Cost of a CEV mission to ISS

[geminivi]

I was looking around for a NASA supplied cost estimate for each flight of the CEV. I found this article from MIT Press<br />http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=biztech&sc=&id=17049&pg=1<br />which quotes a flight cost of $400 million to fly to the ISS.<br />I was astounded. That is very close to what NASA quotes as the cost for a shuttle flight. <br />I'm curious, anyone seen preliminary numbers for what NASA thinks it will cost?

 

[qso1]

I haven't seen any yet but its not suprising. The CaLV and CEV are shuttle derived elements and back in the early 1990s, shuttle "C" which was supposed to be less expensive than shuttle ended up being more which was one reason why it was canceled. Its projected flight rate was too low to get the cost of individual flights below piloted shuttle mission costs.<br /><br />The cost ultimately will be determined by projected flight rate and initial lunar missions IIRC are scheduled to be six months apart. A relatively low flight rate. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[j05h]

Ridiculous. If CEV costs that much for 6 astronauts to ISS, it simply won't fly. That's 3x more expensive per seat than Soyuz commercially and perhaps 20% more expensive than the estimated 40-50 million per seat being charged to NASA. My only hope is that NASA doesn't botch COTS like it did Alternative Access. <br /><br />For the more likely 3-4 astronauts on early ISS taxi missions, the costs are even worse, compared. C'mon, at least give us platinum toilet seats for those prices.<br /><br />Josh <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <div align="center"><em>We need a first generation of pioneers.</em><br /></div> </div>

 

[geminivi]

By costs, I'm interested in the incremental cost to fly excluding the R&D amortization. If that is $400 million, well, just can't be, right?

 

[qso1]

Technically, its still too early to tell how much it will cost since the program is still in its early stages but I'd say it could fall between $250-400 million per LV. And considering thats for the time period starting around 2012, after inflation is factored in, assuming no major economic upheavals. That price is closer to being a bargain than the $500 million per shot shuttle estimates I was using a few years back. That price would be closer to $600 mil now after factoring for inflation. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[geminivi]

A bargain? Let me see, the CEV seats 3 for the ISS and can deliever maybe 1000 pounds. The shuttle seats 7 and can deliever about 40,000 pounds to ISS. If the CEV is 60% to 80% of the shuttles cost, that is no bargain.

 

[themanwithoutapast]

Measured over the Shuttle's lifetime costs per launch costs are about 1.3 billion. The 400 million figure per Shuttle launch does not make sense, because it excludes costs for facilities, for the Shuttle's standing army of workers etc. and just gives incremental costs of what one Shuttle launch costs if you exclude the billions of fixed costs.<br /><br />The CEV will probably be less than 400 million per launch (that is the 400 million figure probably includes cost of the mission - ground control, launch integration which for Shuttle is part of the ISS budget since 2000, otherwise the 1.3 billion figure per launch would even be higher) and therefore will be about 25-30% of what a Shuttle launch costs. <br /><br />That said, with a projected launch date of September 2014 for the first manned CEV test flight and a projected end of the ISS at the end of 2015, I doubt that the CEV will be used for more than 2 ISS-missions in any event.

 

[edkyle98]

If history is a guide, it will probably cost that much or more. The best launch cost predictor, for the low launch rates that all existing launchers fly at, is gross liftoff mass. You can pretty much plot a curve, but a separate curve must be drawn for each economy. Russia and China, for example, are cheaper than Europe and the USA. <br /><br />U.S. launchers cost something like 0.3 to 0.5 million dollars per gross liftoff tonne (metric ton) to fly. Since Ares I with CEV is going to weigh roughly 907 tonnes at liftoff (nearly as much as a Titan IV), it is going to cost somewhere between $300 and $450 million to launch. Since it weighs about half of what a shuttle stack weighs at liftoff, it will probably cost about half of what a shuttle flight costs (very roughly, and remembering that a shuttle flight includes the cost of the "payload" and also taking into account the very real fact that each shuttle flight is actually going to end up costing well more than $1 billion, inflation adjusted and incorporating full program costs). <br /><br />Note that the $400 million doesn't include the cost of the CEV payload, which all by itself will probably exceed the cost of the launch.<br /><br /> - Ed Kyle

 

[j05h]

> The article points eventually to the main culprit: Labor costs. We can be assured that the CEV and CaLV being designed right now are subject to numerous conscious and unconscious attempts to keep the labor force as high as possible. .... project's contaminated payload became far more complex, and no doubt required additional funding to carry on the work.<br /><br />The Standing Army costs will mean that the first US commercial capsules (SpaceXDragon, COTS winner, AirLaunch) will be de-facto standard. CEV is coming in to late and to expensive, already. Soyuz is $20-50/seat, any US competitor needs to be in that range. Northrup and Lockheed aren't talking about any commercial usage of CEV, AFAIK. All there competition, per my argument, are saying they will sell seats to anyone. Soyuz is first out the gate. Who will be next?<br /><br />All of this, in some ways, is irrelevant. What CEV is supposed to be is another national launch system for government use only. The Shuttle isn't a spaceplane, it is a SYSTEM. The STS Space Transportation System costs a certain amount of money per year to operate. It costs the same, roughly, year in and out, whether they fly zero times or 12 times. <br /><br />This is where CEV will fail - it aims to be the One True Rocket again - and will cost a budget-busting $4-6 billion/year to maintain. There are already commercial means to do "block 1" CEV tasks. I think that by the time CEV is ready there will be better, cheaper alternatives. What NASA is saying is that they need access to deep space. The days of National Launch Systems are over - buy capabilities and tickets not infrastructure. <br /><br />Josh <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <div align="center"><em>We need a first generation of pioneers.</em><br /></div> </div>

 

[edkyle98]

I'm not sure about 40,000 pounds (18-ish tonnes) of cargo to ISS. STS-121 is only hauling about 2.3 tonnes of actual cargo to ISS inside the 9.5 tonne Leonardo cargo container. That's about what a Progress can carry. A pressurized CEV is supposed to be able to carry up to 3.5 tonnes of cargo to ISS. In theory, an unpressurized variant could haul up to 6 tonnes.<br /><br />Ares I will have about the same cargo capability as the space shuttle, for perhaps half the price.<br /><br /> - Ed Kyle

 

[geminivi]

The Shuttle in flight STS-98 hawled the US Lab to the space station. That lab weighed in at around 31,000 pounds according to http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/sts-98/OVR164.htm.<br />Ares I isn't close.<br />

 

[edkyle98]

"The Shuttle in flight STS-98 hawled the US Lab to the space station. That lab weighed in at around 31,000 pounds according to http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/sts-98/OVR164.htm.<br />Ares I isn't close. "<br /><br />Sure it is. Ares I with a CEV Service Module could steer a payload weighing more than 12 tonnes (26,460 pounds) to the ISS, just 2 tonnes short of the US Lab mass. If Ares I were used ala-Proton to launch a self-guided module like Zvezda, it would be able to boost more than 18.5 tonnes (40,793 lbs) to ISS.<br /><br /> - Ed Kyle

 

[josh_simonson]

>The article points eventually to the main culprit: Labor costs. <br /><br />Indeed, the CLV program will cost $855 million + $112million/flight. The cost of an extra flight isn't all that great, but the total cost/flight is still $255M if there are 6 launched/year. If only two are launched their unit cost will be $540M.<br /><br />Then there is the CEV and SM. The ESAS report suggested they would cost $207 and $136m respectively for an ISS mission. That's listed as 'flight unit cost' instead of a fixed and variable cost like with the launch vehicles. I don't know what flight rate that corresponded to, and it seemed odd that the ISS SM cost $136m while the lunar SM cost $82m even though the two are supposed to be identical. <br /><br />At 6/year that's $598m/mission for flights to the ISS with the CLV/CEV/SM. Of course that was with the original ESAS 5.5M capsule, 4seg SRB, methane SM and SSME. <br /><br />The lunar variant was cheaper at $169M and $82M for the CEV/SM resulting in the full lunar 'stack' costing $502M, 20% less than the ISS one.<br /><br />That's a lot of money, but over the life of the STS program NASA has spent about $1.3B/launch, so CEV still aught to be cheaper than the STS. Since the CEV/CLV are of a much safer and more robust design than the STS there should be far fewer fatal accidents, which cost over $10B each for the STS. Amortized over the whole schedule, STS accidents have cost more than $200M/launch. As a sanity check also consider what it would have cost to develop and launch crew rescue vehicles with the STS as was the original plan for the ISS. <br /><br />Yes CEV is expensive to fly to the ISS, but CEV wasn't designed for that purpose. Hopefully COTS will eliminate the need for CEV flights to ISS beyond what is needed to develop and prove out the design.

 

[askold]

"If history is a guide, it will probably cost that much or more."<br /><br />That's got to be the understatement of the year. Government programs usually cost several times more than originally projected.

 

[comga]

"Did they ever fire the guy that installed the switch upside-down in the Genesis capsule, or did they kick him upstairs with a pay raise? "<br /><br />Not only is this off topic, it reflects a lack of knowledge about the Genesis system and systems work in general. Have you read the MIB report? In essence, the inversion was the result of on incorrect orientation amongst three higher level assemblies. The acceleration switch, which looks like a resistor with a flange on one end, was put on the circuit board in a particular orientation. The board was put in the avionics box in a particular orientation. Lastly the avionics box was put into the Sample Return Capsule in a particular orientation. One of these was wrong. Whom do you fire? How about the guy who cut out the test on the assumption that it was "legacy hardware"? How about the system engineer that considered four identical acceleration switches to be sufficient redundancy? I have been involved in several space systems projects, and one MIB, and these things are insidious. You need a really good systems engineer or engineers with the time to understand hundreds of tiny details like this. You might, maybe, able to rule out these errors for twice the money, but you might not.<br /><br />Which could bring us back to discussing the cost of a CEV flight. If complex systems need huge support teams to push system reliability up beyond 90% to 99% or 99.9%, which is still way below airliners, then it is going to cost a fortune. The trick is to keep things simple. And that is a much harder task than one might imagine. <br /><br />$400M to send four or six people to orbit is a travesty. However, look at it from a political perspective. ($0.4B / 4 astronauts + ~3*$0.4B / CaLV) * (2 Moon launches/ year) ~= $3B/yr. (The ~3x is a real WAG with no basis.) If NASA could really keep the total running costs to this level, about 20% of their budget, they could maintain the political support to do this for many years. Yo

 

[frodo1008]

Not bad, but what the critics of NASA's costs do not realize is that the exchange rate of the ruble and the unit of money for China (the Yuan?) is far less than pennies on the dollar! It is NOT a level playing field economically (else why do you think that companies such as Wal Mart buy so much stuff from China). China can always (as it is an almost totally controlled economy) make its costs less and less. Heck, with total slave labor the labor costs could less than 1% of American costs!<br /><br />Besides there is a little known fact that the critics don't seem to realize. The last bastion of American superiority in the balance of payments is the American aerospace industry! And one of the main reasons for that for many years has been the cutting edge of space exploration from NASA, both robotic and manned. To say nothing of the fantastic help in new methods of aircraft flight and manufacturing! The overall affect of this is that far more is gotten out of the American space program that has been put in!!<br /><br />Eventually, the flight rates of these vehicles are going to have to increase by a large amount to support the true exploitation of space resources. Then the total costs will come down almost automatically! I also think that the ISS is going to be used and useful far more into the future than just 2015! How long was MIR up past its so-called useable life span? Some 15 years! <br /><br />Besides much of what the methodologies of the newer private space efforts are going to use was originally started by NASA. Bigelow's inflatable habitats had almost all of the original research done by NASA. So go ahead and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, be my guest! <br /><br />Besides, nobody has ever been able to explain why it is necessary to employ the most skilled workers in the world at farm labor prices! Is that the true American dream??<br />

 

[frodo1008]

So do very large and complicated private programs! This is especially true for those programs that are going into areas where nobody as ever gone before. <br /><br />Please note tha the American aerospace industry is still the finest in the world, and is reponsible for the balance of payments being kept far lower that it would otherwise be. It is the other areas of our manufactuing that have had the balance of payments rise to such high levels that it has.<br /><br />There have been many estimates made, or even attempted, to find out what the return on investment has been for NASA and other high tech areas of government spending. The lowest that I have seen is some 4X, and the highest is some 20X. I believe neither, but would be on some 10X myself. Of course, this gets eaten up by other goevenment expenses.<br /><br />So let us just go ahead and kill off the only golden goose that we Americans have left! Why not, we have done a great many other stupid things in recent years!!

 

[lbiderman]

The exchange rate of the Yuan is tied with the dollar (a convertion box), and right now is 8 Yuan per dollar. The rouble is 27 per dollar. Anyway, that is not the important thing: the question is what you can BUY for that money. The russian and chinese engineers are not cheap because of the exchange rate, but because their salaries, the resources, the energy, everything that makes a cost matrix, is cheap. And, unfortunately, you can't beat that with more flights. You have to keep the technology over the envelope to mantain the superiority and to have investors. Right now the US is the only country with advances in the private spaceflight industry: that gives you a captive market. However, as soon as the russians or the chinese develop a cheaper way to send tourist to space, game over. The only way to keep yourself alive is to provide better services: they can put a man in suborbit cheaper than you, then you make an orbital vehicle. When they get to that, you offer circumlunar flights, and so on. NASA is the real thing for any american space program, and they'll keep advancing the envelope, letting local private industries to make profit with it. Definetely, you are right when you say that killing NASA is killing the goose of the golden eggs.

 

[j05h]

> Right now the US is the only country with advances in the private spaceflight industry: that gives you a captive market. <br /><br />That makes no kind of sense considering that the only company in the world flying private citizens into space is Russia's Energia. Scaled Composites and Virgin are about 14,000mph slower. And it ignores the essential international flavor of all successful aerospace endeavors: Space Adventures brokers Soyuz seats, Boeing uses parts from around the world, etc. <br /><br /> /> NASA is the real thing for any american space program, and they'll keep advancing the envelope, letting local private industries to make profit with it.<br /><br />Garbage. For generations NASA has done everything it can to monopolize human spaceflight. Conestoga, Roton, etc were actively worked against, JSC fought tooth-and-nail to keep Dennis Tito off the ISS, to the point of mutiny by his crewmates. It is only in the last few years that they have shown any interest in commercial human spaceflight, and only because the house of cards has started to collapse without it. NASA is essentially a socialist organization born out of WWII and the Cold War, the irony being that the equivalent organizations (RKS, Energia) grasp the capitalist method far better. There is no One True Rocket. Luckily, Dr. Griffin seems to understand that. <br /><br />Another way to think of this: why isn't Lockmart/Northrup talking about selling seats on CEV? My answer is because they are closet-Commies who don't believe in private spaceflight. There is obviously a market for it, but they want to serve the State only. The first successful private capsule is goiing to wipe up the US orbital flight market. <br /><br />Inflammatory? I hope so. NASA and Big Aero need a kick in the pants once in a while. <br /><br />Josh <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <div align="center"><em>We need a first generation of pioneers.</em><br /></div> </div>

 

[geminivi]

Part of the sticker shock, and $400 mill to orbit using methods developed over 40 years ago qualifies as sticker shock, is not accounting for the cost of political expediency. It is necessary for NASA to overpay for this the VSE if it wants long term political support. Throw in some self preservation engineering and sticker shock results. <br />For instance having all the NASA centers involved keeps Congress happy, at added cost. Using shuttle derived parts or common boosters to the CLV and CALV precludes competitive bids, but does mean that the CALV can be restarted easily, if a new admin stops it, once the CLV is off the ground. This assumes that Boeing continues with the Delta IV, a safe bet. No competitive bid always means higher cost. <br /><br />To quote a real rocket scientist and his words about the CEV, “If we copy what we had it won’t be affordable enough or safe enough,” Burt Rutan said, to foster human space travel beyond low Earth orbit, to the Moon, and outward." <br /><br />I think my gut reaction to the $400 mill is just about right.

 

[josh_simonson]

Also keep in mind that 1/3 to 1/2 of the money that NASA spends goes right back into the governments coffers in the form of income tax of the employees and contractors that consume most of NASA's budget. If NASA purchased flights from other countries that share would go to another government, not ours. <br /><br />According to the futron study (pre EELV, but EELV costs came in at $4471/lb) western countries HLVs cost $4400/lb to launch, and china/russia cost $1946 on average. If the US spends that $4400 to launch domestically, like I said the government immediately gets at least $1500 back in the form of income tax. When that money is spent domestically, the government gets another $100 in sales tax, then that person pays about $933 in income tax. Now the only money left that hasn't come back to the government is $1867. That's less than the cost of launching in Russia, and the cash has only just left the hands of the folks that the government paid directly.<br /><br />That's fine and dandy for the government, in their eyes the expensive domestic launchers are about the same price as foreign ones after their tax rebates. It's the private customers that don't get such rebates that can complain. NASA doesn't deal with private customers, so they only have to be around twice as expensive as an offshored option to be cost effective.

 

[edkyle98]

"I think my gut reaction to the $400 mill is just about right."<br /><br />It is a fair reaction. $400 million demands that something useful is created in return. You could buy a couple of 777s for that price, for example. <br /><br />There is a solution. Going back to my previous post about the correlation between gross liftoff mass and cost, NASA could cut its launch cost by launching a lighter payload on a lighter booster. The three-man Soyuz system, for example, weighs 1/3rd as much as Ares I/CEV at liftoff. Using the historical 0.3-0.5 $million/tonne multiplier gives $90- 150 million per launch for a U.S. Soyuz equivalent, for the launch that is, showing clearly that NASA's decision to go with a heavy spacecraft is going to cost it (and us).<br /><br /> - Ed Kyle

 

[josh_simonson]

The cost of the CLV is less than half the cost of launching the CEV though. Also, your numbers are skewed by the poor ISP of the SRB. CLV may weigh 3x soyuz, but it only puts up 66% more payload. The current shuttle SRBs cost only $23.2M, so the cost/lb of SRB is pretty low - $17/lb, $39k/mton. By your low ($300k) historical guideline they would be $180M apiece.<br /><br />Smaller launch vehicles have poorer cost/lb to orbit than larger vehicles - that's the metric by which price performance of vehicles is compared.

 

[vulture2]

Agree. The CLV will require maintaining all the Shuttle infrastructure except the OPF, and a new CEV assembly facility will be needed. CLV will require 5-10 times the launch site personnel of the Delta IV Heavy, which is already flying and has essentially the same payload. The cost per seat will be about the same as Shuttle, with less cargo capacity, in particular virtually no space for life science experiments, which was supposed to be a large part of the ISS mission. While it may well put people on the moon, it is not easy to see how they can do anything there that will be worth the cost.<br /><br />Once NASA's mission was to advance the technology of flight. Missions were flown to demonstrate new technology. Now we spend so much flying missions we can no longer afford to develop new technolgy.

 

[edkyle98]

My numbers are for gross liftoff mass for building and launching a complete launch vehicle only, so would not apply to just an SRB, for example. Using GLOW takes everything into consideration. For Ares I, for example, the lower cost of an SRB first stage (and no way it only costs $20-ish million) is offset by the higher cost of a higher-performing LH2 upper stage to make up the difference. <br /><br />GLOW is a good surrogate for cost because bigger and heavier means more metal, more people, more tasks, more ground support infrastructure, more development and testing, which means more cost, etc. (At least at the low flight rates that have, and will continue to, be a fact of life).<br /><br />As for payload, Ares I is going to be able to put about three times as much mass into orbit as Soyuz-U (22-ish tonnes versus 7.25 tonnes).<br /><br /> - Ed Kyle