A note on #SpaceX and the future of space travel.

[maxomai]

NASA estimate of the total cost for SpaceX to R&D the Falcon 9 system: $3.6 billion.

DOD budget for Joint Strike Fighter R&D: over $9 billion for 2012 alone.

Total cost of shuttle program: $196 billion over 40 years.

There are a lot of things that government can do better than any corporation, simply because the economic logic of leaving such things in the hands of the private sector make things worse. Space travel, carefully regulated, is a notable exception. Continued space travel as a strictly government venture is too risky for political reasons. Privatizing space travel turns the political risks into economic risks - and it turns out that the economic risks aren't that bad after all. Of course, the biggest customer will continue to be the government, but I can see that changing as the cost of travel goes down.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The problem with this idea is that you're not accounting for costs. In addiiton to actually running for 40 years, the NASA space shuttle program also came up with the necessary tech, so you have all of the R&D costs, which SpaceX was able to use so they could come up with their own vehicle. If they'd been developing the system from scratch, like NASA originally did, the costs would have been far higher.

Of course, the biggest customer will continue to be the government, but I can see that changing as the cost of travel goes down.

When someone builds a space elevator or invents wacky-tech like antigravity sure, but currently the cost to send something into orbit is around $5,000 per pound and even SpaceX won't get it below $1,000/pound. That's not really a price that people are going to be jumping to use.

[maxomai.livejournal.com]

At $1000 a pound, it costs $1650 to launch a TubeSat and $2200 to launch a CubeSat.