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Comment by lsh123 | Hacker News Reader

The number Mask is targeting is $10/kg to orbit. With all supplies, it means under $10k / person for a week in orbit.

That doesn't include the cost of a vehicle that can support you for a week and re-enter and land safely, and does not include cost of ground systems to support the mission and recover you. Nor training or regulatory compliance costs. It's just the mass to orbit.

Even if Starship delivers everything promised, I doubt orbit would be within reach of wage earners. Similarly we could afford to pay for a ship to drop a few tons of rock off Guam, but going to the bottom of the Mariana trench and returning alive would be a different kettle of fish.

The target that's rather optimistic. Initially I would expect at leasy 20x that.

Is that target $10kg to orbit and back?

I imagine the price of getting mass back down from orbit would bump your cost up a bit right?

I already doubled it ;)

The starship upper stage has to come back down anyway, so I don’t see why you’d need to double the cost.

The upper stage coming down empty vs full of cargo are entirely different beasts surely?

Every kilogram of mass added to the return trip increases the required deceleration, fuel, etc. Not cheap. At some point you can't reach orbit with the required fuel to get everything back. The Falcon 9 boosters are nearly empty when they come back. As a matter of fact, at least one of their early landing failures was because they cut the fuel load too close and ran out of fuel just before reaching the ground. Minimizing weight on the return landing is critical.

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