> a far cry from the $62M they are advertising.

$62M gets you a spot at the end of their launch manifest, for the standard service as laid out in https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/falcon_9_users_gui...

The customers who want some additional service over what is detailed in the manual have to pay more.

The customers with launch dates soon will have entered the queue before the prices were lowered, and have to pay the prices they agreed on. If they choose to, they are free to give up their position, and re-enter at the back of the queue for the cheaper price. Several operators have indeed done this, at least one more than once.

> Sure, it's an average, which is exactly my point. Underbidding other commercial providers is easoer when you get highly priced government work to susidize these commercial launches

The government prices are higher because at the time the contracts were written, they agreed to a price that was half of what was available on any other commercial provider, including Arianespace. At the time, oldspace basically laughed at them and said that it cannot be done at that price. Since then, SpaceX has driven down the prices across the board. Would you call this a subsidy?

Also, the government price also pays not just for the launch, but also for the development and manufacture of the Dragon capsule, which is something Arianespace does not have the equivalent of, and which probably costs more than the launcher.

But the most important part of all this subsidy talk is that the statement "government launches subsidize private ones" is just plain false, because the private ones also make profit, and a lot of it. The government launches still make more profit, and you could argue that the government deals subsidized the development. But to say they subsidize the launches would imply that SpaceX doesn't make profit on their cheapest launches, which they do.

Overall, the cost argument is FUD. While nothing you said was technically false, it was instead carefully crafted half-truths designed to obscure the reality, which is that if you do pay SpaceX $62M, they will fire your payload into orbit, make a profit doing so, and no-one else is at this time able to compete with them on this.

> Ariane-6 will be much closer to a Falcon-9 and will allow lower costs per kg-payload.

Ariane-6 design was selected in late 2014, to be competitive against the pricing of F9 in 2015.
The design then selected is no longer competitive against modern SpaceX pricing, which has caused most of the prospective commercial clients to book flights with SpaceX instead. (Hence the 100-launch order book.) The development of the rocket still continues with ESA funds, because of it's strategic significance, despite the fact that the rocket will never be able to be commercially successful.

To be able to compete against SpaceX, they are developing Ariane NEXT, which is a project set to reduce the cost of Ariane-6 by a factor of 2. This would make it competitive against SpaceX pricing as of today. There are two problems with this. The first is that the current SpaceX pricing is not their floor -- their prices are set to make them healthy profits, and if there is actual competition they can drop them more. The second is that the timeline for Ariane NEXT has the rocket completed in the 2025-2030 timeframe. So SpaceX could ride their current launch system for a decade before competition. SpaceX launched it's very first rocket a decade ago. Do you believe that they will not have either improved F9 to make it more cost-competitive given a decade of milking it, or phased it out for BFR?

The other supposed F9 competitors are hardly better off.

The Russian Angara is expendable, yet to launch a real payload and already uncompetitive on cost and losing contracts. They have talked about a replacement, but that is still a pure paper rocket, as no funds have been allocated.

ULA is developing the Vulcan which expects to first launch in "mid-2020s", and which is expendable. For missions that go far enough, they can actually beat the current F9 lineup, mainly because of their awesome upper stage. However, at the bread and butter of commercial launches, LEO and GEO, they will have a very hard time competing on cost. If the Gateway program is not cancelled, they can probably get a profit on that. Regardless, they are also still a decade away, and will have to face what SpaceX makes then, not what they fly today.

Blue Origin might surprise us all and suddenly launch a very nice, reusable booster. That is, if they ever actually choose to enter the market and launch something. As of today, they are still MIA.

> The other oart, somehow related, is reliability. Both, ULA and Ariane, have a better launch record than SpaceX. That reused Falcon-9s are now advertized as "launch-proven" instead of reused (nice counter-point to a expendable launcher when you look at a unit level) kind of confirms this and is again pure marketing. Not sure how much marketing factors in when someone wants to launch a $100M plus payload so.

It probably doesn't factor in much at all. But what does is insurance. All commercial launches are insured, and the insurance premiums for SpaceX are not substantially higher than other operators. This tells me that either the insurers are idiots, or that they feel that F9 today is nearly as safe as the competitors. Either way, the customers don't care, as it's not them who lose money if a rocket blows up. Hence, the 100-launch order book. Which is more than the other commercial operators put together.

> And the final factor is that incumbents have really deep pockets, SpaceX needs venture capital.

SpaceX could now run without any additional capital investment. They have a working assembly line, working launch infrastructure, and are cranking out rockets which each make a profit on launch, then land and launch again, and again...

And this is why venture capital is so cheap for them. (see https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/13/equidate-spacex-27-billion-v... ) And they will take in a lot of it to develop BFR. And they will have more of it available than any of those deep pocketed competitors.