Wondering about development- and launch-costs

In the HLLV/economies-thread Frediiiie wrote:



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Since I myself already also had looks to the launch costs, developments costs and perhaps other costs listed there I find this t be worth a particular thread here. I remember to have been wondering a bit about the numbers.

But it's not only that - Another point is that some launch costs aren't calculated by the producers and companies doing the launches - they are calculated by the military or NASA (partially at least).

Because of this the numbers published by the military, NASA or even the producers may be calculated wrong ways.

Have a look here for example: www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm. The development costs are listed to be $ 7,439.600 million while the launch costs are listed to be $ 431.000 million. These launch costs are propellant costs by much less than 10%. The majority will be hardware costs. This means that the development costs are no way covered by the launches of rockets of the Saturn-family - let alone the Saturn V-"family".

It is very unclear what made up the development costs and what links between the development costs and the launch costs might exist.

For those rockets where calculations have been done by the military and NASA and revised later because of changed expectations of future launches I still have to refind the examples.

But calculations by the military or NASA can be expected to lead to political prices rather than prices justified by the economics of the producers and launch servicers.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

This reminds me of the whole space shuttle saga. The advertised cost of space shuttle launch was about $1000 per kg I believe, which is approaching the bounds of reasonable for financial applications. The real cost of shuttle launch is more like $20000 (?) per kg. Apparently the escalting price overruns are due to the fact that the space shuttle is flown very rarely. Originally the shuttle was supposed to be launched once every two weeks or so, but the the only Star Wars was able to provide the demand for such a high launch rate. But the Star Wars was canceled and the space shuttle was left hanging. And the fact that shuttles tended to blow up didn't help either.

Well, shuttles don't 'tend' to blow up any more than most other systems. The shuttle was expected to launch virtually everything the US would be putting up, both govenment and commercial flights, which would have provided the launch rate originally sold to congress. SDI would only have been a small part. However continuing compromises kept pushing the capability down, until the air force dropped any plans to use the system, deciding to rely on EELVs instead. Now, of course, this is vastly oversimplified. This is one thing that exites me about the N-Prize. Find ways to launch something with the minimum necessary vehicle, and consequently, the minimum necessary launch facilities as well, without sacrificing reasonable (place your own definition of reasonable here) safety and success rates.

Right now I'd say we need very cheap, but reliable, modular expendable boosters. Once we've proven that it can be done at much lower costs, I think we'll start to see more payloads. Microspace is right about one thing, start small and move up from there.

James C.
Epsilon Vee

Very small launchers, frequent launches and no fixed infrastructure were from the beginning the foundation for Microlaunchers. Cost per unit weight means nothing. Per launch does. Frequency will create experience and high success rate, and opportunity to change/improve designs quickly (news item: Falcon 1 launch that was to be today is postponed a month because of priority government use at Kwajelein).

Total number of launches has to be hundreds quickly, then thousands. If nominal space into which to launch is that between Earth and Mars, there's literally a trillion times the room as in LEO. No conjestion.

Blair and I decided on N Prize because an attempt provides an even smaller "entry point" than the then planned "ML-1" which is to place one Cubesat to LEO or 100 grams to escape. This, "ML-N", is a better starting point.

Not true if the customer wants to launch a big weight, like a large space telescope or whatever.

if it costs $25 Mil to launch a hundred tonnes then you still need to come up with $25 mil.

The cost of entry is very high in terms of what universities and R&D departments can afford.

However that cost level would be easy for industrial applications to profit at. Industrial applications can't be achieved with micro-launchers.

They are two very different markets and ideas. The frequency is never important. The total cost of launch is a barrier to entry for the low end and the cost per kilo is a barrier of usage to the high end.

$10,000 per kilo would be fine if you could pay $10,000 to launch just one kilo.