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The High Cost Of Space Access

9 Comments

Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:

The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.

As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.

9 thoughts on “The High Cost Of Space Access”

  1. Well obviously it was a typo, what he actually meant to say was “The best evolved expendable launch vehicles (EELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.”

    After all, he doesn’t even mention SpaceX.

  3. I’ve been thinking lately that the great spacex innovation isn’t rocketry or management, but avionics software. Experts have known since the 60’s, the best feasible way to reduce launch cost is reuse the booster stage. A rocket stage is incredibly areodynamicaly unstable, and to fly it through supersonic turbulence unmanned and land on a tiny rocking platform is so difficult, the computer intelligence software and flight controls is only now light and practical enough to fit on a rocket.

    1. Avionic advances ….

      That certainly is a huge accomplishment. DC-X did a bit of that non-supersonically.

      I tend to think that the audacious accomplishment is the simple hubris of trying to fly a more-or-less standard booster all the way back down. Nearly all previous efforts or designs have been mostly aircraft, and hardly a booster at all.

      1. There was certainly no lack of such proposals in the 1960s. Back then the avionics were not up to snuff and to be honest not a lot of effort was spent on it. For example at one time there were proposals to recover the Saturn I-C stage.
        http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html

        I guess there were less opportunities to try this out as well because the Saturn V launches were somewhat infrequent. One of the comments over there is that the Saturn V did not have enough design margin to increase the weight but I kind of doubt that considering the F-1A and J-2X engines were in the pipeline.

        1. Somewhere I have a Boeing magazine from the 60s which discussed these plans, and I seem to remember that they needed about sixty Saturn V launches before the recovery savings would exceed the development costs of the recovery system. So that alone really made it a non-starter.

  4. Roger hasn’t done his own math. The numbers he cites for the Saturn V are a cost of $465 million in 2015 dollars for 262,000 pounds into LEO. That’s $1,775 per pound. The figures I recall for Saturn V were slightly different, and would change the number to $2,010 per pound. That is from John Noble Wilford’s We Reach the Moon, published immediately after Apollo 11. He cited a cost of $128 million a launch in 1969.

  5. Those ol Saturn stage ocean recovery ideas look real cool. Right up to the part when the hot rocket engines touch seawater. That’s always been the catch. In order for this to work you got to do a powered descent onto a tiny oceangoing moving target. Only now is small flight controls and autopilot software able to pull it off. Before spacex’s avionics, the only fully reusable spaceship I could think of as being really workable was probably the TSTO winged manned boosters of the early shuttle designs.

    1. In order for this to work you got to do a powered descent onto a tiny oceangoing moving target.

      Or catch it in mid-air with a giant helicopter. Don’t laugh — NASA actually considered that. You can see a model of it at the Hiller Aviation Museum in the Bay Area.

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