>>1434549Falcon 9/Heavy and Dragon might be really good for cost (with maybe the exception of Ariane 5/6), but the thing is, Starship is an as yet unproved design, which seems to not really look all that promising for really much other than flights to the moon. Mars in a Starship looks like an utter pipe dream. Falcon 9 has the best costing for SSO and LEO. Falcon 9 loses out to Ariane 5 for GTO, simply because Ariane 5 launches 2 satellites at once, Falcon 9 can only launch 1 (with maybe some ride share with small sats, cube sats, or just something else). Cargo Dragon has unique capabilities, but actually is less cost effective per kg of cargo brought up to the ISS than the ATV did. While Dragon can bring cargo down to earth, as well as depressurised cargo, ATV could bring large amounts of water and air, and could also do station reboosting on its own, things Dragon *cannot* do.
What SpaceX can do, which ArianeSpace cannot, is get US DoD contracts to launch various defence satellites. This means that SpaceX can end up putting way more launches over the course of the year than ArianeSpace can, even though geostationary satellite launches are preferred on an Ariane 5. Although, the long waiting list to launch on Ariane 5 has put off some companies. More and more often, we're seeing geostationary satellites end up being designed for a Falcon 9 launch, only to switch to Ariane 5 at some point.... possibly due to the reduced costs, or perhaps because some other reason came up (deployment time from an Ariane 5 launch is much shorter than from a Falcon 9).
ULA is basically only doing DoD launches now... they're very cost uncompetitive now.
On the topic of Mars, even NASA's own Deep Space Transport, a kind of tug design, which would use both storable and ion propulsion to get to Mars seems like a very difficult concept to pull off.
