SpaceX jack up Falcon 9 launch prices? | Booster | Forum

Post edited 7:06 pm – February 3, 2010 by Luke Maurits

I was just reading the offiicial Falcon 9 website and I've noticed that launches now cost between $44 and $49.5 million (depending on how much of the payload you use).  Now, the Falcon 9 cost did used to be $35 million, right?  That is the figure we've used in the CLLARE overview document and I'm sure we got it from the official site.  I guess they've jacked up the price?

This is a shame – we will certainly need more than 80% of the payload which means it will cost us $49.5 mill.  This makes it pretty unlikely that the entire landing mission will cost under $50 million as we'd hoped.  I guess perhaps now we can simply advertise CLLARE as "back to the moon for less than $60 million".  Unfortunately, while there's not all that much objective difference, the psychological impact of crossing the half-way to $100 million is not to be underestimated.

EDIT: Ah, just realised we may have got the $35 million figure from the Wikipedia article on the Falcon 9, which is still showing that figure.  There's a date of 2006 next to that amount.  Maybe this price hike happened a while ago.  We probably should have been a bit more careful checking up on that. :/

Ah, so it would seem.  I did try to get an archive.org history for the page but at the time I tried their search function kept complaining of excessive server load.  Thanks for following it up.