Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

I am both amazed and disappointed at the cost to do one launch of this machine. How much of that cost is going to occur each launch?

View on HN

This test cost $370 million.

An SLS launch is projected to cost $500 million.

A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-lan...

Wow, almost $2.5B at today's cost. There is no way that they would allow that much today.

Shuttle launches cost $1-2B, and carried significantly less to orbit.

There's some accounting fun in that, though. The marginal cost of a Shuttle launch was considerably lower. $1-2 billion is what you get by dividing the budget by the number of launches. Much of the cost went into maintaining the fleet and would have had to be paid whether or not they launched. That's substantially different than with an expendable launcher.

Lmfao isn't that extremely ironic? The purpose of the shuttle was to have a semi-reusable rocket to save a little money. Instead we end up blowing billions just maintaining and refurbishing the fleet. The shuttle very obviously wasn't the way to go.

I think SpaceX's grasshopper setup is more promising. It doesn't need to withstand the same pressures that the shuttle had to because of the altitude at which it returns to Earth, so there's not so much to refurbish. That, and it also comes down like a pencil rather than like a rock.

The Shuttle's cheapness was predicated on a high launch rate. When the high launch rate wasn't achievable, it became pretty expensive. That's only to be expected, of course. A 747 is an economical way to fling a bunch of people and cargo across the Pacific if you do it once a day, but it's terribly expensive if you only fly it a couple of times a year. The Shuttle was decent enough conceptually, but it pushed the envelope in too many places and that hurt reusability a lot.

I agree that SpaceX's setup is more promising. The fact that they're slightly modifying an existing expendable rocket that's already cost-competitive means that any reuse is just a bonus. They can throw away a bunch of boosters as they work on the problem, which wasn't an option with the shuttle at $2 billion apiece just to construct them.

The cost of a Shuttle launch was $450M and carried 24,400 kg & 7 people to LEO. The only thing that can compete with that short of the Saturn V is the Delta IV-Heavy, which is $340M per launch and can carry 28,790 kg to LEO.

Where does that $450M figure come from? I'm looking at Wikipedia where I presume you took that from, and it says the total cost adjusted for inflation was $196 billion, with 135 launches, that (with straight division) averages out to 1.5 billion adjusted for inflation over the life of the shuttle.

Yeah, during Apollo, the NASA budget was 2.5-4.5% of the total federal budget, vs. 0.5% today.

During Apollo the federal budget was also many times smaller. In real dollars NASA's budget is only about 20% smaller than its average in the 60's. The difference with respect to human space travel is risk aversion and lack of focus and political will.

The US needs another cold war to get it motivated. Maybe if China steps it up...

The US is currently, and for the foreseeable future, solely reliant upon Russia to get astronauts to & from LEO & the ISS. Frankly, I'm surprised Putin hasn't rattled that saber yet.

Edit: I'm rooting for Sabre & Skylon, myself. Perhaps not for big payloads but for 'naut travel, anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_%28rocket_engine%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29

> and for the foreseeable future

That depends on whether or not 2017 is foreseeable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development). Since 2012 the US has had a craft that is capable of taking people to and from the ISS, NASA just wants to do an excessive amount of testing and incremental improvements before we trust it (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/05/...).

Well, technology is supposed to drop in cost over the years, while also getting better.

The SLS is designed for a 500m cost per launch. This was a test flight using the very expensive Delta IV rocket, not the SLS rocket, currently in development.

For reference, the Saturn V cost (fixed for 2014 inflation) is 3b per launch. The Space Shuttle cost 1.5b per flight. So this system is fairly cheap historically, especially considering how much lifting power the Block II configuration will provide.

Interesting that we went from 3b to 1.5b from the Saturn V to the STS, half, but this time are going from 1.5b to 500m, a third.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

For those interested, the new Gerard R. Ford class aircraft carrier costs 14b in R&D and 9b in construction and costs 2.5b a year to run (including other ships in carrier group). If I'm doing my math right, something like the SLS, and its lifetime of missions (excluding Mars), is comparable to having another carrier in the US military. Currently we have ten carriers and two under construction.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/carriers/cv-list.asp

That are the projections, right? How much security is there, that the real costs will be quite that number?

The Space Shuttle once also should be much more affordable than it really was ....

Also to compare the Saturn V with one Space Shuttle lift is really not fair at all ... since the Saturn V could carry much more weight, as much I know as the Shuttle in one lift (more than 100tons for the Saturn V vs. 24 tons for the Space Shuttle into a low orbit).

It's a bit sad (in terms of lost opportunities to put mass in orbit) to recall that the Shuttle, empty, weighed about 86 tons. This weight went to orbit every time whether the mission needed people or not. So the launch to LEO capability of the Shuttle was actually about 110 tons, on par with the Saturn V.

Yes, you are making the classic "we spend X for the defense project and that would buy Y."

You aren't adding anything to the conversation because it never changes anything. Can we try some non-classic thinking? Maybe we can add something new to the discussion .

I don't think I am. I'm just trying to put that cost into some perspective. Its comparable to a aircraft carrier in some ways. I'm not necessarily advocating for cutting the military spending. If people are comfortable with taxation for one of those carriers then they should, arguably, be comfortable for taxation for the SLS.

I think people have distorted ideas of what space travel really costs. Describing it as a 13th carrier puts thing into perspective.

An aircraft carrier is a mobile city with a nuclear reactor, and hundreds of warplanes that serves a purpose for decades. I think it's a big stretch to make any kind of comparison. It really only confuses the issue.

A Falcon 9, which from my understanding has similar capabilities as the Delta IV, costs 60 million per launch. SpaceX is targeting 5-7 million per launch, but that depends on them getting the full reusabily they want. We'll have to wait and see if they actually achieve that price point.

Delta IV Heavy (which EFT-1 flew on) is currently the world's most powerful rocket, capable of putting 30 tons into LEO, about twice the payload of the Falcon 9. The Falcon Heavy which is supposed to make its first flight sometime next year is supposed to carry about twice the payload of a Delta IV Heavy[1]. However, NASA could not choose it for a few very good reasons: A) it isn't ready to fly yet and B) NASA really really needed this mission to go perfectly, and so being on the first flight of a brand new, less tested rocket created too high a risk of program cancellation.

NASA was very concerned that if there were problems with this launch it would lead to program termination in the current budget environment. Especially given the fiasco of the Constellation program, and the fiasco of every program save two (ISS and STS) dating back to Apollo Applications and the Space Task Group, I can understand NASA's concern.

[1]: Note that when Musk originally announced this rocket as the Falcon 9 Heavy back in 2011, it was supposed to first fly in 2013, and all their website sas now is "Expected in 2015". Rocketry and space is HARD. Even for SpaceX.

Thanks for the response, did a bit more research and realized my mistake of not comparing the heavy versions of both rockets. I did find this article (http://www.nss.org/articles/falconheavy.html) that talks about the Falcon Heavy and it's projected cost of 100 million per launch, almost 1/4 of the price, and can carry more then double the payload. However it's a bit old (2011) and I'm not sure if that projected price point might have changed, with the delays and all.

You need a Falcon Heavy for today's launch, but the problem here is that there is no such thing as a Falcon Heavy. It doesn't exist yet, or ever.

Not to mention there's risk in NASA putting its Orion dreams on something thats currently unproven. If the publish saw Orion blow up today then that could prove disastrous for the SLS program.

Just the Delta IV Heavy cost $375 million. Rockets are expensive.

I did a Google search for a breakdown of the costs related to launching rocket. Found this => http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/launch.htm.

They are, but they're not quite this expensive.

This isn't just a rocket, it's a rocket with paperwork certifying USAF involvement and EELV contracting and various oversight instruments, and manufactured by ULA, the consortium we allowed to become a monopoly, which will offer jobs to everyone involved in this process after they retire from government service.

Private telecom satellites, which are in fact an open market, go for any of the Russian, Chinese, or European launchers, and recently for SpaceX, because ULA's products are too expensive unless you're the US Government.

ULA in this view is effectively a branch of the US space program, which is allowed to guarantee its shareholders a profit, and is protected from allegations of waste because we have NASA to use as a punching bag, they're just a 'private sector contractor'.

That's why reusability is so important.

How much would you like it to cost?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com