SpaceX: BUSTED! (Patreon)

The bullshit meter twitches every time Elon Musk claims hes made things 10 or 100 times better.  I had always assumed with the rockets though he actually had made some real progress. After all it does look very impressive when his rockets reland. However, impressive does not mean you did it cheaper. The space shuttle orbiter after all was fully reusable, but wasn’t actually that cost effective. Well when you start looking at the metrics of comparison between the space shuttle and the falcon 9, the savings mostly vanish. This should maybe most solidly be bought home when then payload master from NASA said that when they started using spacex instead of the shuttle, their cost to orbit increased.