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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to spacecraft Fuel is cheap manpower is expensive.

The Americans built the first ever reusable spacecraft but they never really stuck with one design. Just about every shuttle was slightly different which resulted in slightly improved performance, reduced safety, and dramatically increased costs. They then kept using them well past the designed lifetime which once again radically increased the costs. All while flying them a minimum number of times each year.

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How cheap is the fuel? Say, a space shuttle? I've heard a launch costs $450 million, but it doesn't say if it was fuel alone.

While the shuttle was technically 'reusable', it required a lot more retooling between flights than simply putting more fuel in the tank. It was a _very_ complicated machine, and invariably needed to have various components and consumables replaced after every flight.

The marginal cost on a Space Shuttle launch is actually rather low--a few tens of millions if we kept up with the original launch rates (less than the cost of a Falcon 9h!).

Also, no work was ever done to bring down operational costs. In fact, such costs ballooned as the program dragged on, despite numerous design studies showing ways to reduce them.

It's supposed to be on the order of one to two percent of the program cost, depending on exactly what fuel you use and how often you fly.

In U.S. dollars in the year 2000, it came to about $16 of fuel per pound of payload launched. We had a homework assignment to figure out that number in our propulsion class at the University of Washington.

Shocking. The rest of that $10k per pound is amortized launcher costs and operations. (If you include the initial R&D, it goes up to something like $50k per pound.)

The shuttle was a truly immoral launch vehicle.

That's incredible. You should do a blog post about that. It's really fascinating and I don't think is been published anywhere.

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