Virgin Galactic: $250 million program

[savuporo]

Armadillo has real data, from their current testing operations, to say that $10K a flight is realistic near term.
http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?catid=25&itemid=3532
Relevant parts of the quote:

A four module system should be capable of reaching 100km with a person, but there wouldn't be any redundancy in the system. We will probably use a second generation, nine module system for commercial tourism applications. The raw consumables for a fully loaded nine module flight would be about $5000. If we move to self-pressurized lox/methane and took bulk deliveries, the costs could drop to $1000.

Our flight insurance is per-year, not per-flight, so insurance costs won't be significant if we have a high flight rate. We don't know what the facility usage fees for Spaceport America are going to be yet, but I don't expect them to be too bad, because they really want to get rockets flying there.

If we have to rent equipment and trek the team out to New Mexico to make a single flight, labor and travel overhead will dominate the costs. When we get to the point of having permanent facilities at the spaceport and making several flights a day, I honestly think that the operating cost can get down under $10k / flight. Since we want to perform 100+ demonstration flights before taking random paying customers, this is important. If there is sufficient market demand to keep a vehicle flying continuously, building larger vehicles that carry more people each flight can probably get the actual ticket PRICE down to $10k.

I expect the market ticket price to stay at $200k for at least the first five hundred passengers,

[meiza]

But it's unclear if that includes the volunteer labor... Once there are people hired to do it full-time, it gets expensive. But still might be cheap.

[Comga]

iamlucky13 - 26/3/2008  1:03 PM
....... I just think it's wildly over-optimistic economically.

When one of us has made several billion dollars, we will be invited to Branson's private island to share with him our opinions on what is and what is not a good business plan.

[savuporo]

meiza - 31/3/2008  11:30 AM
But it's unclear if that includes the volunteer labor... Once there are people hired to do it full-time, it gets expensive. But still might be cheap.

do "it" and "it" gets expensive .. what exactly ? Obviously, the R&D that Armadillo has been doing throughout the last years would be expensive as hell .. paying one of the top 3D coders in the world to mess around with lathes and liquid oxygen would be a damn expensive if entirely unrealistic pitch. But they arent factoring this into ticket prices.

However, when they eventually get to the position to spin something off for operations, i see no reason why their hired labor for operations would be terribly expensive. They have designed and built for ease of operations from day one. Flying something like their nine module stack on routine suborbital flights on a daily basis would not need much ops crew at all.
From everything Carmack has said so far they are aiming for basically gas up and go ops, obviously with some periodic maintenance checks now and then.

[Lampyridae]

Comga - 1/4/2008  2:56 PM

iamlucky13 - 26/3/2008  1:03 PM
....... I just think it's wildly over-optimistic economically.

When one of us has made several billion dollars, we will be invited to Branson's private island to share with him our opinions on what is and what is not a good business plan.

Perhaps talking with Richard Branson's cryogenically preserved head on a private island on Mars if this is to be believed...

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

1st Mars Mission by 2014. ROTFLOL. But a few more years and $ billions from Richard Branson and I say yes. Going there to stay and quite possibly die in a decompression incident is much easier than getting back to Earth (several hundred mT IMTLEO different). Open source is quite fantastic sometimes, and the best spaceflight simulator is undeniably Orbiter, which is open source.

I may start up a thread on this one...

[Comga]

Lampyridae - 1/4/2008  9:05 PM

[.. a private island on Mars if this is to be believed...

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

1st Mars Mission by 2014. ROTFLOL. ..

That's what you get on this date.  "Belief" is not applicable. ROFLMAO is.