Hooray – Expensive Space Rides Are On The Way For The Rich
With all the happy talk about cool personal spaceflight there are two things you almost certainly will not hear at #ISPCS2019
1. how much the tickets will cost
2. when the rest of us non-rich people will get to fly pic.twitter.com/gs9VpVleFP
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) October 9, 2019
Keith’s note: The ISPCS – International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight – is being held this week. They do not webcast anything and other than tweets this event is held in an echo chamber with the usual suspects engaged in choir practice. Its great that all of these rides into space will soon be available for purchase. But so long as short suborbital hops cost as much as a house, several college educations, or two years of care for an Alzheimer’s patient, this is just going to be a limited market catering to the elite. The only exception to this seems to be the SpaceX Starship … let’s see where that goes.
Even with Starship, it’s going to take a lot of launches and reuse to get the price merely down to where it would be as expensive as a vacation for a regular person (IE several thousand dollars). Robert Zubrin did the numbers on that in his new book, and you’d need about 10,000 Starship launches per year.
The suborbital launchers are going to have to get a lot bigger if they don’t want to just be super-rich tourist stuff (and have an airplane-level turnaround time and reuse rate).
Maybe it will just never happen. The technical challenges and margins with rockets are just narrower and harder fundamentally than with airplanes.
Yes, but remember those numbers are based on the old composite Starship. The new stainless steel one will be an order of magnitude cheaper to build and fly.
Exactly.
?
Just launching once per week to LEO would be over 5000 customers a year .. I do not believe you can get that many 50 million dollar seats or even 10 million dollar seats a year. I believe prices will have to drop fairly fast once development is paid for.
Zubrin is fine doing math, but some of the assumptions he starts off with are iffy. 100 passengers, 10,000 flights per year and a $1,000 ticket comes out to a billion dollars a year. From what I’ve seen SpaceX claim, they expect to have operating costs well below that. But even 1,000 flights per year would be quite a lot.
Air travel started the same way with trips so expensive that only the wealthy could afford to travel by air. But its a step in the right direction. We’ve got to get away from taxpayer funded NASA trips only for a handful. That has kept us in a holding pattern for fifty years.
Does anyone have the inflation-adjusted price of a transatlantic (or transpacific) flight in 1950? That might be an interesting comparison. But I could only find domestic flights going back to 1979.
On a cost per mile?
What Flights Used to Cost in the ‘Golden Age’ of Air Travel
https://www.travelandleisur…
A transatlantic flight was about half the price of the average house, about the same as the average annual salary.
Yes, so their passengers were limited to government employees, individuals on corporate business that was time sensitive or the wealthy until after WWII. Then the advances in aviation technology and infrastructure from WWII started it sliding down the price curve until the average person could afford it in the Jumbo Jet era. Interestingly enough the Gini Coefficient is almost where it was in the 1930’s which could be good for the industry.
Ok. That looks like a factor of ten or twenty compared to today. Even with a similar drop in cost for a suborbital ride into space, it would still be more than I’d care to pay.
“…cost as much as a house, several college educations, or two years of care for an Alzheimer’s patient…”
Lol
This is the norm. The rich are our guinea pigs for new tech, from steamships to airplanes to monkey gland transplants (didn’t work as well) to rocketships. It raises the visibility of both transport and passenger. Hypergammy has *always* been a human characteristic, and any publicity is thought better, as long as the press spells your name right.
Well cheaper than they used to be, and in ten years, they’ll be cheaper than that. I’m not suggesting that they will ever be $99, but at some point, they’ll be within reach.
Reading through the comments here, I really surprised myself when I realized that the “hops to space” hold little fascination (that’s the part that surprised me).
But think about it: in short order, the required “prep” will no longer be required, reducing the entire experience to at most half a day, and the actual event 30 minutes or so; lots of that will be in a pendulum below parachutes.
The event is analogous to watching football on TV or being in the stadium. By and large, much more of the game is available on TV.
Now, the 8 or 9 minutes required to achieve orbit? That’s an entirely different event.
Maybe a soap company could have a slogan contest.
Perhaps SpaceX will offer one of its spacesuits as an alternative prize. ?
Halloween is just a few weeks away. I could see some terrestrial applications for a SpaceX pressure suit.