In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
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Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#12Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
> with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO?
Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#13It just isn't plausible that Starship launch costs for LEO could be 1/28th the costs for Falcon Heavy. This sounds like more Musk optimism to me.
Falcon Heavy has a significantly smaller payload bay and the 1st stage will always be lost. If a starship can fly 10 times and requires much less refurb than a FH, it makes sense.
Right, the projected rate is effectively the super-bulk discounted rate if you buy 10 launches worth of cargo at once and actually fill it to max capacity whenever a launch window is open. I don’t think the individual flight rate would be anywhere close to $50/kg for the vast majority of customers.
The more relevant number is the all-in immediate price per launch, the rate where one could simply wire the money and SpaceX would launch next week, divided by the actual thing(s) launched, which will weigh some intermediate amount. And compare that to the same for the other rockets.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#14Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
That is exactly what I thought too. As things go cheap, they become encumbered with their local version of « turd ». We are now sending dozens of thousands of microsatellites, which, in 20 years, may well be considered as Earth’s manure floating around.
I wonder if the market or human incentives will increase some other variables which will make it just as inaccessible to the lowly (as it should - Even Elon Musk shouldn’t be able to send non-necessary stuff up in low orbit), such as: Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO, or increasing legal authorizations required.
On the other hand, assuming we could indeed send our manure for $1400/kg, would it be the most reasonable way to get rid of radioactive waste? It sounds like a Simpsons episode, but the cost seems so low that it sounds like the next step.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#15The y-scale on that graph really makes it hard to understand the true drop in price.
The log scale and the orgin at 0 definitely don't help the readability here...
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#16Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
Dennis Tito went as a tourist in 2001 for $20 million. If you can get a turd generator to space for that price, I’d imagine it’s considerably cheaper to get the finished product up there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism
Referring to human beings as "turd generators" is truly fantastic.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#17Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?
I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?
The government of your country will need to approve, since they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite.
Also, you can send the turd alone, you need to attach it to a launcher, and have a deployment mechanism. You are looking at a few thousands $ minimum regardless of the weight.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#18In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#19In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
Trash is full of valuable materials! Right now it may not be economical to recover those, but I would be surprised if we aren't mining our landfills in the next 100 years. That said, the CO2 emissions from launching anything non-essential into orbit are huge, I'd wait until we have a space elevator to (intentionally) throw trash into space.
Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
#20In Switzerland, in some Cantons, there is a trash tax. You pay roughly 1-2 USD the small taxed trash bag. So at the current trend it will literally become cost efficient to send our trash to space in a few years.
I dunno if environmentalists are going to want to send all our trash into LEO