SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The European Space Agency has about 2,000 staff and spends €365m a year on human spaceflight. Commercial spaceflight company SpaceX employs more than 4,000 staff and raised about $1bn in funding in January 2015. Common wisdom has it that this is the kind of organization, and money resources, you need to get humans into space.
Now a rag-tag team of about 50 volunteer physicists, engineers, mathematicians, software developers, sysadmins, pyrotechnicians and even a deep-sea rescue diver attempts to challenge that wisdom, by sending a manned capsule 100km above sea level, past the Karman line dividing Earth's atmosphere from outer space.
Their materials: anything they can salvage, off-the-shelf equipment, a 300 sq metre hangar at a closed shipyard near Copenhagen [Denmark] and a launchpad in the Baltic Sea. Their timeline: 5 to 10 years from now. Their budget: about €175,000 annually.
Rocket science is still rocket science, but since the golden age of spaceflight from 1950 to 1970, much of the theoretical basis has become public. There is still a long way from textbook to a flying rocket, but with enthusiasm, solid engineering skills and good craftsmanship, we make the impossible possible. (from their website)
Of course it is ridiculous to presume Copenhagen Suborbitals, the name of this collective, will ever succeed. When hell freezes over, turkey and apple pie will fly directly into my mouth, manna drops from heaven etcetera -- these guys are delusional.
Yet Copenhagen Suborbitals has already managed five rocket launches, more than a hundred engine tests and four versions of its space capsule since 2008. Maybe, just maybe, the right methodology matters more than the available budget. So, what if, against all the odds, this bunch of nerds manage to launch a human into space using open source software and off-the-shelf hardware, on a shoestring budget?
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday August 22 2016, @09:49AM
There's a reason a lot of the cost of spaceflight is nothing but fuel.
We all hear this, but it's not true. Remember that huge external fuel take on the space shuttle? Cost of all that fuel was around $500,000. The cost of a space shuttle launch, averaged over the life of the program, was $450 million. Fuel comes out to around 0.1%.
A SpaceX launch is around $60 million, of which about $250,000 is fuel, or about 0.4%.
tl;dr: Fuel is actually the smallest part; it's the rockets and the infrastructure that drive your costs.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @07:00PM
That $450 million is using NASA program accounting, which is ALWAYS suspect. If you take the total cost of the program and divide by the number of launches, you get about $1.6B per launch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @12:23AM
Why is that? Do the program costs not consider labor operating costs?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:31AM
"The Space Shuttle's large External Tank is loaded with more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are mixed and burned together to form the fuel for the orbiter's three main rocket engines."
You're suggesting it costs less than a dollar a gallon for super-cold liquid oxygen + hydrogen? And that's just the external tank.
"The two solid rocket boosters used roughly 500,000 kg (1.1 Mlb) of a 11-star perforated solid propellant cake of Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (APCP - a mixture of of ammonium perchlorate, aluminium, iron oxide, PBAN or HTPB polymers, and an epoxy curing agent) each"
EACH. And, again, you're suggesting less than half a dollar a kilo for that stuff.
Your maths is out, even if it may not be the biggest single cost.