Think you might have misread my response or I was clumsy in my wording. I didn't say the numbers were there. And I didn't expect them to be either. Peter Beck was clear in not promising anything specific. Unlike Elon Musk Peter Beck is much more careful about overpromising. In fact Rocket Lab makes a bit of a point of proving that they keep their promises and do what they say they will do within the time frames they say.
The Elon Musk claim of $20 per Kg is something I would take with a big grain of salt. Maybe after many years. I don't know. The thing is that Elon Musk does deliver products he says he will deliver... for the most part. But his claims about cost and price tends to be quite off. Neither his Model S or Model 3 ever got as cheap has he promised. Nor did Falcon 9 launches get as cheap has he promised.
I agree that all the missions to Mars and the Moon is a clear advantage to Starship. So my interest is more in looking at who will have the edge in commercial launches of satellites.
I will not dispute that Starship will win a per kg competition against Neutron even if $20 may be optimistic.
However, I am much less convinced Starship will win on launch costs. Like if a company has one satellite to launch which both companies can send and there is no ride share, who will be able to offer the better price?
Each Electron launch is $6 million. Of that only$2 million is building the rocket. I am thus highly skeptical that SpaceX should be able to do launches below $4 million. Elon Musk has said below $10 million. When he says below, I think we can more guess it will be somewhat above $10 per launch.
Keep in mind that Starship involves a far more complex launch setup than Electron. They got a massive tower there and enormous tanks to fuel. Rocket Lab in contrast seem intent to reduce their launch site costs. Not needing a tower at all. Their rocket has legs which stand out at all times.
Say they get launch site cost down from current $4 million to $2 million. Falcon 9 second stage is like $10 million and that is a much bigger and more expensive second stage than Neutron will have. It is stacked so it needs to handle buckling loads. It has bigger tanks and so on. So say Neutron can build their for half the price at $5. That gives them total launch costs of a reused Neutron at $7 million.
Sure this is all speculation, but it is some educated guesses of what might be possible given what we know. All I am saying is that if we play a bit around with the numbers it far from certain that Starship will offer the cheapest launches. Yes, cheapest per kg launch, no doubt. But if that will be a competitive advantage or not depends on the size of the launch market. Can they fill up each Starship launch with 100 tons of cargo?
In the future some time I am sure. But not the first years, apart from Starlink launches.
As for a redesigned Falcon 9. That would be highly problematic. When landing a single Merlin 1D engine is way too powerful. Those raptors would be awesome on launch but a big problem for landing. They cannot deep throttle; neither can Merlin but you can turn off 8 out of 9 engines.
And Neutron doesn't do a recoverable 2nd stage. What they do is move cost from 2nd stage into 1st stage but that is pulled off by having a light structure of carbon fiber composite. I don't think you can do 2nd stage recovery for a rocket the size of Neutron or Falcon 9.
Probably doesn't make sense for SpaceX to pour money into a design like that given that the whole company exists purely to colonize Mars. Launching satellites is more of a side business to finance that goal.
In a lot of ways the space industry is both super awesome because of these new developments while at the same time being a bit boring because SpaceX has such a huge lead. I am crossing my fingers for Neutron because I think it is fun with more competition and different visions.
