4 ms·

I wonder what's the commercial price point. I wish it could be as low as 30k USD in 10 years so maybe I can do that too.

vkou 3y ago
A suborbital flight is not exactly 'going to space' in any meaningful terms. If lack of air qualifies as going to space, then the economy flight I was on last week got me four-fifths of the way to space. Neither it, nor VG is anywhere close to capable of taking me into orbit, though.
pavon 3y ago
Virgin Galactic prices will likely never go down. They had to spend far more money than expected to scale up from SS1 to passenger flights. They have around 600 reservations at $200K, and it is questionable whether they can break even providing flights at those prices. They won't begin to make profit and be able to earn back their upfront investments until they complete those reservations, and start flying new customers for whom the price is now $450K. Blue Origin's approach is more scalable, but they won't talk price at all which suggests they are charging just as much if not more - likely whatever the market will bear. It will be a long time before they've flown all the customers who are willing and able to pay current prices, so there is no profit incentive to decrease prices. NASA has contracted SpaceX Dragon flights at about $70M per seat, and the OIG estimates the cost to SpaceX at $55M per seat. If we are extremely optimistic about Starship and say it will cost the same amount to launch as Falcon 9 / Dragon, and has 100 passengers instead of 4, that brings the price down to $2-3M per seat, so still way more than Virgin Galactic, although you get more as well (Inspiration 4 was LEO for 3 days, instead of freefall for 3 minutes). The only way I could see the prices going down significantly is if you had something like Starship alone (without super heavy booster) doing frequent sub-orbital hops (like daily). I won't venture a price WAG for that though.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Plus the insurance on virgin galactic flights is probably pretty expensive too, assuming they can get it at all. It's a deliberately dangerous design, needlessly putting passenger lives at stake for the sake of claiming to be human piloted. At least Blue's vehicle has shown itself to be pretty safe for passengers.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > can break even ... they can't. > they complete those reservations ... they wont.

vkou 3y ago

A suborbital flight is not exactly 'going to space' in any meaningful terms. If lack of air qualifies as going to space, then the economy flight I was on last week got me four-fifths of the way to space. Neither it, nor VG is anywhere close to capable of taking me into orbit, though.

pavon 3y ago

Virgin Galactic prices will likely never go down. They had to spend far more money than expected to scale up from SS1 to passenger flights. They have around 600 reservations at $200K, and it is questionable whether they can break even providing flights at those prices. They won't begin to make profit and be able to earn back their upfront investments until they complete those reservations, and start flying new customers for whom the price is now $450K. Blue Origin's approach is more scalable, but they won't talk price at all which suggests they are charging just as much if not more - likely whatever the market will bear. It will be a long time before they've flown all the customers who are willing and able to pay current prices, so there is no profit incentive to decrease prices. NASA has contracted SpaceX Dragon flights at about $70M per seat, and the OIG estimates the cost to SpaceX at $55M per seat. If we are extremely optimistic about Starship and say it will cost the same amount to launch as Falcon 9 / Dragon, and has 100 passengers instead of 4, that brings the price down to $2-3M per seat, so still way more than Virgin Galactic, although you get more as well (Inspiration 4 was LEO for 3 days, instead of freefall for 3 minutes). The only way I could see the prices going down significantly is if you had something like Starship alone (without super heavy booster) doing frequent sub-orbital hops (like daily). I won't venture a price WAG for that though.

dotnet00 3y ago
Plus the insurance on virgin galactic flights is probably pretty expensive too, assuming they can get it at all. It's a deliberately dangerous design, needlessly putting passenger lives at stake for the sake of claiming to be human piloted. At least Blue's vehicle has shown itself to be pretty safe for passengers.
panick21_ 3y ago
> can break even ... they can't. > they complete those reservations ... they wont.