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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

It costs about $81 million USD per seat round-trip to go to ISS on Soyuz. SpaceX is doing the same for around $58 million per person (last I read). That alone is a HUGE deal. And that cost is expected to drop as SpaceX gets more comfortable with launching humans, whereas Soyuz has been raising prices.

Not to mention that it's increasing the number of countries and rocket designs that can send people to and from the ISS. Without alternate launch providers, if some flaw were to be found in Soyuz or political issues begin to get in the way of launches, then the US could find itself unable to get astronauts to and from the ISS safely.

Boeing is also in this race, and will be sending up humans to space in their Starliner soon as well, it's still up in the air which will get to the with humans on board ISS first.

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A cost reduction of less than 50% for something that the Russians have been doing routinely with 1960s technology is akin to Magellan setting sail? I like SpaceX but man the spin is blinding.

I'm not saying it is, i'm just explaining what is new about this mission and why I'm excited for it.

I think people are making it larger than it is because doing something and commercializing something are completely different things.

The first flight in a plane was awesome, but not if we just stopped there. Currently SpaceX is somewhere along the line between the Wright Brothers and the Boeing 707. It may be "only price reductions", but once those price reductions hit a critical mass, it enables a whole world of possibilities. SpaceX is already talking about using their next rocket in a similar way to airlines now. Launching a bunch of people from one place into orbit, then landing in another place on the same planet for extremely fast flights across the world. They are talking about creating Moon and Mars bases. Those are things that won't ever happen if we keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars per launch, because the economics of it just won't ever work out.

They still aren't done, and it's no guarantee that they will be able to ever get prices down low enough, but at least they are trying, and making good headway toward it.

The cost reduction is relative to the price Russia charges, not compared to their costs.

Supposedly[1], it was $23 million in 2007. but Russia raised the prices since then. The cost of the Soyuz to the Russians could well be lower than SpaceX still.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090604111935/http://www.kommer...

Hopefully Crew Dragon will not only provide alternative to Soyuz, but also allow bigger crews and payloads both to and from space, nicer atmospheric returns in terms of accelerations and ability to fly on a shorter notice - it takes 2 years to make a Soyuz today.

Magellan was not remotely the first to set sail, nor was he the first to apply that technology.

Of course what SpaceX does is not the same thing as Magellan's trip around the Earth, but it's absolutely an important milestone. It reduces costs on something very expensive, it reuses rockets in a way that wasn't possible before (this is the part that makes it arguably more innovative than Magellan), and it finally gives the US its own capability to go to space again. It was a bit embarrassing how dependent the US had become on Russia since the Space Shuttle's retirement.

But the Soyuz was absolutely also a fantastic feat. It may be small, but it's been the world's primary workhorse for manned space travel to LEO. It's far more reliable than the Space Shuttle (2 lost crews vs none for the Soyus on far more flights, I believe). And the US has nothing remotely comparable. Until now.

The price per seat of $58 M was actually the average over SpaceX and Boeing seats (https://spacenews.com/nasa-boeing-spacex-share-more-details-...), not the price for a seat on Dragon. As far as I am aware, the prices that NASA is paying for seats from each provider are not public.

Google thinks a shuttle launch cost at least $450 million, for comparison.

It's really not something you can compare. Space Shuttle was not a can for humans to reach LEO. It was a much more capable spacecraft with a significantly bigger (both in volume and weight) payload.

With an appropriate payload there were proposals for upto 80 people in the shuttle. At $450m to launch that would be $6m a seat.

Indeed, clearly not a head-to-head comparison, I just wanted to find some figure for the shuttle's cost. It's not clear to me what the 450 includes.

I had not heard of this 80-person shuttle-bus, that sounds pretty crazy!

It was in the plans back in the late 1970s/early 1980s. You can see it popular science of the past, along with a lot of other parts to the total shuttle system, very little of which was ever built. The basic idea is you can put lots of things in the cargo bay, parts to a space station (not the ISS, though the shuttle was used to build the ISS), a rocket to get from low earth orbit to something else, a bus for lots of people.

I wonder how much was a serious proposal, and how much was an artist allowed to daydream.

I thought the going rate for falcon 9 reusable launches was $60 million a flight. With 7 astronauts shouldn't that work out to $8.5 million per astronaut? That's not accounting for the cost of the crew dragon, but I'd be surprised if that increases the cost by an order of magnitude

Well they had to do quite a lot to be able to get to the point where NASA approves of them launching humans, and those costs have to be gained back. Just look at this mission and the upcoming abort test and the years of work that has gone into getting that approval, it's not cheap!

Makes sense. Didn't NASA give them finding to develop the crew dragon though? Is that factored into the launch cost figures we see?

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