Those $150m are for bringing up the same payload to the ISS as Dragon can, right? In 2007 Nasa signed a $719m contract with Roscosmos for 15 seats and 5.6 tons of cargo. 5.6 tons are three Progress flights (2.350kg per mission) and one Dragon flight (6.000kg per mission). We don’t really know what part of those $719m is for cargo but $150m seems about right to me. Those $150m would pay for three and not just one Progress flight.

It’s quite amazing, really. The Dragon spacecraft is much more awesome than Progress. It can get more than double the payload to the ISS. More importantly, though, Dragon can bring half of that back to earth. There is no spacecraft that can currently do that. The Space Shuttle could but not anymore and Soyuz is pretty much only good for bringing back people and not cargo.

And it’s still comparable in cost or cheaper than Progress (which is a truly mature and tested spacecraft)? That’s quite astonishing.

Next to the fact that NASA would rather give money to a US company, which will invest part of it to develop cheaper and more capable rockets, than to Russia, these SpaceX costs are likely to be significantly cheaper than Soyuz.

In 2007, NASA got a deal for $719 million for 5.6 tons and 15 seats. Seats on Soyuz now cost ~$60 million a piece, or $900 million just for 15 seats. The price for cargo then probably also increased.

And competition also means that the Russians can’t mark up their flights quite as much. Currently they are the only ones doing it, Nasa depends on them. That’s obviously not a nice situation to be in.