Making Starship propellant on-site instead of buying it merchant cuts the bill from about $2.19 million to roughly $210,000 a flight, but the binding constraint is physical: merchant supply needs about 389 cryogenic tanker deliveries per launch, a pattern no road fleet sustains past the low hundreds of flights a year. That is why the $100 billion Louisiana campus puts propellant production and power generation on the site plan.

An analysis of how declining launch and return costs could reshape the economics and development timelines of emerging space markets