Elon Musk: Rockets Don’t Need to Be So Expensive—Reusability Is the Key to Space Travel

Elon Musk: I started reading about rockets to understand why they're so freaking expensive.

“I started reading quite a bit about rockets to try to understand why they're so freaking expensive. Where does the $60 million go for the Delta II? Now Delta II, I think, is $100 million or something, some crazy number. And Delta II is a relatively small rocket. If you go to one of the bigger rockets, it's anywhere from $200 to $400 million.

Anyway, so I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a good reason for rockets to be so expensive, and that they could be a lot less. Even in an expendable format, they could be less.

And that if one could make them reusable, like airplanes, then the cost of rocketry would drop dramatically, the cost of space travel would drop dramatically.

Because the cost of the fuel was maybe anywhere from 0.2% to 0.5% of the cost of the rocket.

It's like a plane. How much is the cost of the fuel in the plane versus the plane itself? It's at least a two-order-of-magnitude difference.

But nobody had really been able to make a reusable rocket work. So I thought, if we can do that, then that would really be the key breakthrough for space travel.”

Interview at the Computer History Museum, January 22, 2013