Reading this morning about the fact that Trump admin wants to stop funding ISS by 2025 and am wondering how much it REALLY costs to maintain the ISS. The number currently thrown around is 3-4 billion a year but knowing NASA and how government space costs are RIDICULOUS
Reading this morning about the fact that Trump admin wants to stop funding ISS by 2025 and am wondering how much it REALLY costs to maintain the ISS. The number currently thrown around is 3-4 billion a year but knowing NASA and how government space costs are RIDICULOUS, I wonder if anyone has done an analysis.... I am sure that NASA, ESA, JAXA and Russia are super padding their costs. I bet my prized GI Joe collection that the REAL cost to maintain and staff the ISS is an order of magnitude lower than what NASA pitches around....especially using Dragon2, BFR and other commercial launchers and industry. Thoughts?
They have not cared to reduce costs.If they cared to reduce costs, they would be delivering things to as near the station as could be done in large volumes, and using minimally capable tanks with small cold gas thrusters on to close with the robot arm, and little else for delivery, not complex vehicles.As one possible example.
Quote from: cferreir on 05/21/2018 03:34 pmReading this morning about the fact that Trump admin wants to stop funding ISS by 2025 and am wondering how much it REALLY costs to maintain the ISS. The number currently thrown around is 3-4 billion a year but knowing NASA and how government space costs are RIDICULOUS, I wonder if anyone has done an analysis.... I am sure that NASA, ESA, JAXA and Russia are super padding their costs. I bet my prized GI Joe collection that the REAL cost to maintain and staff the ISS is an order of magnitude lower than what NASA pitches around....especially using Dragon2, BFR and other commercial launchers and industry. Thoughts?You lose the bet, although you can hold onto your GI Joe collection. I have my own. The $3-4 billion normally quoted to maintain ISS includes three primary components. The largest component is space transportation at $2.6 billion(2017). Station operations and maintenance is consistently in the $1.1 billion range. Finally science gets ~$350 million. While space transportation is projected to drop to $1.8 billion once commercial crew is online and Soyuz seat purchases are gone, it will still account for more that 50% of the normally quoted budget. We've already privatized cargo transport, and 2020+ budget projections give us an official estimate for transportation costs once crew transport has privatized. You can't simply use future cost projections(BFR) to claim current prices are too high. If you can convince Boeing, Orbital, SNC, SpaceX, and ULA to launch a total of seven flights, both crew and cargo demand for ISS, per year, for less than a total of $200 million per year, within the next week, we can discuss you regaining the rights to your toys. That said, private industry can learn to effectively build and operate LEO stations at a far lower cost than we are currently paying for ISS. What is lacking is the money. We are building a commercial station program, but it is only now beginning to receive the funding necessary for serious flight testing. What we really need to do is to start discussing what NASA needs in the stations that will replace ISS. We can't even consider how much we could save until we have an idea of how much we are going to do instead will cost.
The one part of the equation that was never brought up is the Russian side. The main problem I see for operating the ISS as an efficient private operation is dealing with the Russian hardware and the fact that fuel resupply and station reboost are mainly done via the Russian side. God knows what unwinding that spider web of deals and NASA-Russian cooperation would involve and if they would even be interested. Jettisoning the Russian components is probably not feasible and thus a private ISS would be hostage to the Soyuz program and that might be the real deal killer.
Quote from: Joseph Peterson on 05/25/2018 02:58 amSNIPYou lose the bet, although you can hold onto your GI Joe collection. I have my own. The $3-4 billion normally quoted to maintain ISS includes three primary components. The largest component is space transportation at $2.6 billion(2017). Station operations and maintenance is consistently in the $1.1 billion range. Finally science gets ~$350 million. While space transportation is projected to drop to $1.8 billion once commercial crew is online and Soyuz seat purchases are gone, it will still account for more that 50% of the normally quoted budget. We've already privatized cargo transport, and 2020+ budget projections give us an official estimate for transportation costs once crew transport has privatized. You can't simply use future cost projections(BFR) to claim current prices are too high. If you can convince Boeing, Orbital, SNC, SpaceX, and ULA to launch a total of seven flights, both crew and cargo demand for ISS, per year, for less than a total of $200 million per year, within the next week, we can discuss you regaining the rights to your toys. That said, private industry can learn to effectively build and operate LEO stations at a far lower cost than we are currently paying for ISS. What is lacking is the money. We are building a commercial station program, but it is only now beginning to receive the funding necessary for serious flight testing. What we really need to do is to start discussing what NASA needs in the stations that will replace ISS. We can't even consider how much we could save until we have an idea of how much we are going to do instead will cost. Ok. Good answer but the $2.6 billion includes money for SNC to develop their system. If the ISS is to be privatized that would go away (I would still like NASA to fund stuff like that but a private ISS can't). So a private ISS would rely solely on available transports like SpaceX, Orbital and Boeing and buy them based on cost so that if it is cheaper to buy ALL SpaceX and Orbital so be it. Again, we are talking private so there is no incentive to "fund" jobs or keep engineering talent at Boeing for the future (which is NASA's mission and I understand the value there but it is NOT a private ISS mission). I know the price would be significantly lower than 2.6 billion.Station operations in the 1.1 billion seems to me like the military buying toilet seats and wrenches for $5K each (i.e. there are costs hidden in there). There are A LOT of costs bundled in the 1.1 billion because the systems used are shared among a lot of NASA systems and missions. Again, I understand that but I wonder how much it costs SpaceX to operate their launch control and monitoring versus NASA and Boeing. I bet that if the operations were designed and operated solely for ISS the number would be much much less than 1.1 billion.The one part of the equation that was never brought up is the Russian side. The main problem I see for operating the ISS as an efficient private operation is dealing with the Russian hardware and the fact that fuel resupply and station reboost are mainly done via the Russian side. God knows what unwinding that spider web of deals and NASA-Russian cooperation would involve and if they would even be interested. Jettisoning the Russian components is probably not feasible and thus a private ISS would be hostage to the Soyuz program and that might be the real deal killer.
SNIPYou lose the bet, although you can hold onto your GI Joe collection. I have my own. The $3-4 billion normally quoted to maintain ISS includes three primary components. The largest component is space transportation at $2.6 billion(2017). Station operations and maintenance is consistently in the $1.1 billion range. Finally science gets ~$350 million. While space transportation is projected to drop to $1.8 billion once commercial crew is online and Soyuz seat purchases are gone, it will still account for more that 50% of the normally quoted budget. We've already privatized cargo transport, and 2020+ budget projections give us an official estimate for transportation costs once crew transport has privatized. You can't simply use future cost projections(BFR) to claim current prices are too high. If you can convince Boeing, Orbital, SNC, SpaceX, and ULA to launch a total of seven flights, both crew and cargo demand for ISS, per year, for less than a total of $200 million per year, within the next week, we can discuss you regaining the rights to your toys. That said, private industry can learn to effectively build and operate LEO stations at a far lower cost than we are currently paying for ISS. What is lacking is the money. We are building a commercial station program, but it is only now beginning to receive the funding necessary for serious flight testing. What we really need to do is to start discussing what NASA needs in the stations that will replace ISS. We can't even consider how much we could save until we have an idea of how much we are going to do instead will cost.
To what extent are the science experiments being done on ISS actually subsidized by NASA in the first place? If that went away, would there still be sufficient demand?
$107M+: external (non-NASA non-CASIS) funding leveraged
I think that a private station will certainly be less expensive, but not radically less expensive in absolute terms. There are large fixed costs in a complex and unique project such as a manned space station, so dont expect an order of magnitude difference. However, a private station could be much bigger than ISS due to economies of scale, which is where private enterprise truly excels. Think many large Bigelow modules and resupply flights on reusable rockets launching every week, for the same or lower price than ISS today. Assuming there is demand for such a large station, of course.Unless private space stations really take off and NASA station is merely one of many. Then all bets are off.