Alt.space spending

The recent flurry of announcements from Space Adventures concerning the development of the Explorer transport system got me to wondering about the total amount of money publicly committed to ongoing entrepreneurial spaceflight projects. Of course, there is no guarantee that a given amount will actually be raised just because it was posted in a press release or newspaper article. Nevertheless, there are now a significant number of multi-million dollar projects sponsored by credible organizations with significant financial means.

Below I show a "back of the envelope" type of list of alt.space projects and the (rough) funding numbers that I've seen associated with them. The ~$1.3B total seems like a fairly reasonable estimate. For comparison, this is quite a bit larger than the cumulative amount spent on the 1990's alternative launcher projects like Kistler ($600M) and Rotary ($30M).

Funding at this level may start to attract even more investment into the field. Also, with more and more projects with money to spend, we could see the development of a supporting infrastructure of companies supplying parts and services.

I also threw in at the bottom the money committed by NASA to commercial spaceflight. It increases the total by about 40%. That's a nontrivial increment and will definitely help to support the industry. (There is also DARPA and other military money but I've not tried to estimate that.)

===========================
Explorer vehicle related projects:
Vehicle development $25M *
UAE spaceport + $265M
Singapore spaceport + $115M
= $405M

Spaceship Company &
Virgin Galactic $125M

NM Spaceport $200M

SpaceX $100M

Rocketplane $40M

Blue Origin $20M *

Rocket Racing League $10M *

Bigelow $400M **

Other projects $50M ***
---
Total = $1350M
-----

NASA COTS (ISS Resupply) $500M
Centennial Challenges $10M
=====
Total = $1860M

I've not included the budget of the ZERO-G company. I assume it is in the several million dollar range.
I've also not included the $20M payments from one or two tourists each year to go to the ISS.

* Guesstimates

** Robert Bigelow has said he will spend around $400M on his space projects over the next 15 years or so.

*** Armadillo, TGV Rockets, Planetspace, XCOR, etc. have funding but have not made their budgets public. The $50M is a wild guess for the sum total of what these projects are spending on current projects.

Posted 02/27/06 | 00:46:29 by TopSpacer | Filed under: NewSpace

Comments

Good list.

I think you can bump up SpaceX to $200 million. Musk has stated that a second round of financing in the range of an additional $100 million is due after first launch.

Also, wasn't Bigelow at $500 million through 2015? I guess he could change those numbers at any time, of course.

Posted by Daniel Schmelzer at 02/27/06 10:56:39

Hi Daniel,
Thanks, I didn't know that Elon had given an explicit figure for the next funding increment.

I think you are right about the $500M for Bigelow. I didn't have time to track down the number he had given but knew it was in the $400M ballpark.
- C.

Posted by TopSpacer at 02/27/06 11:27:55

I think Musk gave the add'l $100 million funding figure in the press conference. Here's a previous reference on your site.

http://www.hobbyspace.com/n...

I guess that could be a marker for some bigger or smaller figure, but a manned capsule for Falcon 9 strikes me as rather spendy option.

Posted by Daniel Schmelzer at 02/27/06 16:49:03

The last time I had the expenses totaled up, I had spent somewhat over $2 million on Armadillo, which was a bit less than I expected.

I still don't see any reason why we won't make it to space in the clearly forseeable future at our current level of effort.

John Carmack

Posted by John Carmack at 02/27/06 19:40:21

One thing that bugs me is that there are two "spaceport" projects that are spending $ 580 million of the $1350 million or so just for suborbital vehicles.

In both New Mexico and the UAE the spaceports are more expensive than the suborbital vehicles that are their only confirmed customers thus far.

And if you look at the NASA COTS contract as being conjectural, and take into account the fact that Bigelow's not spending the $ 500 million all next year, but spread out, the fraction of immediate (i.e. the next couple years) investment going into these spaceports starts looking proportionally larger.

I was also under the impression that the vehicles that were meant to fly from these spaceports were air-dropped and landed by gliding to a runway.

I thought that meant their need for infrastructure would be relatively low. I can't help but think that the investment in this industry is cyclical, that this is the "boom" part, and that there might be better places to invest capital than in the ground infrastructure.

Posted by Phil Fraering at 02/27/06 23:09:29

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