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How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
- postit 6y agoHonest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
- Johnny555 6y agoI was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
- ivalm 6y agoThey won’t be launching individual turds, instead it would be a turd cluster with thousands of turds which will decay in orbit at the same time, raining an ultra-hot turd rain which will hopefully evaporate prior to reaching sea-level, instead making clouds slightly turdier.
- zeroxfe 6y ago> with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.
- njarboe 6y agoUntil Blue Origin is offering similar pricing with their New Glen rocket, I'm sure SpaceX will keep launch costs at a good premium to their costs while using this moat to make money in other areas like the SkyLink project.
- iguy 6y agoAt a few hundred dollars per kg, I bet you could run a business scattering people's ashes. Maybe even at a few thousand. I wonder if they would turn you down? Edit -- turns out this is a thing, already, I just didn't know. SpaceX apparently does not mind. Flights to the moon are planned.
- xcskier56 6y agoHad to have a recent loss to learn this, but in the funeral home's options package was to send some of the ashes to space for $2500. The director skipped over that page quickly, but it was a picture of a Falcon 9 taking off
- marsokod 6y agoThe government of your country will need to approve, since they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite. Also, you can send the turd alone, you need to attach it to a launcher, and have a deployment mechanism. You are looking at a few thousands $ minimum regardless of the weight.
- criddell 6y ago> they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite Is that by treaty?
- lostlogin 6y agoDennis Tito went as a tourist in 2001 for $20 million. If you can get a turd generator to space for that price, I’d imagine it’s considerably cheaper to get the finished product up there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism
- cbozeman 6y agoReferring to human beings as "turd generators" is truly fantastic.
- laurent92 6y agoThat is exactly what I thought too. As things go cheap, they become encumbered with their local version of « turd ». We are now sending dozens of thousands of microsatellites, which, in 20 years, may well be considered as Earth’s manure floating around. I wonder if the market or human incentives will increase some other variables which will make it just as inaccessible to the lowly (as it should - Even Elon Musk shouldn’t be able to send non-necessary stuff up in low orbit), such as: Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO, or increasing legal authorizations required. On the other hand, assuming we could indeed send our manure for $1400/kg, would it be the most reasonable way to get rid of radioactive waste? It sounds like a Simpsons episode, but the cost seems so low that it sounds like the next step.
- smorephism 6y ago>Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO You actually specifically want things to go to LEO before they die; when they're sufficiently low, atmospheric drag takes care of them quickly. I agree with the overall direction of your point-that we need to be careful about our space junk-though :)
- khazhoux 6y agoI had the exact same thought! LOL Now I wonder what exactly about the headline made all three of wonder about sending poop to space? I guess poop is a universal answer to "most ridiculous thing that weighs under a pound"?
- KingMachiavelli 6y agoLEO isn't a great place for radioactive waste as it would be in the path of many satellites plus their is some orbital decay meaning it would eventually fall back to earth. Higher orbits take more energy to reach and thus are more expensive. There is also politics involved, any country putting nuclear 'waste' in high orbits would be a suspect for putting nuclear weapons in space as well.
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- Jaygles 6y agoThat's fantastic. Makes me wonder what other efficiency gains we're missing out on due to there not being the right incentives.
- aaron_m04 6y agoIt just isn't plausible that Starship launch costs for LEO could be 1/28th the costs for Falcon Heavy. This sounds like more Musk optimism to me.
- gibolt 6y agoFalcon Heavy has a significantly smaller payload bay and the 1st stage will always be lost. If a starship can fly 10 times and requires much less refurb than a FH, it makes sense.
- MichaelZuo 6y agoRight, the projected rate is effectively the super-bulk discounted rate if you buy 10 launches worth of cargo at once and actually fill it to max capacity whenever a launch window is open. I don’t think the individual flight rate would be anywhere close to $50/kg for the vast majority of customers. The more relevant number is the all-in immediate price per launch, the rate where one could simply wire the money and SpaceX would launch next week, divided by the actual thing(s) launched, which will weigh some intermediate amount. And compare that to the same for the other rockets.
- CrazyStat 6y agoNobody does launches on a week's notice.
- MichaelZuo 6y agoRight, in practice prices in the launch industry are not ‘prices’ as a consumer would understand them because any quote comes with certain contractual restrictive covenants, agreements, timelines, etc., that really are more akin to home buying than a typical commodity priced in per kg terms. For order of magnitude comparisons we can ignore all that, for finer grained comparisons it really is comparing apples and oranges. In the ideal future world launches should be done without the need for secret contracts, something like the private jet industry where planes can chartered, almost at the push of a button, at short notice.
- d_silin 6y agoFor the smallest possible missions, the price per kg is fairly constant in recent years - $50,000/kg. SpaceX does indeed offers the best price: $5000/kg, but only if you are buying in bulk.
- simonh 6y agoOr can get a ride share to a suitable orbit.
- t3rabytes 6y agoThe y-scale on that graph really makes it hard to understand the true drop in price.
- satellite2 6y agoThe log scale and the orgin at 0 definitely don't help the readability here...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoHighlighting the SpaceX data points would definitely help with readability. But origin at zero is a good thing; charts with Y axes offset from 0 are generally worse than worthless - they're actively misleading (and often purposefully so).
- marcosdumay 6y agoI don't get the automatic dismissal of graphs with offset axes. Yes, this one is better because it starts from 0, but there are plenty of reasons to offset a graph. For example, when you want to look at curves correlation (you may even want more than one offset at the same time), or study the change behavior.
- satellite2 6y agoIn Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
- malux85 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoTrash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.
- Dumblydorr 6y agoI'm interested to see what's viable to send to orbit now. Can a solar shade be put up which blocks light from hitting our poles and prevent some climactic change? How about rocketing asteroids back to LEO for processing into valuable minerals?
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoGeoengineering projects will probably require a lot of haggling in committees, mining asteroids does seem to have some momentum (pun intended)[1] though I would personally worry about moving some big metallic asteroid to LEO, wouldn't want to make any mistakes... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_mining_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Proposed_minin...
- RyJones 6y agoI was just watching a video where they made the claim that the slag from steel production 100 years ago has more metal than some ores, so it's becoming worthwhile to re-mill slag.
- Maer4everever 6y agoNice charts ! I was a bit sad not to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family) in the list ! I'm really not expert enough into space race matters to know if it's relevant, or if the tiny french LEO platform would be worth charting ?
- laverya 6y agoGoing from the lowest price and highest payload for the Ariane 5... $165,000,000 / 20,000 kg = $8250/kg, or still not really competitive. And in fact, the source spreadsheet [0] lists a few members of the Ariane family - so I think it's charted. 0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbRDIXuMO3rsSSQ2ZZA2SwvMF6CEVg/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbRDIXu...
- 908B64B197 6y agoAriane isn't competitive at all price-wise for commodity satellites. What it has going for however is a near perfect track record.
- valuearb 6y agoAriane is still somewhat competitive to geocentric orbits and when dual berthing. Falcon 9 and Heavy lose most of their performance advantage when going to higher orbits, IIRC because their first stages stage lower, and their upper stage has an ISP disadvantage vs. hydrogen rockets. To maximize payload percentage to both LEO and higher orbits the most optimal rocket configuration is a first stage burning a dense fuel like RP-1 or Methane to minimize your largest tankage size/weight, and use hydrogen on your upper stage to maximum ISP without incurring too large a cost in heavier tankage. That’s how the Saturn V could lift 150 metric tons to LEO and 50 to translunar injection. But instead SpaceX decided to use the same fuel and engines for both stages to get economies of scale in engine production, and dense fuels to save the most dry mass. They could have optimized the next generation Falcon platform with a cryogenic hydrogen upper, and increased their GEO payloads 10-20%, at the cost of dual engine designs with less economies of scale and increased fueling complexity and infrastructure. Instead they decided to brute force the same simple design architecture and build a 10x larger booster/second stage with Starship/SuperHeavy with 3x times the engines. One engine type, one fuel type and bigger rockets with enough brute lifting capacity that you can still put 100 metric tons in LEO while conserving enough to fly back your first stage and make your second stage out of heavy stainless steel so it can re-enter and be reused too. So probably two thirds the payload to orbit capacity as a Saturn V style rocket, but 1/100th the cost per launch.
- lend000 6y agoAre these numbers inflation adjusted? The difference would be far more dramatic if not.
- quercusa 6y agoIt's surprising not to see that anywhere — it's the natural question.
- dgacmu 6y agoThanks for asking this, it's super-important to understand it. If they're not infation-adjusted, then there's already been a (very slow) exponential reduction in the cost. I think they are inflation-adjusted. Here's an inflation-adjusted source that explicitly lets you pick FY2021 dollars as the reference: https://aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-orbit-how-much-does-it-cost/ https://aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-or... It puts the Saturn V at $5k USD/kg, the same as this article. What's interesting is that it shows a general downward trend a little more clearly than this one does, but the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still very shocking outliers.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoNot at my computer, but this function in mathematica would help: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/InflationAdjust.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/InflationAdjust.h...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThey seem to be unadjusted. The source link under the picture links to this dataset: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbRDIXuMO3rsSSQ2ZZA2SwvMF6CEVg/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbR... There's a column there for inflation-adjusted prices, but not much data in it.
- zamadatix 6y agoThis seems to support it being adjusted not unadjusted. There is no unadjusted column and the Saturn V is listed as 5400 adjusted which lines up with the graph, if it were the unadjusted number it'd be ~7x off.
- cbozeman 6y agoGiven these insanely cheap prices, I have to wonder about the viability of sending your own microsatellites into space to create your own personal communications cluster. I don't know enough to know what all would be required, how / if you could communicate with other networks, etc., but even just having your own personal LEO satellite-based communications network seems relatively plausible based on these launch costs and piggybacking on other, larger launches.
- huhtenberg 6y agoCheap means "of a low price", so a price can't be cheap, just low.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoYou can pay A for B, which you then pay for C. B is the price of C, and A is B's price. If A has a low value, then B is cheap, and thus a cheap price. Pretty much all money can be bought for very slightly more money. Thus, a price can be cheap.
- huhtenberg 6y ago"Cheap X" means "an X that costs less". "Cheap price" literally means "a price that costs less". You can certainly say that, but it makes no sense.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoI've just demonstrated that it makes sense. But, really, that's irrelevant. You're telling me that a particular arrangement of 26 symbols “makes sense”, but another “doesn't”, even though both convey the intended meaning perfectly well – as evidenced by your critique describing the intended meaning?
- mdorazio 6y agoYou're still looking at over a hundred thousand dollars to put a single 1U cubesat in orbit (including development, testing, and certification for the sat itself). And that would be moving at 6-7km/s relative to the ground, so you can see how expensive it would be to put any kind of useful personal constellation into orbit still
- syntaxing 6y agoNot diminishing the technology advancement that SpaceX has been pushing but are these prices profitable? Or is it similar to the Tesla strategy which is to keep margin minimal (even negative) at the benefit of breaking into the market?
- wedn3sday 6y agoI dont have the link to the price analysis, but I believe the re-usable falcon9 becomes profitable after the 2nd or 3rd launch. The disposable falcon is profitable on the first launch.
- xcskier56 6y agoIn the early days, margin was probably low to negative. However, now, according to wikipedia, the price for a reused falcon 9 launch is $50 million. In reusable configuration this will launch 34,400 lbs to LEO. At this pricing it is around $1450/lb to LEO. This is speculation to a degree, but I think Elon has tweeted that the internal SpaceX cost for such a mission is around $15m. So yes, even at $1450/lb to LEO, SpaceX is making a significant margin. See this article for more info: https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/ https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus... Remeber that SpaceX still has to recoup the investment in developing the Falcon9 as well as reusability. In the linked article above, they mention that Elon said developing reusability cost about $1 billion. So lots of this margin goes to paying that invest back.
- 908B64B197 6y agoThat's one of the reasons I'm not really interested in the Artemis program. I'd rather fund Starship to get that massive launch cost reduction and then start looking at returning to the moon. Being able to ship more hardware means you don't have to make it as reliable since you have spares. That further drives down the cost of R&D.
- adolph 6y agoArtemis != SLS. Artemis is a program for which the SLS and other vehicles are under development. SpaceX and other commercial launch providers are also being engaged by the Artemis program to develop vehicles. While Starship (and maybe New Glenn) does look more attractive than SLS now, a effort as large as Artemis is more concerned with capability than immediately driving the cost down. SLS is a capable vehicle moved forward by proven methods by experienced vendors. The lower risk drives higher and more predictable up front costs. Check out Everyday Astronaut for some interesting perspective on what is going on with SLS and Starship: https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/ https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/
- valuearb 6y agoThe SLS is an badly designed architecture built on obsolete technologies with very limited capabilities. SRBs greatly increase launch costs while reducing safety. RS-25s were designed to be reused, but required such extensive refurbishment that they were like drag racing engines requiring full rebuilds after every race. Using hydrogen to fuel the first stage required building a massively heavy cryogenic tank, impairing performance so greatly the RS-25s cant lift the SLS without SRBs. And not only will it cost $20B before it’s first launch, but each flight will destroy over a half billion in engines alone. So the minimum cost per flight is over $1B without counting the R&D, about $3B to $5B per flight in total depending on how many flights are flown to amortize the R&D. And with all that, SLS has very limited capabilities. The block 1 will be the largest heavy lift launch system (until Starship launches), but it’s only about 30% more payload mass than a $150M falcon heavy expendable. But worse is the maximum possible cadence for the SLS is twice yearly, making it both useless and unnecessary for more ambitious missions that will rely on in orbit refueling. It’s just an archaic dinosaur built out of nearly 50 year old parts.
- max_ 6y agoAre there any interesting project's one can participate in by launching say 1 kg in space? $5k sounds abit accessible
- amelius 6y agoHow would these numbers change if we had a proper carbon tax?
- kitsunesoba 6y agoProbably not much. Rocket output is practically nothing compared to that of commercial airlines and ocean freight. Furthermore, SpaceX’s upcoming rocket can be carbon-neutral since it burns methane, which can be extracted from the earth’s atmosphere.
- gpm 6y agoTL;DR - it's a rounding error. A falcon 9 launch burns roughly 260 metric tons of liquid oxygen [1]. CO2 is 1.375 times the weight of O2, so assuming complete all that oxygen turns into CO2 we're looking at 357 metric tons of CO2 (which is an exaggeration, because a good portion of it turns into H2O instead... but the H2O is actually slightly concerning because it's in the upper atmosphere... so whatever). Canada wants it's Carbon tax to reach $170 CAD per ton by 2030, which seems to be considered a pretty agressive carbon tax [2]. At this rate the fuel burnt in flight would cost a whopping 61 thousand dollars CAD... or 48K USD. On a multi million dollar launch. [1] https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/ https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:_Updated_Federal_Carbon_Price,_reaching_$170_in_2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...
- valuearb 6y agoFuel costs for a Falcon 9 launch are around $150,000, or about 1/3 of 1% of what SpaceX charges for a reusable launch.
- dougmwne 6y agoI was wondering, so in case you were too, that other recently introduced rocket that has a <$5k/kg launch cost is the Russian Angara A5. It has flown twice. Falcon 9 has flown over 100 times. SpaceX really does have an incredible lead on the competition.
- hughes 6y agoHow much useful payload did the A5 deliver in those two flights?
- dougmwne 6y agoNone. Both launches were of mass simulators.
- avmich 6y agoThe dataset doesn't include options to buy during a good chunk of 1990-s a Proton launch for some $30 millions. That's a carrier with upwards of 20 tons payload capabilities to LEO. Soyuz rocket family also has periods in history when prices were quite low; SpaceX phenomenon touches only the last 10 years at best - and it's in last 10 years when Proton became particularly unreliable and Soyuz maybe more expensive.
- trianglem 6y agoIs ISRO being considered? I can’t really tell from the chart but they must be highly price competitive purely looking at India’s PPI.
- miguelrochefort 6y agoWe just paid $80 to ship a 1kg package from Canada to the USA. It seems like it would be cheaper to send it to LEO using the SpaceX Starship.