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Not so fast - $209B in 2010 $? Really? Where's the original cost statements? NASA's own site says $450M per launch, but that probably doesn't include amortized R&D costs, so I'd imagine it's higher if you include that. Then again, should we also include the X program? It was the precursor research for the shuttle after all. What about the Apollo program itself? It provided LOX engine research. There's also the solid rocket fuel for the boosters. Etc etc etc. An easily inflated number without backing data and vague hand-waving about "adjusted" dollars.

The real numbers we have are what NASA posted for the last missions - $450M per flight. There is no information on what that includes that I found, and this is higher than that posted in wikipedia which bases its numbers on this document which has some more interesting information in it about competing launch systems in the Shuttle class. Note that not all are manned, and yet the shuttle is within a factor of 3 at most on a per Kg cost. It also details information on the shuttle launch costs based on pulling it from the full NASA budget, which indicates the most expensive estimate is $500M per launch. The wikipedia link also details the costs of a Saturn launch and cost per Kg. The Shuttle was only slightly more expensive, and an order of magnitude more capable by this comparison (We'll ignore the piece about Saturn being able to reach the moon, the Shuttle was never designed for that purpose)

Lastly, we have the issue about politics interfering with the Shuttle program. A much cheaper shuttle could have been built with an accompanying heavy launch vehicle for less than the Shuttle. It probably would have been safer too, as it would not have had a Challenger incident, as solid rocket boosters would not have been needed. But that's a tangent into what ifs, it should merely be noted that the Shuttle was not the result of engineering design for a purpose, but of politics adding conflicting requirements and then not funding those requirements.

Well, the ISS has a mass of over 400,000 kg. It would make sense to include a box of random spare parts. It's not like it will have a huge impact on the total mass of stuff we've sent up there.

The costs of launching anything on a Soyuz is about 6,000 $/kg. With the newer Falcon rockets of SpaceX, it's supposed to go down towards 2,000 $/kg. So that makes it a very expensive Coffee Can. But it's not impossible.
Also annoying the entire internet with your questions about how to fix a nut and bolt is more expensive.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_systems
http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Space_Transportation_Costs_Trends_0902.pdf

Launch a steel based rod metal projectile insulated using the heat shield materials that came out of old shuttle project.

Do you even have the most basic understanding of how much that would cost? Here is a white paper with the details

Price Per Pound to orbit (pdf)
http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Space_Transportation_Costs_Trends_0902.pdf

So you want to launch a one ton rod into orbit? Just the cost of a launching that would be about $8 million, assuming a $4,000 per pound launch cost. Add onto that several million just to build it in the first place. You won't be able to afford to deploy these in enough numbers to make any difference. A LGM-30 Minuteman III ICBM with a 3 warhead MIRV is only about $7 million.

Massive destruction without having to worry about any radioactive fall out.

You haven't done the math on this, have you?
A 2,000 pound rod traveling at Mach 10 has a kenetic energy equal to..........1.2 tons of TNT. Congratulations, you've spent $10+ million to do what two $800,000 cruise missiles can do.

People have criticized the US stoppage on the shuttle

Not me, the shuttle was a total boondoggle. One-time use rockets/capsules have proven to be the more economical method.

The maneuverability to intercept and destroy any other countries military satellites if needed would also be devastating to those countries who rely on them.

The country that most describes is the US. No other country is as heavily reliant on satellites. Note that China supposedly has an operational anti-satellite laser, which I find to be completely believable as the tech has been feasible for quite some time.

I have pointed out elsewhere that any country that has rocket tech of SCUD-C level or better could build a "shotgun" type anti-satellite weapon for LEO satellites, the main difficulty being targeting.

Currently, getting something in orbit costs between 3000 and 10000 dollar per kilogram...
This link shows estimated costs for all current launch systems, ranging from smallest to the biggest.
http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Space_Transportation_Costs_Trends_0902.pdf

I wonder what SpaceX are aiming at. Is the privatization really going to be cheaper? If so, I wonder where they will be able to cut costs.

Exactly... start it, fly it, and use it as an orbiter or even a spacecraft.

Can't we just launch it one last time, and use it as a vehicle to get to Mars or something? It seems perfectly suited for the job. It has a cargo bay for a lander. It is big enough to live in (astronauts do that all the time, although not for many months at a time).
I know this isn't as easy as I make it sound... but hell, if you already have a space shuttle in orbit, isn't it just a matter of taking enough fuel with you?

The external shuttle tank contains about 750,000 kg of fuel. At a price of about 2500 $/kg to Low Earth Orbit ( http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Space_Transportation_Costs_Trends_0902.pdf ), the price tag of having a fully fueled space shuttle in orbit is 1 launch of the shuttle, plus 2 billion dollar in fuel costs.

Also, you might want to have a look at the latest Futron Study...Check out this article if you don't want to give out your info to download the study itself.

The construction of a space elevator will allow humans to get anywhere else in space faster and cheaper. Rocket-based methods are horribly inefficient ways to get to orbit. Payload launch costs of $10,000 or more per pound? You gotta be kidding me. If we don't have the technology for space elevators yet, NASA should be working on that as a top priority.

Nice thing about doing it on the cheep is they make up for "quality" with "quantity".

It also means that there is nothing on god's green earth you can give me to get on one of those death traps:P But if they can bring the cost down to their advertised price of $7,826 a kilogram (hopefully WITH insurance) to GTO, then it just might be the future.

Bring it down to $5000 a kg with a 95% launch and land success rate? We could send a person to GTO for under $450,000 (Average weight of a guy being 86.1kg) vs the $4mill for a person in the shuttle:P

PS - Used this document for numbers. Take it with a grain of salt as it even clams to use 2000 prices.

I often see the number quoted as 10,000 dollars per pound. I'm on my way out the door so I don't have time to actually "run the numbers" on it, but here's a link that may be useful:

http://www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf

At quick glance (and first google result for "cost per pound of launching to space" or something) it seems to list different launch vehicles and hte cost of the payload to orbit.

This wouldn't even make too much sense since
with that kind of money a kilogram in orbit would cost around 50000 pound. There are much cheaper means of getting to orbit:

http://www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf

Interestingly small launchers seem to be less efficient than larger ones on average.

Maybe one should just try to hitch a ride.

On the other hand this seems to be a fun project.
I hope they are successful.

I've ordered equipment I didn't like and had to replace. The ISS doesn't really have such extraordinary environmental requirements as much as the price up screwing up is so much higher. At about $10K per pound, that's about 2000X as expensive as UPS for "shipping and handling".

http://www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf

People wish for a cure for cancer, but it is not the fuel of imaginations. There is no Star Trek about a cure for cancer.

Space is most emphatically not prohibitively expensive -- not if the goal is for humanity to have a presence in space, and to explore and learn. Sure it is if the goal is for every person to take vacations on the moon, but that's not the point. The fact that a few private sector hobbyists can do what they are should be a clue that space is amazingly accessible to humanity, not that's it inaccessible to individuals.

And lastly, it's nothing at all like asking for computers in every home 50 years ago. It would be more like asking why computer technology grew at an explosive pace until the 1970s and then slowed to a trickle -- because that's basically what happened with space exploration.

The cost of access has stayed about the same, when it should have come down by a factor of ten.

Lifetime of satellite 10's of years.
No way to fix it if something breaks
Losses from energy transmission, probably negate
extra energy by being in space. (you are transmitting the
energy through the atmosphere in both cases)

Maybe you get more sunlight.

I'm guessing similiar energy to the desert at 100x the cost.

Call me skeptical.

http://www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf

2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?

First look at the cost of a launch vehicel and the cost to create a communication satellite. Keep in mind light speed is slow and latency is an issue esp if we are talking geostationary orbit, which starts at at least twice the distance of the cable being proposed. We're talking 360ms on a good day, 500ms typical. Low earth orbit is preferable for communications, but one needs a network of satellites to maintain a link, vs a big ass cable.

Cable might be a low tech solution, but it's a proven one and is the shortest distance between two points.

It was actually 1.5 billion, and 100 million is a low ball figure for the cost of a shuttle launch.

Being a purely politically funded venture, nailing down the cost is difficult, but varies.

$300 million
$600 million
$500 million
$55 million incremental, $1.3 billion when you include facilities, research, engineering, etc...

If you take a rough midpoint and say $500 million per maintenance, the break even point would be three missions. Now, a huge portion of a satellite's cost is the R&D just to design the thing. If you produce multiple ones, the cost drops substantially. Produce multiple hubbles and soon they'd cost under a billion each. Meanwhile you can still do a great deal of updating on the ground.

I'll admit that I'd prefer to scrap the shuttle entirely, replacing it with boosters, dedicated personal carriers, and source maintenance missions from a space station. This would hopefully drastically reduce the cost of maintaining it, and might change the equations again.

No, not really. The paper also clarifies some of the problems in price per kg calculations, including the problem of "generic costs" given out about vehicles, not specifics, and how those change over time to the actual costs.

$10k/kg? You're off by a factor of roughly 2.20462262.

According to this summary of launching costs (PDF), the cost per pound to orbit on these Russian ICBMs is shockingly low -- $211 per pound. The nearest competitor in small launch vehicles costs $3313 per pound. I guess you get what you pay for.

The basic premise is that it costs too much to launch from Earth, so you're going to launch millions of tons from Earth so that you don't have to launch from Earth any more. You pay what it takes to launch millions of tons from Earth -- thereby creating a multi-trillion dollar Earth-based commercial launch industry, driving down the cost per pound to space substantially*. In other words, your seed capital is used to finance your competitors and invalidate your business premise.

But let's be kind and say that your investors are too dim to notice this flaw in your plan, and you actually get your moon launch facility built. Now, what will you launch, and where will these payloads be coming from? Think carefully before answering this. You need to put hundreds of millions of tons of something into space to make your scheme pay for itself, and that something has to come from somewhere, and your moon facility only makes launch systems. Hint: you better not be launching anything that originates on Earth, or I'm going to make a lot of fun of you.

Am I really the only one who sees problems with this scheme? If this is your idea of real investment stay out of business, and please, please stay out of the space industry. There's a dozen real ways to spend a few hundred trillion bucks on space colonization that actually make sense, but this isn't one of them.

* Bear in mind that current cost to LEO is typically about $10K/lb but as low as $211/lb to LEO, if you know how to shop around.

1. Space
2. Space Tourism
3. Profit!!!

There's a potential route from suborbital all the way to space hotels to lunar trips; that is mostly funding driven (i.e. suborbital profit is likely to lead to increased orbital flights, the technology is not really directly applicable, although it's quite closely related.)

A suborbital flight is short, expensive, and not very interesting. A trip to Mir was a real experience, but suborbital flight? It's like a really good roller coaster, with a really expensive ticket.

Market studies would tend to disagree with you: there is considerble interest in suborbital spaceflight among people with the means to pay for the experience. Is there a flaw you see in these studies?

It's possible right now to charter the "Vomit Comet" KC-135, and experience zero G for a minute or so.. You even get to unstrap and move around. Very few people do this. Penn and Teller, the magicians, did once. That gives a sense of the size of the market.

NASA's "Vomit Comet" cannot be chartered by the public, although there is one company, Zero G Corporation, working to provide such flights in the US, similar to what's commercially available in Russia. They haven't started commercial service (although the home page of the site claims an early 2003 introduction date), but they have made progress on the business and regulatory fronts.

Jeff Foust
The Space Review

:)

--Mike

>No, the space station was placed in that orbit as a compromise
>so that both the American (Shuttle) and the Russian (Soyuz)
>vehicles could get to it. Baikonur [astronautix.com] and Cape
>Canaveral [nasa.gov] are at quite different lattitudes. ISS is
>half way in between.

Yes, true to a point - and it was a stupid compromise. Had we relied on the cheaper, more reliable Russian boosters and scrapped utilizing the Shuttles for ISS construction, crew delivery and resupply, the ISS could have been placed into a substantially higher orbit, requiring fewer reboost missions and therefore becoming inherently cheaper to operate.

Compare the cost of launching unmanned payloads (say, ISS components) on a Russian Proton rocket to the cost of launching them on the Shuttle. It costs around $4,729 a pound to put a payload into low earth orbit with the Shuttle, as opposed to $1,953 a pound with the Proton. Proton can't launch payloads that are quite as large as the Shuttle's (19,760 kg for the Proton vs. 28,803 kg for the Shuttle), but the cost per pound for the Russian vehicle is vastly lower. As opposed to the $300 million plus launch cost of a Shuttle, a Proton costs a comparatively paltry $85 million to build and launch.

And you don't need a rocket as big as a Proton to launch men into space - the Russians routinely send people to the ISS aboard the relatively tiny Soyuz rocket, which only has a capacity of 7,000 kg and costs just $37 million to build and launch (the per-pound cost is also cheaper than the shuttle - $2,432). Compare this to the Shuttles, which cost at least $2 billion to build each (probably more, if you factor in R&D), and well in excess of $300 million each launch (some accounting puts Shuttle launches at an incredible $500 million each).

There also hasn't been a fatal accident involving Soyuz since the 1970's, when an air seal failed during reentry and the crew suffocated. There was a serious accident during the '80s when the booster failed, but the cosmonauts were able to successfully escape the destruction of the vehicle and came away with only minor injuries. That's simply not possible with the Shuttle, since the astronauts are strapped right next to huge tanks of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (an insanely stupid design - there's no way to be safely blown clear).

There have been something like 1,600 launches of Soyuz-family rockets, as opposed to a little more than 100 Shuttle launches, so clearly most of the bugs have been worked out of the Soyuz system by now. The fact it's a far smaller rocket means less energy is required to launch it into orbit, reducing the stress and strain on the system and making it inherently safer than the Shuttles, with all that fuel and weight they have to contend with. There's also no reason to couple human payloads with equipment and supplies bound for orbit. In fact, it's downright senseless.

Here are some reliability figures for boosters in common use. With the exception of Soyuz, these are all unmanned boosters. Note that many of these unmanned boosters are as reliable (or even more reliable) than the Shuttle, which becomes a 2 billion dollar supersonic crematorium for all 7 astronauts aboard roughly 1 mission in 50:

Atlas 1&2 - 49 launch attempts, 95.9% reliability
Delta 2 - 73, 98.6%
Ariane 4 - 81, 96.3%
Proton - 254, 89.4%
Soyuz - 958, 99.3%
Long March - 54, 90.7%

Quite frankly, the Shuttle is nothing but a jobs program. Everything that's being done with the ISS could be done - cheaper and safer - using Russian launchers. For some interesting stats regarding launchers and costs, see this PDF file (sorry for the format, but it's informative), this NASA FAQ on launchers (it's from the mid-'90s, but still mostly accurate), and

NASA _should_ scrap the ISS, now. Don't OS/2 it. (Pardon me while I put on the flame retardant suit.) Sure, a lot of money has been dumped into it. Fine. Leave it there for a while and if we can figure out a way to use it well, then go ahead.

remeber that someone did spend at least $5,000/pound to put that metal up there (possibly much, much more, depending on low earth orbit vs. Geosync orbit - pdf on launch costs here. Surely it'd be worthwhile to devise a means to "recylce" that material in orbit, rather than just letting it burn up in the atmosphere, ala MIR. hah, maybe I'll take my secret space yatch up there, and tow the damn thing off to a personal scrapyard somewhere. 393,733lbs @ 5,000/lb = $1.97 billion, just to get the metal up there. I know you didn't suggest letting the ISS burn up in the atmosphere, but it kinda sounded to me like that was what you were implying..