[AR] Re: $4 billion per flight
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2022 14:11:15 -0500 (EST)
On Tue, 1 Mar 2022, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
Ignoring the huge development costs, of course. I've lost track. How
many tens of billions have been sunk into this thing over the years?
With or without its Ares predecessor, it's a very large number.
I dimly recall a fairly simple early-60s analysis which concluded that it
makes no economic sense to pay the development costs of an (expendable)
launch system that you plan to fly less than a hundred times.
A fairly trivial corollary is that a system with a flight rate of once a
year can't possibly justify its development costs unless the project is
not really about launching payloads economically. 4-5/year is about the
lowest number that barely makes economic sense, and 10/year is better.
Henry
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