The Economist has a good article on SpaceShipOne. There's only one problem with it:

...it is difficult for his competitors (as well as everybody else) to work out what a ticket might actually cost.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives some idea. Mr Rutan says his highest costs are staff for the pre- and post-flight check-ups. He has a few dozen staff and, at one point, had a plan to run SpaceShipOne once a week for five months. Assuming each of his staff cost $120 an hour to employ, it would cost a minimum of $60,000 per tourist for staff alone.

That assumes that his entire staff is dedicated to SpaceShipOne operations. He has many other projects to which they would charge, so a SpaceShipOne flight won't bear the full burden of his standing...well, not army, but perhaps a large squad, or perhaps a platoon. So I think that these are overestimates of his overhead costs.

$120 an hour seems kind of high too. But I guess the point of this calculation was to provide an overestimate. Another thing that's a bit off is the launched costs for manned vehicles. On the US side, it might be "pretty static" at $20,000 per kg for the space shuttle, but I get the impression that the Russians are much cheaper and improving their costs incrementally.

The cost doesn't matter. It will go down as competition kicks in. Enough people will pay the necessary high cost initially and demand will just increase. Any calculation at this point is pure guess.

Even educated guesses are good, are they provide a framework for discussion. I'm not certain how far competition can push costs down (engineering will play a role as well), as competetion does not in and of itself reduce costs, it provides an incentive to reduce price.

The real cost drops will come when operators must compete among themselves for riders, and vendors compete between themselves to provide vehicles to the operators. What we emphatically don't want is a few, or one, vertical companies encompassing both functions.

As opposed to how NASA works, this is still pretty awesome. Check this bit from an interview with Sean O'Keefe yesterday:

O'BRIEN: Are there people that work in NASA, perhaps yourself included, that look at what Rutan pulled off for $20 million and say "Gosh I wish we could do that?"
O'KEEFE: Well there's no question that there are a lot fewer limitations on what you can do with private financing. And that's to be understood. The public condition is that you have to be a lot more accountable. You've got to be absolutely traceable in terms of the things you're engaged in.
Nonetheless, we need to adopt very similar kinds of approaches to figure out how we can, on behalf of the public, [meet the] technical challenges we approach every day and find and invite new answers to old problems or new answers to new problems.
Pure bureaucratese spoken here. So let's see if I've got this straight: In order to be fiscally accountable to the public (far more demanding than private individuals) we have to spend more of their money? It's more expensive to do it the NASA way because we have to trace every dollar? We're limited because we spend more money?

This is just astounding. This is what working in government does to you. It absolutely bends your view of reality.

Watching the Discovery Wings channel last night, they were talking about Concorde and Space Shuttle and other things that were examples of things only government could do because they weren't limited in the way private enterprise is by the profit factor. What planet is O'Keefe from?

Lissen ta yerselves! It's been 4 franken' DAYS since the flight, and you're worrying about the price of a ticket! Even the w.a.g.s are about the same as rich adventure junkies pay TODAY to climb Everest, and a suborbital hop doesn't require a year of near-superhuman physical conditioning. I predict people will be BIDDING for the tickets and somebody's gonna get rich.

Interesting. In the Air Force one of the high cost of launches is the "standing army" of support staff - pre, during and post-flight. You have to pay them the same amount if you have one launch a year of one a week. So, the more lauches you have, the less per launch the standing army costs.

Interesting. In the Air Force one of the high cost of launches is the "standing army" of support staff - pre, during and post-flight. You have to pay them the same amount if you have one launch a year of one a week. So, the more lauches you have, the less per launch the standing army costs.

Sorry..hit it twice.

This is just astounding. This is what working in government does to you. It absolutely bends your view of reality.

That is the way government works, though, and the reason he gives for why is defensible. The important difference between public and private sector is that in the private sector you can negotiate your accountability -- within limits imposed by law (see Enron) -- with those to whom you're accountable, and re-negotiate on the fly based on results.

So it's not entirely a worldview problem.

Dag; That's an excellent point.

Standing armies are not to be feared unless their costs overwhelm the total. Airlines maintain enourmous standing armies, but can amortize them across multiple flights per location/per day.

In the public sector your can't negotiate your accountability because, in fact, there really isn't any accountablity.

In the private sector accountability means show me the output for my inputs. In the public sector output is irrelevant. Accountability in the public sector is nothing more than being able to show what happened to the inputs, that's it.

What this translates to is the numbskulls in Congress don't really care how much you or even how you spend the money as long as some of it gets spent in their districts. That's accountability.