Exciting that companies will soon put customers into space. But when ticket prices exceed the average cost of a 4 year college education or a family's house only rich people are going to be buying tickets. What about the rest of us? No one in the space media ever reports on that. pic.twitter.com/70WgaAlMpE
Just an FYI per earlier posts I have done ZeroG training – twice and #NASTAR suborbital scientist training flying full-g simulations in their centrifuge. Anyone in good health can fly into space.
And what is the likelihood that these “rich” people will be repeat customers at such prices. What is the expected longevity given how many rich people out there will do this? And what will happen to the industry the first time human life is lost? Is this really a sustainable business model?
A passenger ticket on the China Clipper cost about $3000 in the 1930’s, around $60,000 in today’s money. Because of this only the rich or those traveling on urgent business for the government or private firms could afford it. But as technology advanced over the years prices slid down the deman curve for air flight. Same for early railroads. Space will follow the same pattern and slide down demand curve as technology improves. Why do you expect space will be different?
Exactly! Give this another 10-20 years, and the cost will likely halve or even quarter itself. I’d be retired then and while not too rich, I’d still be happy to blow maybe 10-Grand or even more for an orbital weekend or two
The BFR may be in about that range. The ability to lift 300,000 lbs for under $10 million would give you a cost of $34/lb. If it is able to carry 400 passengers you would have cost of about $25,000 each. If Elon Musk is able to reduce it to $5 million a flight through high volume operations you would reduce the cost per passenger to $12,500 each. As a reference point the Concord SST had a ticket price of around $12,000 for a round trip ticket. So it may be doable which is why I am hoping Elon Musk is able to pull off another market disruption with BFR.
$12,500 for a round trip on Concord isn’t outrageous, if you consider it was an all-first-class airplane and what first class tickets cost.
But I’d be careful with the numbers for BFR. 300,000 pounds to orbit and 400 passengers is only 750 pounds each. That has to cover quite a bit more than the person, especially if you’re talking about a weekend or a longer stay on orbit, there’s luggage, life support equipment, dead weight for the cabins and furniture, and consumables. (I assume anyone paying that much would expect better food that astronauts typically eat…) I can’t see that adding up to 750 pounds, but it might get close.
True, they may be able to only handle a couple hundred, or even a hundred, at a time to orbit so the price will be twice as high. But 300 or 400 might be a feasible goal for the point to point system. Still it will not be out of line with the price of transpacific air travel of Pan Am or the long range flight of Imperial Airways in the 1930’s. I also wouldn’t expect them to spend more than a day in orbit unless they are going to an orbiting hotel.
I generally agree were it not that we are sitting in a huge gravity well. Technology will not necessarily solve all our issues or desires no matter how much we believe. Also if you look at the development timeline from start to average passenger usage, boats, trains, airplanes, and project a related timeline on human spaceflight, it will take another 50 or so years before events (prices) will decrease to the level of the common man.
You need to remember that a large part of the problem is that space travel is the only mode of transportation that the government got to first. Cost plus contracts and flying only a handful of civil servants a year is not going to lower costs. That is why space travel is decades behind the curve that other modes followed. The good thing is that folks on the NSC realize it which is why they are focusing creating a favorable regulatory environment for it instead of wasting time on some grand new vision for NASA.
Note that the cost of fuel for the Falcon 9 is less than 1% of its total cost, so that’s what physics demands in order to get out of our huge gravity well. Therefore it stands to reason that a fully reusable TSTO could be built and flown that costs a lot less than Falcon 9. Falcon 9’s first stage is “first generation reusable”. We’ve got a lot of opportunity with second, third, and etc. generation vehicles to hack away at the other 99%.
I don’t see the first fatal accident as a (sorry) fatal flaw in the business plan. There are plenty of sports, hobbies, and sorts of recreation which have the occasional fatality. I see a disproportionate number of stories about rock climbing accidents, simply because of where I live. I think that amounts to about two dozen fatalities in the US each year. As far as I can tell, that hasn’t affected interest in rock climbing. So I don’t see why a low, but non-zero, accident rate for suborbital joy rides would be a problem for Blue Origin and their business plan.
I think it would be a problem, especially a fatality in the first couple of years. By problem I mean a greatly reduced number of customers compared to if they are able to fly completely accident free for the first several years. I think the biggest revenue hit would be experienced by the company that has the accident, but potentially all of them (or the other one if there are only two) would feel the impact as well.
Predicting how the general public views things is not an exact science, especially when it comes to safety. Even I was surprised at the revenue hit that Southwest Airlines took after the engine failure caused one fatality, their first inflight fatality in over fifty years of operation. They will recover pretty quickly I think, but I think a space tourist fatality especially in the early phase will take much longer to recover from.
Countering my argument is that the first couple of fatal Comet crashes in the early 1950’s didn’t seem to have a huge impact on the number of people willing to fly on it. However although jet transport was new for the public, flying in an airplane wasn’t, and the public seemed to accept the initial explanations of thunderstorms and even a bomb, as something that could happen on any airplane not just a jet airliner.
But in the case of suborbital tourist flights it will all be new and so there will be nothing for the public to base their “comfort index” on other than seeing other people do it and live to tell the tale. I suspect that a lot of people will view suborbital flights rightly or wrongly as similar to tandem skydiving, or going down in a mini-sub, etc. Just as people buy their spouses rides in an acrobatic plane for their birthday, or maybe even a MIG flight, I expect we will hear about people of the wealthier sort surprising their spouses with a ticket for a flight on a suborbital spaceship.
But when the first fatal accident occurs it will be a huge news item covered extensively. I think it will cause many people to change their view of the risk and begin to think of it as more like climbing Mount Everest, or maybe BASE jumping. I’m not saying that you or I would see it that way after just one fatal accident, but again I’m referring to the unpredictable general public.
If however they can achieve several years of safe operation, then when the first accident occurs there would still be a decline but not as severe because people would get that it was an anomaly, and I think things would bounce back faster than it would if there was an accident in the first couple of years.
I think Branson and Bezos believe this also and I suspect that it is one of the reasons why it’s taking each of them so long to get started with tourist flights, I think they are really trying to eliminate as much risk as possible even if it takes additional years to do so.
They once said the same thing about air travel. The question is: what will be that spur to push technology development to bring costs down? For air travel, it was the mail. What will it be for space?
To me, that’s the exciting part of being alive now. Nobody knows how the space biz will shape up. Nobody knows what sort of product will sell, long term. Nobody knows the true nature of the market: its depth, or resilience, or other defining characteristics.
This is at least part of why America is so great. Because NObody knows, for sure, but dozens are willing to put life savings, and investments, on the line too figure it out. A few extraordinary souls will both figure out how the market can be characterized, but more importantly will have some input into actually defining the space market.
Arguably, for aviation, it was a couple of major wars. Compare the state of the art in 1914 versus 1918 or 1939 versus 1945. I hope that’s not what it will be for space.
While it cost 4 year college degree for ticket that is within the budget of many organizations and groups with an interest in space allowing them to send their own “astronauts” on missions of interest to them.
Not unlike the ramping up that occurring with small satellites, advances in digital technology, and the drop in launch costs is allowing organization and countries to put up satellites that couldn’t afford it before.
It wasn’t that long ago that not even a ludicrously rich person couldn’t buy a ride into space. Then a ludicrously rich person could get a ticket. Now it dropping to the cost of 4 year college degree. Hopefully it continues to drop downward from there.
I suppose the price could come down over time, although I’m not sure how. They’d either need to drastically reduce turnaround time, or increase the size of the suborbital rocket and capsule so it could carry many more passengers (early planes were expensive because they only carried a handful of people, like private jets today).
This is version 1.0 of their suborbital launch vehicle and capsule. No doubt a version 2.0 could be built that would lower costs. But that will likely have to wait until they make some money from version 1.0.
The first four function calculators (+ – x and / ) offered by Texas Instruments cost hundreds of dollars in 1975! This price will not likely see the kind of reductions that consumer electronics has witnessed but it is certain to go down significantly over time.
So $200k take out a 30 year mortgage could allow it to not be just for the rich if you get creative. A weekend at blue origins may only be 30 minutes in space that you turn into self published book, vlog leading up to and after the experience, Ted talks and more. All on how you capitalize on the experience while it is still a novelty.
I wish $200,000 was less than the cost of a family’s house where i live (or the monthly rent for an apartment similarly lower, and therefore in the low three figure range…)
Rich people are always the early adapters of new innovative and expensive technology. Right down to the time mom’s told daughters to marry a man that wears glasses because they were expensive and only a man of means could own them.. Telescopes, airplanes, automobiles, yachts, refrigerators, color TVs, the BRICK mobile phones.. .the list is endless of products that were considered toys for the rich before they were mass produced with economy of scale. Space transportation is just another in a long list.
Some stuff yes, there was a time only the stinking rich had car phones. Now they are so cheap we argue about so many people using the phone while driving. But can space travel economically scale the same way? Long range air travel more accessible to the common man from the days of the China Clippers (wow $60K for a ticket in today’s dollars!), however, helicopters and small business jets are vastly superior that what they were 50 years ago. But those things are way beyond what commoners will ever have. I’m thinking LEO spacecraft if ever scale up to routine flight it will be in same category as helos and GA jets (if have to ask price, you can’t afford it).
We are talking about the cost of fuel to move human cargo 200 miles into LEO. Burt Rutan stated the cost for suborbital can easily move to 25k Musk has stated 500K to Mars but I have not seen any LEO prices. Musk and Bezos will make it cheap enough to start settling LEO at the very least.
I figure if the initial cost for Blue Origin is 200K a flight and they hit the cadence on the suborbital hops they are planning that the cost goes down by an order of magnitude within a decade of full operations.
And what is the likelihood that these “rich” people will be repeat customers at such prices. What is the expected longevity given how many rich people out there will do this? And what will happen to the industry the first time human life is lost? Is this really a sustainable business model?
A passenger ticket on the China Clipper cost about $3000 in the 1930’s, around $60,000 in today’s money. Because of this only the rich or those traveling on urgent business for the government or private firms could afford it. But as technology advanced over the years prices slid down the deman curve for air flight. Same for early railroads. Space will follow the same pattern and slide down demand curve as technology improves. Why do you expect space will be different?
Exactly! Give this another 10-20 years, and the cost will likely halve or even quarter itself. I’d be retired then and while not too rich, I’d still be happy to blow maybe 10-Grand or even more for an orbital weekend or two
The BFR may be in about that range. The ability to lift 300,000 lbs for under $10 million would give you a cost of $34/lb. If it is able to carry 400 passengers you would have cost of about $25,000 each. If Elon Musk is able to reduce it to $5 million a flight through high volume operations you would reduce the cost per passenger to $12,500 each. As a reference point the Concord SST had a ticket price of around $12,000 for a round trip ticket. So it may be doable which is why I am hoping Elon Musk is able to pull off another market disruption with BFR.
$12,500 for a round trip on Concord isn’t outrageous, if you consider it was an all-first-class airplane and what first class tickets cost.
But I’d be careful with the numbers for BFR. 300,000 pounds to orbit and 400 passengers is only 750 pounds each. That has to cover quite a bit more than the person, especially if you’re talking about a weekend or a longer stay on orbit, there’s luggage, life support equipment, dead weight for the cabins and furniture, and consumables. (I assume anyone paying that much would expect better food that astronauts typically eat…) I can’t see that adding up to 750 pounds, but it might get close.
True, they may be able to only handle a couple hundred, or even a hundred, at a time to orbit so the price will be twice as high. But 300 or 400 might be a feasible goal for the point to point system. Still it will not be out of line with the price of transpacific air travel of Pan Am or the long range flight of Imperial Airways in the 1930’s. I also wouldn’t expect them to spend more than a day in orbit unless they are going to an orbiting hotel.
or if there is a commercial station that can hold 400 people in LEO.
I generally agree were it not that we are sitting in a huge gravity well. Technology will not necessarily solve all our issues or desires no matter how much we believe. Also if you look at the development timeline from start to average passenger usage, boats, trains, airplanes, and project a related timeline on human spaceflight, it will take another 50 or so years before events (prices) will decrease to the level of the common man.
The sooner we start the 50 year clock the better.
You need to remember that a large part of the problem is that space travel is the only mode of transportation that the government got to first. Cost plus contracts and flying only a handful of civil servants a year is not going to lower costs. That is why space travel is decades behind the curve that other modes followed. The good thing is that folks on the NSC realize it which is why they are focusing creating a favorable regulatory environment for it instead of wasting time on some grand new vision for NASA.
Note that the cost of fuel for the Falcon 9 is less than 1% of its total cost, so that’s what physics demands in order to get out of our huge gravity well. Therefore it stands to reason that a fully reusable TSTO could be built and flown that costs a lot less than Falcon 9. Falcon 9’s first stage is “first generation reusable”. We’ve got a lot of opportunity with second, third, and etc. generation vehicles to hack away at the other 99%.
It would be a mistake to think these seats are only of interest to tourists.
As for the loss of life, check out climbing Mount Everest or any of the other 8,000 meters mountains.
I don’t see the first fatal accident as a (sorry) fatal flaw in the business plan. There are plenty of sports, hobbies, and sorts of recreation which have the occasional fatality. I see a disproportionate number of stories about rock climbing accidents, simply because of where I live. I think that amounts to about two dozen fatalities in the US each year. As far as I can tell, that hasn’t affected interest in rock climbing. So I don’t see why a low, but non-zero, accident rate for suborbital joy rides would be a problem for Blue Origin and their business plan.
I think it would be a problem, especially a fatality in the first couple of years. By problem I mean a greatly reduced number of customers compared to if they are able to fly completely accident free for the first several years. I think the biggest revenue hit would be experienced by the company that has the accident, but potentially all of them (or the other one if there are only two) would feel the impact as well.
Predicting how the general public views things is not an exact science, especially when it comes to safety. Even I was surprised at the revenue hit that Southwest Airlines took after the engine failure caused one fatality, their first inflight fatality in over fifty years of operation. They will recover pretty quickly I think, but I think a space tourist fatality especially in the early phase will take much longer to recover from.
Countering my argument is that the first couple of fatal Comet crashes in the early 1950’s didn’t seem to have a huge impact on the number of people willing to fly on it. However although jet transport was new for the public, flying in an airplane wasn’t, and the public seemed to accept the initial explanations of thunderstorms and even a bomb, as something that could happen on any airplane not just a jet airliner.
But in the case of suborbital tourist flights it will all be new and so there will be nothing for the public to base their “comfort index” on other than seeing other people do it and live to tell the tale. I suspect that a lot of people will view suborbital flights rightly or wrongly as similar to tandem skydiving, or going down in a mini-sub, etc. Just as people buy their spouses rides in an acrobatic plane for their birthday, or maybe even a MIG flight, I expect we will hear about people of the wealthier sort surprising their spouses with a ticket for a flight on a suborbital spaceship.
But when the first fatal accident occurs it will be a huge news item covered extensively. I think it will cause many people to change their view of the risk and begin to think of it as more like climbing Mount Everest, or maybe BASE jumping. I’m not saying that you or I would see it that way after just one fatal accident, but again I’m referring to the unpredictable general public.
If however they can achieve several years of safe operation, then when the first accident occurs there would still be a decline but not as severe because people would get that it was an anomaly, and I think things would bounce back faster than it would if there was an accident in the first couple of years.
I think Branson and Bezos believe this also and I suspect that it is one of the reasons why it’s taking each of them so long to get started with tourist flights, I think they are really trying to eliminate as much risk as possible even if it takes additional years to do so.
They once said the same thing about air travel. The question is: what will be that spur to push technology development to bring costs down? For air travel, it was the mail. What will it be for space?
To me, that’s the exciting part of being alive now. Nobody knows how the space biz will shape up. Nobody knows what sort of product will sell, long term. Nobody knows the true nature of the market: its depth, or resilience, or other defining characteristics.
This is at least part of why America is so great. Because NObody knows, for sure, but dozens are willing to put life savings, and investments, on the line too figure it out. A few extraordinary souls will both figure out how the market can be characterized, but more importantly will have some input into actually defining the space market.
That’s the benefit of freedom, in my view.
Arguably, for aviation, it was a couple of major wars. Compare the state of the art in 1914 versus 1918 or 1939 versus 1945. I hope that’s not what it will be for space.
While it cost 4 year college degree for ticket that is within the budget of many organizations and groups with an interest in space allowing them to send their own “astronauts” on missions of interest to them.
Not unlike the ramping up that occurring with small satellites, advances in digital technology, and the drop in launch costs is allowing organization and countries to put up satellites that couldn’t afford it before.
It wasn’t that long ago that not even a ludicrously rich person couldn’t buy a ride into space. Then a ludicrously rich person could get a ticket. Now it dropping to the cost of 4 year college degree. Hopefully it continues to drop downward from there.
I suppose the price could come down over time, although I’m not sure how. They’d either need to drastically reduce turnaround time, or increase the size of the suborbital rocket and capsule so it could carry many more passengers (early planes were expensive because they only carried a handful of people, like private jets today).
This is version 1.0 of their suborbital launch vehicle and capsule. No doubt a version 2.0 could be built that would lower costs. But that will likely have to wait until they make some money from version 1.0.
The first four function calculators (+ – x and / ) offered by Texas Instruments cost hundreds of dollars in 1975! This price will not likely see the kind of reductions that consumer electronics has witnessed but it is certain to go down significantly over time.
So $200k take out a 30 year mortgage could allow it to not be just for the rich if you get creative. A weekend at blue origins may only be 30 minutes in space that you turn into self published book, vlog leading up to and after the experience, Ted talks and more. All on how you capitalize on the experience while it is still a novelty.
Its not novel once hundreds of rich people do it.
Yes it is .. until the masses are involved…hundreds out of 8 billion people still makes it novel.
I wish $200,000 was less than the cost of a family’s house where i live (or the monthly rent for an apartment similarly lower, and therefore in the low three figure range…)
Rich people are always the early adapters of new innovative and expensive technology. Right down to the time mom’s told daughters to marry a man that wears glasses because they were expensive and only a man of means could own them.. Telescopes, airplanes, automobiles, yachts, refrigerators, color TVs, the BRICK mobile phones.. .the list is endless of products that were considered toys for the rich before they were mass produced with economy of scale. Space transportation is just another in a long list.
Some stuff yes, there was a time only the stinking rich had car phones. Now they are so cheap we argue about so many people using the phone while driving. But can space travel economically scale the same way? Long range air travel more accessible to the common man from the days of the China Clippers (wow $60K for a ticket in today’s dollars!), however, helicopters and small business jets are vastly superior that what they were 50 years ago. But those things are way beyond what commoners will ever have. I’m thinking LEO spacecraft if ever scale up to routine flight it will be in same category as helos and GA jets (if have to ask price, you can’t afford it).
We are talking about the cost of fuel to move human cargo 200 miles into LEO. Burt Rutan stated the cost for suborbital can easily move to 25k Musk has stated 500K to Mars but I have not seen any LEO prices. Musk and Bezos will make it cheap enough to start settling LEO at the very least.
I figure if the initial cost for Blue Origin is 200K a flight and they hit the cadence on the suborbital hops they are planning that the cost goes down by an order of magnitude within a decade of full operations.
Oh please. What “hostility towards rich people”? Its all about the price point which is what I said.