CCDev/CCP updates

[yg1968]

That's the most exciting thing about CCiCap, I think. The end result is providers who can fly (or have flown!) a non-NASA astronaut to LEO.

Note that yesterday Hucthinson grilled Bolden on why more than 1.  Clearly they don't liek the idea.

She didn't say that NASA should have only one. She asked why NASA wasn't making a down selection as she thinks that there are currently too many.

[Lurker Steve]

Totally ignoring the FY12 money that is going to CCiCap, $300/21*12 = $171M/yr and $500/21*12 = $286M/yr.. so the program needs $342M to $572M per year for 2 participants or $513M to $858M per year for 3 participants.

Only while undergoing development.
The trick is going to be to get divorced from NASA after becoming operational and picking up commercial ridership.
For that we need more destinations in earth and cis-lunar space.
If they can do that then they won't need NASA's money with all those expensive strings attached.
Every one of those commercial carriers could operate successfully for much less overhead without all of NASA's peculiar requirements.

All of the new vehicles have 6 or 7 seats, right ?
One or two extra flights with 5 paying passengers @ $50 mil per passenger should easily cover development costs for a year, assuming you can get certified to carry passengers. As long as the vehicle has windows to look out into space, you don't even need to visit a space station. Just make it more than a glorified Disney ride.

[Jim]

All of the new vehicles have 6 or 7 seats, right ?
One or two extra flights with 5 paying passengers @ $50 mil per passenger should easily cover development costs for a year, assuming you can get certified to carry passengers. As long as the vehicle has windows to look out into space, you don't even need to visit a space station. Just make it more than a glorified Disney ride.

The issue is the market isn't there

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

All of the new vehicles have 6 or 7 seats, right ?
One or two extra flights with 5 paying passengers @ $50 mil per passenger should easily cover development costs for a year, assuming you can get certified to carry passengers. As long as the vehicle has windows to look out into space, you don't even need to visit a space station. Just make it more than a glorified Disney ride.

The issue is the market isn't there

Jim is correct that at $50M there is no market. The highest price a space tourist has paid to date has been $35M and that was 3 years ago. At $20M-$35M (SpaceX Crew Dragon prices) the market is ~ 0.6 to 0.75 tourists per year based on history. To fill a single flight with six tourist passengers would mean at best only one flight every 8 years.

[yg1968]

All of the new vehicles have 6 or 7 seats, right ?
One or two extra flights with 5 paying passengers @ $50 mil per passenger should easily cover development costs for a year, assuming you can get certified to carry passengers. As long as the vehicle has windows to look out into space, you don't even need to visit a space station. Just make it more than a glorified Disney ride.

The issue is the market isn't there

Jim is correct that at $50M there is no market. The highest price a space tourist has paid to date has been $35M and that was 3 years ago. At $20M-$35M (SpaceX Crew Dragon prices) the market is ~ 0.6 to 0.75 tourists per year based on history. To fill a single flight with six tourist passengers would mean at best only one flight every 8 years.

I am not sure that you can say that. The Russians sold all of the seats that they could sell. So it is very much possible that they could have sold even more seats than they did. There is also some relunctance for American space tourists to take six months off to train in Russia (eventhough they usually enjoy their stay in Russia).

[QuantumG]

Even I don't think you could get $50M/seat from space tourists without going to the ISS. Obviously the only way to find out is to go find people with that kind of money and try to sell the seats, but none of us have that option here.

Now, $5M/seat, that's totally doable.

[go4mars]

Now, $5M/seat, that's totally doable.

Do you mean without ISS? 

[QuantumG]

I mean only that people would pay $5M/seat for orbital flights that do not visit the ISS. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

[simonbp]

Yeah, I'd agree you could find customers for $5 million non-ISS flights.

VG is charging $200,000 ($0.2 million) for 5-minute suborbital flights and already has deposits for around 430 seats. It's reasonable to expect some fraction of those 430 to pay 25 times more for a several-day orbital flight.

Question is, can any of the CCDEV companies actually pull off $5 million per seat?

[baldusi]

Yeah, I'd agree you could find customers for $5 million non-ISS flights.

VG is charging $200,000 ($0.2 million) for 5-minute suborbital flights and already has deposits for around 430 seats. It's reasonable to expect some fraction of those 430 to pay 25 times more for a several-day orbital flight.

Question is, can any of the CCDEV companies actually pull off $5 million per seat?

The question is for how long. Let's say that you make a reusable vehicle like the Dream Chaser, but one that's 1.5 times bigger in each dimension. It should weight something like 40tonnes. And you might be able to cram 20 pax on it. And let's assume that on a Falcon Heavy you could sell that for 200M total. That's still 10M per pax. And it would be a sardine can.
If they go to LEO each orbit is something like 90 minutes. So you could do two orbits, or three hours. But there would be like traveling on tourist on a plane, only without gravity. There would be even less windows, and I doubt you could cram a toilet in it. I just don't see a way to reach 5M/pax unless you had a reusable FH, too.
But do your numbers the other way around. 6 pax on a Dragon. That's 30M. Could you have a fully reusable system for 6 pax for just 30M? Seems very very hard.
Let's try 15, that's 75M. That's the cost I would expect from a fully reusable Dragon/Falcon 9 (roughly, 50% cost reduction from the expected 132M). Problem is, you can't put that many on a Dragon. Let's say 30 pax. That's 150M. Could you do a fully reusable system for 150M that can cram 30pax? If you assume 2m³ per pax that's 60m³ of cargo volume. That's, roughly, a 3.65m x 8m cylinder if you assume 20cm of wall thickness.
Now, take the Airbus A320. It has a fuselage of 4m, and a cabin width of 3.7m. The seat pitch is 0.81m and seats six per row on tourist. So, if you could have an interior of 3.7m and 8.1m of seat space, that would allow to seat 60 pax. Let's say the width would be 4.2m (25cm walls), let's add 1m to the cabin's length for margin, and let's assume a hemisphere on the front (for a blunt cone entry design and pilot cabin), plus another 5.3m on the back for the Service Module. That would be (2.1m+1m+8.1m+5.3m) 16.5m long and 4.2m wide craft, very similar to the Space/T concept for CCDev, but scaled bigger. To get an idea, it would be just like ISS's Destiny, but twice as long. And the Space Shuttle cargo bay was 4.6 m by 18.3 m.
How much should that weight? Well, totally WAG, let's say 40 tonnes. The Shuttle Orbiter was 68 without the SSME. This is half as long and has no wings. And it would be rated for a very little time in space.
So you have 60 pax per 5M, that's 300M, and you could launch on a Falcon Heavy (non reusable). If the FH is 150M, you have another 150M for the reusable spacecraft and operations in general. Let's say we buy this arguments. How many passengers per year do you think you could get for 5M/pax? You'd need at least 60. And then the fixed costs of the infrastructure just for such a vehicle would get into your costs. And I don't think you can get enough total revenue with less than 60 pax for a fully reusable system to be worth it.
So, if you make it too small, you can't get enough total amount to actually launch something. If you get too big, you need too many passengers per year. And I think those sizes overlap. In other words, there's not a viable middle point.  If you get into the 30 to 40 pax you are into the 150M to 200M per launch revenue, which could barely pay just for a FH.

[Chris Bergin]

No longer an update thread. Locked.

A new thread will be created later.