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Fuzzwah

This test cost $370 million.

An SLS launch is projected to cost $500 million.

A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-lan...

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Wow, almost $2.5B at today's cost. There is no way that they would allow that much today.

Shuttle launches cost $1-2B, and carried significantly less to orbit.

The cost of a Shuttle launch was $450M and carried 24,400 kg & 7 people to LEO. The only thing that can compete with that short of the Saturn V is the Delta IV-Heavy, which is $340M per launch and can carry 28,790 kg to LEO.

Where does that $450M figure come from? I'm looking at Wikipedia where I presume you took that from, and it says the total cost adjusted for inflation was $196 billion, with 135 launches, that (with straight division) averages out to 1.5 billion adjusted for inflation over the life of the shuttle.

There's some accounting fun in that, though. The marginal cost of a Shuttle launch was considerably lower. $1-2 billion is what you get by dividing the budget by the number of launches. Much of the cost went into maintaining the fleet and would have had to be paid whether or not they launched. That's substantially different than with an expendable launcher.

Lmfao isn't that extremely ironic? The purpose of the shuttle was to have a semi-reusable rocket to save a little money. Instead we end up blowing billions just maintaining and refurbishing the fleet. The shuttle very obviously wasn't the way to go.

I think SpaceX's grasshopper setup is more promising. It doesn't need to withstand the same pressures that the shuttle had to because of the altitude at which it returns to Earth, so there's not so much to refurbish. That, and it also comes down like a pencil rather than like a rock.

The Shuttle's cheapness was predicated on a high launch rate. When the high launch rate wasn't achievable, it became pretty expensive. That's only to be expected, of course. A 747 is an economical way to fling a bunch of people and cargo across the Pacific if you do it once a day, but it's terribly expensive if you only fly it a couple of times a year. The Shuttle was decent enough conceptually, but it pushed the envelope in too many places and that hurt reusability a lot.

I agree that SpaceX's setup is more promising. The fact that they're slightly modifying an existing expendable rocket that's already cost-competitive means that any reuse is just a bonus. They can throw away a bunch of boosters as they work on the problem, which wasn't an option with the shuttle at $2 billion apiece just to construct them.

Yeah, during Apollo, the NASA budget was 2.5-4.5% of the total federal budget, vs. 0.5% today.

During Apollo the federal budget was also many times smaller. In real dollars NASA's budget is only about 20% smaller than its average in the 60's. The difference with respect to human space travel is risk aversion and lack of focus and political will.

Well, technology is supposed to drop in cost over the years, while also getting better.

The US needs another cold war to get it motivated. Maybe if China steps it up...

The US is currently, and for the foreseeable future, solely reliant upon Russia to get astronauts to & from LEO & the ISS. Frankly, I'm surprised Putin hasn't rattled that saber yet.

Edit: I'm rooting for Sabre & Skylon, myself. Perhaps not for big payloads but for 'naut travel, anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_%28rocket_engine%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29

> and for the foreseeable future

That depends on whether or not 2017 is foreseeable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development). Since 2012 the US has had a craft that is capable of taking people to and from the ISS, NASA just wants to do an excessive amount of testing and incremental improvements before we trust it (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/05/...).

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