Last updated Nov 29, 2025
tech
If SpaceX achieves routine re-use of Starship’s heavy booster (on the order of ~10 flights per vehicle with fast turnaround on the order of an hour), then within the next few years the Starship system will be able to deliver payload to low Earth orbit at roughly $10 per kilogram.
So if you can reuse that thing ten times, that's a $3.5 million cost per launch, plus a million for fuel... That's how you start to get to ten bucks a kilogram over the next couple of years, but it was critical to be able to reuse that heavy booster. And that's what Elon just demonstrated, is we can actually catch that heavy booster, refuel it and launch it an hour later. And if you can do that over and over again, you're spending ten bucks a kilogram to put material into space.View on YouTube
Explanation

As of November 30, 2025, the conditions Friedberg specified for the prediction have not occurred, and his "next couple of years" timeline from October 18, 2024 has not yet elapsed.

  1. No “routine” 10× reuse of Super Heavy boosters yet
    Public flight records show that Starship has conducted about ten–eleven integrated test flights so far. Some Super Heavy boosters have been reflown (e.g., the booster for Flight 9 previously flew on Flight 7; the booster for Flight 11 previously flew on Flight 8), but no Super Heavy has anything close to 10 flights yet. (supercluster.com)

  2. No hour‑scale turnaround; cadence is still weeks to months
    Launch-tracking data list the fastest turnaround between Starship system flights at roughly 37 days, not ~1 hour, and each individual booster/ship pair is used only occasionally, with long periods of inspection and modification between flights. (nextspaceflight.com)

  3. $10/kg to LEO is still aspirational, not realized
    Current analyses of early Starship operations suggest effective launch costs on the order of tens to hundreds of dollars per kilogram—e.g., modeling around ~$90–100/kg with modest reuse—and industry writeups talk about projected or long‑term possibilities for $10–20/kg, not actual achieved prices. (nextbigfuture.com)
    Musk and commentators explicitly describe the ~$10/kg number as a future goal dependent on very high reusability and mass production, not something SpaceX is charging or achieving in 2025. (nextbigfuture.com)

Because:

  • The prerequisite state Friedberg described (routine ~10‑flight reuse with ~1‑hour turnaround) has not been reached; and
  • His timeline of "over the next couple of years" from October 2024 extends to roughly late 2026,

we cannot yet say whether his conditional claim about eventual $10/kg under those conditions is right or wrong. The correct status as of now is that it remains untested and too early to judge.