[SPAM] Re: [extropy-chat] Fly Me to the Moon

[Charlie Stross]

On 6 Jun 2005, at 16:44, Mike Lorrey wrote:

>> In the present day the per-unit construction cost of a spacecraft is
>> definitely -not- the main driver of launch costs.
>
> On the contrary, Space Ship One, the only private spaceship we have to
> draw a baseline from, has wings. Tier two reportedly has wings as well.

Space Ship One is due to go into orbit ... when?

> Space shuttles cost a few billion to build, they cost somewhere around
> $100 million to launch.

Uh-huh. The Shuttle program costs c. $6Bn/year. This is fixed 
infrastructure costs including the pad, the VAB, and the 5500 people it 
takes to turn the STS around between flights. Maximum flight tempo 
anyone contemplated, post-Challenger but pre-Columbia, was 10 
flights/year; a more realistic tempo with a 4-shuttle fleet was 5/year. 
So we're talking close to a billion per flight.

This is still quite cheap when you compare to Saturn Vs in full-up 
Apollo moon landing configuration, which cost $350-400M per moon launch 
and had a very similar mass to LEO; that was £350-400M in *1968* 
dollars, so call it $2-3Bn in todays money.

This is before you add the construction costs of the shuttle, of course.

> Space Ship One reportedly cost $20-$30 million to build (of course
> there is a lot of r&d in that that will be taken up by later units).
> Fuel costs are reportedly $100k-$200k per mission. If SS1 lasts 20
> missions, its costs per mission would be $1.2 million.

As I said before: Space Ship One goes into orbit when, exactly?

Until it goes into orbit it ain't a real reusable surface-to-orbit 
space transportation system. And SS1 ain't designed to do that. There's 
a small matter of 5mk/s delta-V that's missing somewhere, along with 
the re-entry thermal protection system and a few other extras. QED.

I'm not questioning Burt Rutan's ability to build a real reusable 
orbiter, if you gave him a deep-pocket budget. But SS-1 isn't the real 
thing, and whatever he came up with would have to be at least one -- 
and probably two to three -- orders of magnitude pricier to build and 
at least one and probably two orders of magnitude more costly to fly. 
Even *without* NASA's bureaucratic flight certification requirements.



-- Charlie