is the midpoint between the high and low scenario numbers that FAA chose for the Proposed Rule for Human Spaceflight Requirements for Crew and Spaceflight Participants to calculate how much of a burden the regulation would be. 7500 flights over ten years with one paying customer paying $200,000 would be $1.5 billion. Rocketplane is building a 4-seater expected to enter testing in 2006. Masten has a 5-seater on their product roadmap for some time after 2008. XCOR Xerus is a two-seater. The Spaceship Company has an operator who says they have $10 million in deposits for flying in a 7-9 seater. 7500 times 4 passengers would be $6 billion over ten years or $600 million/year.

Likely there will be higher prices early and more flights at lower prices later as operations become more routine, more suborbital vehicles get built and competition takes hold. If flight rates grow linearly from zero, we would get 1425 flights in year ten and even if the price drops to Futron’s predicted 2015 price of $80,000 per passenger, we would substantially exceed the demand forecast by Futron if this prediction holds up. $500 million per year was a number they did not think would get hit until 2018.

If we double the Futron price estimates (they anticipated $100k prices at the start), we might double revenues, but that requires that all those launches have willing purchasers. (As I’ve said when Futron first released the study in 10/2004) since Futron doesn’t include demand from games, this may be reasonable.

Put another way, reconciling Futron’s passenger numbers with the FAA flight numbers, we get an average passengers per flight over ten years of only 2 passengers per flight.

The high estimate for suborbital flight rates by FAA was 10142 and the low 5081 with a 50% probability attached to each. These include test flights and non-passenger flights.

–Update 2006-01-04 04:56:00 CST–
And non-government orbital passenger flights.