Smith, at The Motley Fool, is doing a sequence of articles about...well, he calls it, "Our voyage of discovery (of potential investments) in the space industry..." In a recent article he looks at the relative cost of the various space launch vehicles.
In the article he lists, estimates, and guesses the cost to build rockets at SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, the Indian Space Research Organization, China National Space Administration, and Russia's Roscosmos.
He concludes the brief article by saying:
What does it all mean for investors? Right now, SpaceX is clearly building rockets cheaper than Boeing and Lockheed or Airbus can match. But given the cut-rate pricing being offered by not-necessarily-for-profit space programs in Russia, India, and China, SpaceX may be the least of Boeing's, Lockheed's, and Airbus' worries. Going forward, the real price pressure, and the real battle for market share, may be coming from abroad.
(Score: 1) by aqui on Tuesday July 05 2016, @12:47PM
What matters is the price per kilogram, for a given orbit. If you don't correct for the payload/range lift capacity of the vehicles you are blowing smoke out of your ass.
Most of the Indian etc rockets have payloads/ranges that are significantly smaller.
The other piece is a significant number of payloads cant be launched by smaller rockets (as they exceed the payload of the rocket), so the comparison in the article is meaningless.