Is reusability worth it for commercial crew?

[Nibb31]

Aircraft are mass-produced in the hundreds.

Spacecraft such as DreamChaser or Dragon will be in the single digits. The demand is simply not there to sustain a single fleet. With such low numbers, you don't get economies of scale. All your fixed production, tooling, process, logistics costs are spread over a small number of units making them more expensive than a mass produced product.

It is cheaper to produce 1000 paper cups than to make a single glass cup. If you're typically going to use your cup less than a 1000 times, it makes sense to go with disposable.

[IslandPlaya]

Aircraft are mass-produced in the hundreds.

Spacecraft such as DreamChaser or Dragon will be in the single digits. The demand is simply not there to sustain a single fleet. With such low numbers, you don't get economies of scale. All your fixed production, tooling, process, logistics costs are spread over a small number of units making them more expensive than a mass produced product.

It is cheaper to produce 1000 paper cups than to make a single glass cup. If you're typically going to use your cup less than a 1000 times, it makes sense to go with disposable.

Good post. I think the savings from mass-production of the Falcon stack will be worthwhile but minimal.
I think Dragon will get into double digits however...

[Pipcard]

JAXA paid for a number of market surveys back in the early 90's for orbital and suborbital space tourism.  Even back then, they found a sufficient customer base to support a space tourism business.  The defense industrial players weren't interested because that wasn't their business.  It's taken a while for non-defense players to develop who are willing to address the market, but my point is that the market surveys have said that the market was there for a while now.

I was very fascinated by this topic a few months ago, with the Kankoh-maru and Shimizu space hotel. I even recreated the latter as an Orbiter add-on.

a global market of as many as 1 million passengers a year seems feasible if the price of a flight can be brought down to about $20,000

Their conclusions were that this would involve tens of flights per day. That is less than 0.1% of commercial aviation, now at around 3 million passengers per day, but space travel will nevertheless become a relatively large-scale activity, and an "ordinary" means of travel for members of the public.

[arachnitect]

JAXA paid for a number of market surveys back in the early 90's for orbital and suborbital space tourism.  Even back then, they found a sufficient customer base to support a space tourism business.  The defense industrial players weren't interested because that wasn't their business.  It's taken a while for non-defense players to develop who are willing to address the market, but my point is that the market surveys have said that the market was there for a while now.

I was very fascinated by this topic a few months ago, with the Kankoh-maru and Shimizu space hotel. I even recreated the latter as an Orbiter add-on.

a global market of as many as 1 million passengers a year seems feasible if the price of a flight can be brought down to about $20,000

Their conclusions were that this would involve tens of flights per day. That is less than 0.1% of commercial aviation, now at around 3 million passengers per day, but space travel will nevertheless become a relatively large-scale activity, and an "ordinary" means of travel for members of the public.

Yeah, the hard part is the factor of 1000 cost reduction.

BMW wouldn't need much of a marketing department if they could sell an M3 for less than $100.

You might as well ask what the demand is for $5 DSLRs, $1000 Manhattan apartments, or 50 cent ipads.

[mvpel]

Ten years ago you couldn't get an iPad for $500,000. We live in exciting times.

[arachnitect]

Ten years ago you couldn't get an iPad for $500,000. We live in exciting times.

Consumer electronics are unique and follow their own rules; I only include it to show how unreasonably optimistic the Japanese study was. We could have cost reductions -possibly even dramatic ones- in the near future, but a 1000 fold reduction should be considered impossible with current or foreseeable rocket technology.

The interesting question is what the orbital tourism market would be at prices in the low millions.

When it was introduced, a Model T Ford cost around $20,000 (today's dollars). Despite all the exciting improvements in car technology you can't buy a brand new car for anywhere close to $20.

A transatlantic flight on a Pan Am Clipper cost around $12,000 (again, adj. for inflation). Today you can get across the pond in cattle class for $500. The more comparable first class ticket could easily cost $5000.

$20,000 orbital flights are not going to happen.

[pippin]

Ten years ago you couldn't get an iPad for $500,000. We live in exciting times.

But them. The only breakthroughs have been software and low-powered CPUs. Apart from that you could get all the components in an iPad for $1500 10 years ago and actually there have been tablets before the iPad, they were just more clunky.a friend of mine had one even 12 years ago, it was a full PC with a touch screen. Actually pretty much a Surface Pro...

So all you eventually saw was a price re custom to around 25% by scaling up the production from a few hundred units a year to tens of millions of units a year.

[HIP2BSQRE]

If NASA wants to pay for a new crew vehicle each time, they will be funding the creation of a fleet that can be flown cheaply for commercial applications. Commercial applications need to be cheap above all, so that fits quite well.

That's the same story that was sold for Dragon v1 and now they're all sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Very valid point. But for crew, there's already a demonstrated market for tourism, so at very least a few seats could be sold.

The demand is there - currently the supply is not there.  Please remember with soyez that you have to do training in Russia for 6 months.  Most millionaires do not have 6 months to learn Russian.  Now if the price was $20 million per seat and the time need was cut down to 30 days - you do not think that the demand would be there?  Please remember every spare seat that Space Adventure has gotten there hands on has been sold.   Currently the Russians have an monopoly on supply and that is why the price has gone up.  There is no other game in town.

[Robotbeat]

Aircraft are mass-produced in the hundreds.

Spacecraft such as DreamChaser or Dragon will be in the single digits. The demand is simply not there to sustain a single fleet. With such low numbers, you don't get economies of scale. All your fixed production, tooling, process, logistics costs are spread over a small number of units making them more expensive than a mass produced product.

It is cheaper to produce 1000 paper cups than to make a single glass cup. If you're typically going to use your cup less than a 1000 times, it makes sense to go with disposable.

Bad analogy. The real story is that both the reusable and disposable cups are made of glass.

Also, rockets have a cost per kg of dry mass the same as an airliner. Look it up, a 737 costs, pound for dry pound, about the same as a Delta IV. That points to me that there's not as much to be gained from mass production as you might think, though it wouldn't hurt. Reusability will make a FAR greater difference.

[Oli]

Please remember with soyez that you have to do training in Russia for 6 months.

You could argue Soyuz is too small for transporting clueless tourists into space. With Dragon for example you have 5 seats in addition to pilot/copilot.

Please remember every spare seat that Space Adventure has gotten there hands on has been sold.

Space Adventures could have built a station only for tourists if demand would have been sufficient.

[QuantumG]

Space Adventures has tried to buy their own Soyuz launches. NASA intervenes each time. It's an ongoing battle and one of the reasons why it's very unlikely we'll see spare seats on commercial crew vehicles going to "tourists".

[sghill]

Aircraft are mass-produced in the hundreds.

Spacecraft such as DreamChaser or Dragon will be in the single digits. The demand is simply not there to sustain a single fleet. With such low numbers, you don't get economies of scale. All your fixed production, tooling, process, logistics costs are spread over a small number of units making them more expensive than a mass produced product.

It is cheaper to produce 1000 paper cups than to make a single glass cup. If you're typically going to use your cup less than a 1000 times, it makes sense to go with disposable.

Bad analogy. The real story is that both the reusable and disposable cups are made of glass.

Also, rockets have a cost per kg of dry mass the same as an airliner. Look it up, a 737 costs, pound for dry pound, about the same as a Delta IV. That points to me that there's not as much to be gained from mass production as you might think, though it wouldn't hurt. Reusability will make a FAR greater difference.

How much does it cost for an Airbus to fly across the Atlantic versus the same trip using a two stage liquid rocket?  I only ask because the fuel costs are the only unavoidable costs for both transportation systems, so if we reduce the problem down to it's bare minimum, we can start to get a rough idea of where the absolute floor is going to be for rocket-based transportation versus airliner based transportation.

I do realize the two systems go go different destinations, and serve different types of customers, but at their most basic sense, they are both transportation systems that use fuel.  Airlines can charge me around $500 and up to get me across the Atlantic.  I want to know how cheap a rocket (we'll say it carries ten passengers for simplicity) could get me there- all other factors ignored.

[Oli]

Space Adventures has tried to buy their own Soyuz launches. NASA intervenes each time.

Again, I don't mean to the ISS, but to their own station/module.

[QuantumG]

Space Adventures has tried to buy their own Soyuz launches. NASA intervenes each time.

Again, I don't mean to the ISS, but to their own station/module.

They did that too.. it was called Mir. The Russians learnt their lesson.

[yg1968]

Space Adventures has tried to buy their own Soyuz launches. NASA intervenes each time. It's an ongoing battle and one of the reasons why it's very unlikely we'll see spare seats on commercial crew vehicles going to "tourists".

NASA intervened? I am not sure why NASA would have a say in this. There was talk of adding an extra Soyuz (a fifth Soyuz) but Roscosmos never went ahead with it.  It was Canada and ESA that were considering it. 

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1007/01soyuz/

[Oli]

Space Adventures has tried to buy their own Soyuz launches. NASA intervenes each time.

Again, I don't mean to the ISS, but to their own station/module.

They did that too.. it was called Mir. The Russians learnt their lesson.

Oh dear, another conspiracy theory  . MirCorp ran out of money, simple as that.

[QuantumG]

Oh dear, another conspiracy theory  . MirCorp ran out of money, simple as that.

No conspiracy or theory required. It's a fact that NASA intervened in the MirCorp deal with Russia and said Mir had to go before they would talk on ISS. MirCorp tried to do other stuff after the Mir deal, and then ran out of money. For example, all the prep work for Dennis Tito and Greg Olsen's Soyuz flights was done by MirCorp, after the Mir deal.

[Robotbeat]

Regardless, it's a different world now that we're post-shuttle and the commercial crew providers are being evaluated partially on whether they have a good business plan (ie non-NASA customers). NASA may want the extra seats filled with cargo, but SpaceX can certainly launch tourists on other flights.

[QuantumG]

They "can", yes. I'm saying they won't, because SpaceX doesn't care for space tourism.

[Robotbeat]

They "can", yes. I'm saying they won't, because SpaceX doesn't care for space tourism.

SpaceX doesn't care. But SpaceX will take the money. I'm sure Space Adventures has talked to SpaceX.