The Tauri Group finds that transport costs to reach geostationary orbit fell from an average of $32,000 per kg in 1999-2000 to $21,000 per kg in 2007-08: Study Finds Launch Costs Dropping - Aviation Week.

Not surprisingly, Bob Zubrin disagrees with the Aerospace Corp's costs estimates for NASA's HSF program: Junk Cost Estimates Supplied to Augustine Committee Threaten to Sink NASA's Human Spaceflight Program - Mars Society Blog.

Seems like Aerospace's numbers for NASA projects are consistent with GAO's and are probably fairly reliable. Doubt they are reliable for private projects implemented outside of the government cost-plus procurement process.

Here's a look at what Elon Musk's goal of a 10x reduction in launch costs could mean for overall space mission costs: The Musk Factor: reducing the cost of spaceflight - Denver Space Industry Examiner (via spacetoday.net).

I find the lower graph ("Consumption Spreads Faster Today") in this image from a New York Times op-ed to be quite fascinating. It nicely illustrates how goods that start out as luxuries for the rich eventually become low cost commodities owned by most everyone (at least within a developed country). In fact, a middle-class household may own several models of a previously expensive product: Study: Nearly 35% of US Households with a Vehicle Have at Least Three - Green Car Congress. The op-ed makes the point that this process of commoditization is accelerating as seen, for example, with cellphones and flat TVs.

I'd like to see a similar graph for services such as airline flights, restaurant dinners, week-long vacations in Florida, etc. I'm sure it would look quite similar. I remember, for example, that long distance bus travel in the US was still common into the 1970s but mostly disappeared after deregulation of the airlines and the resulting big drop in airfares in the 1980s. (A similar process has happened in Europe in the past decade or so.)

No, I'm not going to claim that a trip to space will get as cheap as a flight from New York to L.A. anytime soon or that every middle class family will be taking a vacation in space by 2015. However, in terms of technology, there is no fundamental reason the same economies of scale cannot eventually bring the price of a space flight (first suborbital and later orbital) down to the level that a middle class person could afford after saving assiduously for a few years just as he or she might do today to take a dream vacation in a distant country. I don't know how many years "eventually" will span. Depends on the actions of a lot of players. However, I do know that the process of bringing spaceflight within reach of the common person will never happen without first starting with high prices to an upscale market.

With regard to the magnitude of the cost of a project to win the Google Lunar Prize, I've been surprised to read a number of people say that such a project must surely require $200M-$300M. That seems way over the top. NASA Ames, for example, planned to build one or more microlanders for a quick survey of the areas where Apollo II might send astronauts. They projected a cost for such a lander to be in the $50M-$100M range. The microlander project was canceled due to internal NASA politics over funding for unmanned lunar exploration, not because of technical problems.

Here are some graphics of the microlanders: DigitalSpace Projects : Microsat Lunar Lander for NASA ARC (Summer 2006)
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Another lunar project cost benchmark to consider is the Lunar Prospector orbiter project, which began as a private venture led by a team that included space scientist Alan Binder, the Houston Space Society (HSS), and the Space Studies Institute (SSI). They very nearly got it to space on a Russian launcher but couldn't raise the few million dollars they needed.

The project got reformulated several times under Binder's leadership and eventually he got a spacecraft to the Moon via the NASA Discovery program for about $65M. Binder has said that if it had stayed a private project with lots of volunteer labor, they could have done it for less than $20M.

Binder has written a huge book (1100 pages!) describing the tortured trek of the Lunar Prospector, See this intro and timeline for a quick overview. He also has been on the Space Show several times (e.g. Mar.05 and July.07 ) and recounted the many hurdles the project had to overcome such as Mike Griffin's repeated attempts to kill it when he was a NASA manager.

Jon Goff examines the question over whether launch costs will be reduced as flight rates increase: Some Launch Economics - Selenian Boondocks
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Anousheh Ansari doesn't seem to have much of an investment, financial or otherwise, in the Explorer suborbital vehicle project: Space Adventures suborbital push in jeopardy? - Personal Spaceflight

Yesterday while driving back to Rockville I listened to some Space Show interviews. In a show with Dr. Henry Hertzfeld of the George Washington University Space Policy Institute, he was perfectly confident that launch costs will never drop substantially below current levels and certainly not to the $1000/lb range. He, of course, doesn't take space tourism or suborbital spaceflight very seriously.

On the other hand (or other ear), in the interview with Dr. James R. Wertz, CEO of Microcosm and Adjunct Professor of Astronautics at USC, he expressed confidence that launch costs can be drastically reduced. He not only takes space tourism seriously, he believes a commercial lunar base for tourism is quite feasible.

(BTW: I see Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane Kistler was on the show today.)

Alan Boyle has supplemented a recent posting on NewSpace activities with comments from John Pike: The X Prize's second stage - Cosmic Log - Oct.5.06.

As usual, Pike pretends to teach physics, engineering, and business to people who actually have training in those areas and who work in them everyday. You would think that if he had a modicum of intellectual curiosity he would contact the leaders of the new space transport companies, e.g. Burt Rutan, Jeff Greason, Elon Musk, etc., and ask them why they think they can lower launch costs substantially. However, he takes it for granted that such guys must be fools and they should instead contact him to get the real truth on launch costs.

Despite what he says, it's been pointed out repeatedly that physics, as embodied in the rocket equation, basically only tells you how much fuel you need to get to orbit for a given rocket engine and vehicle design. It doesn't tell you anything about launch costs. In fact, the total cost of the fuel needed for most rocket vehicles is a minor fraction of the total cost of getting to orbit.

Daniel Schmelzer notes that in the interview with Robert Bigelow on the Space Show last week, Mr. Bigelow mentioned a very high rate of flights to the company's full scale orbital facility: Robert Bigelow on Launch Demand - Carried Away - Aug.27.06.

By the third year of operation, he expects 20 flights a year, including 16 with 6 to 8 passengers each. This would mean flights about every two weeks on top of ISS resupply, satellite and other deliveries to orbit for US launch companies. This would obviously be a revolution for the industry. As Daniel points out, it would have major ramifications for spaceport operations alone.

Whether a Bigelow launch market will will be provided by one or both of the COTS winners or by some other space transport system(s) waits to be determined. But with this flight rate, space transport prices will come down due to economies of scale and reusability will be the key to pushing prices as low as possible.

The $500M in total development cost for the SpaceX Dragon system sounds pretty high to Daniel Schmelzer: Dragon Development Will Be Expensive - Carried Away - Aug.23.06.

Half a billion is real money, for sure, but I would still consider a passenger capable system at that price to be a great bargain. The SpaceShipTwo development, for example, is going to be in the $100M range (though this will include more than one operational vehicle.) Rocketplane is up to around $50M for the XP. So five to ten times more for orbital crewed systems seems reasonable considering that the energies involved are about 30 times higher and there are many other enhanced complexities compared to a suborbital system.

Conversely, if one looks at the costs of the various paradigm projects for alt.space - DC-X, Lunar Prospector, SS1, etc. - they are generally estimated to be around five to ten times cheaper than if they had been run with standard NASA/OldSpace procurement and management methods. I don't know if there is a good estimate yet for the cost of the Ares 1/Block 1 CEV system but I doubt it will be developed for less than $5B. So a factor of ten less for a system with many of the same capabilities seems like a good deal.

I'll note from statements I've seen from John Carmack at Armadillo Aerospace that he still strongly believes that suborbital and orbital vehicles can be developed for significantly lower costs than the above numbers.

A reader pointed me to this Futron paper from 2002 that looked at how launch costs changed over the 1990-2000 period: Space ransportation Costs: Trends in Price Per Pound to Orbit 1990-2000 - Futron - Sept.02. They looked at both LEO and GEO costs. The LEO prices have a huge spread because of the large variation in cost according to the size of the vehicle used and whether it is a "Western" or "Non-Western" vehicle. So it is difficult to discern any trend. The GEO dropped by about a third by the mid-1990s and then flattened out. So for the biggest commercial market, GEO comsats launch prices have dropped over time despite what one DC talking head declares.

As I mentioned with respect to Sea Launch, I think a study that continued to the present time would show a further drop in GEO launch costs, though prices probably have stablized as the comsat industry has come out of its recession in the early part of this decade and demand for launches is higher.

Esther Dyson and others have drawn parallels between the efforts of the very light jet (VLJ) developers like Eclipse Aviation and the entrepreneurial space transport companies. They are all trying to build something new at a price point significantly below what industry experts say is feasible and they are aiming at markets that the experts say will never materialize.

Looks like Eclipse, though, is proving that it will in fact get fairly close to its original price target for its vehicles and the 3000 orders indicate that there does exist a market for it:
* Flight Interview: Vision of Eclipse Aviation's Vern silences the sceptics - Flight Int./Eclipse Aviation - Mar.06
* Eclipse Begins Production On First Customer Eclipse 500 - Aero-News - Mar.2.06

Of course, this doesn't mean that the new spaceship companies will succeed as well but there are some lessons they can learn from Eclipse. Probably the most important is that a company must have sufficient capital to overcome setbacks. A crisis like the need to change engines on the Eclipse would typically kill a startup but in this case they had the money to survive. Companies like AMROC and Kistler have failed not because of profound technical roadblocks but due to a lack of money when they hit a crisis. The crisis came with a pad test failure in the case of AMROC, and it came for Kistler as a collapse of investor confidence in the company's business plan following the failures of Iridium and Globalstar. (If Kistler had been able to keep going, it would now dominate a lucrative ISS resupply business.)

Eclipse also shows that the high cost for most anything built by the US aerospace industry is not due to laws of nature but to practices that can be changed:

“The vast majority of our problems are with US companies, not overseas ones,” he admits. “It all comes down to a culture of the aerospace industry. Quality has never been an issue – this is an industry for whom quality is a matter of life or death. But price is something to be negotiated after the fact and schedules are there to be broken. It’s all driven by cost-plus pricing on defence contracts which defends failure. It does nothing to incentivise efficiency.”

[Update] Jon Goff Ken Murphy examines the issues raised in Grant Bonin's Space Review article, which argues that existing (or soon to be built) medium lift vehicles offer a more cost effective approach for the Moon/Mars exploration program than building a new heavy lift vehicle : On Bonin's 'The case for smaller launch vehicles in human space exploration (part 1)' - Selenian Boondocks - Jan.3.06.
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Speaking of costs, Dick Stafford points to a NASA site with tools for making space project cost estimates: NASA JSC Cost Estimating and Models Web Site