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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?

#101

Post by zamadatix »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69
lend000 wrote: post #22

Are these numbers inflation adjusted? The difference would be far more dramatic if not.

They seem to be unadjusted. The source link under the picture links to this dataset: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbR... There's a column there for inflation-adjusted prices, but not much data in it.

This seems to support it being adjusted not unadjusted. There is no unadjusted column and the Saturn V is listed as 5400 adjusted which lines up with the graph, if it were the unadjusted number it'd be ~7x off.

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#102

Post by amelius »

gpm wrote: post #78
amelius wrote: post #64

How would these numbers change if we had a proper carbon tax?

TL;DR - it's a rounding error. A falcon 9 launch burns roughly 260 metric tons of liquid oxygen [1]. CO2 is 1.375 times the weight of O2, so assuming complete all that oxygen turns into CO2 we're looking at 357 metric tons of CO2 (which is an exaggeration, because a good portion of it turns into H2O instead... but the H2O is actually slightly concerning because it's in the upper atmosphere... so whatever). Canada wan…

Ok. How much kg of CO₂ is that per kg of payload?

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#103

Post by marcosdumay »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
satellite2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The log scale and the orgin at 0 definitely don't help the readability here...

Highlighting the SpaceX data points would definitely help with readability. But origin at zero is a good thing; charts with Y axes offset from 0 are generally worse than worthless - they're actively misleading (and often purposefully so).

I don't get the automatic dismissal of graphs with offset axes.

Yes, this one is better because it starts from 0, but there are plenty of reasons to offset a graph. For example, when you want to look at curves correlation (you may even want more than one offset at the same time), or study the change behavior.

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#104

Post by CrazyStat »

valuearb wrote: post #99
CrazyStat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody does launches on a week's notice.

Soon we won’t remember when SpaceX wasn’t launching every week.

Launching every week is still very different from launching on a week's notice.

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#105

Post by blt »

sonotmyname wrote: post #90
blt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying by the bag is good. In the USA, if you live in a detached house there's normally a fixed price to get a large barrel collected weekly. The barrel is large enough to hold a week's trash from a family of four who puts no effort into reducing trash output. If you live alone and are conscious about generating trash, you get ripped off.

> In the USA Hold up.. This not only varies by state, but by county and city. Some places have this built in to special assessments on property taxes, some contract with a trash company that collects fees directly, and some are a bit of a free for all with multiple trash companies providing pickup and or/dumpster service (this is more common in rural areas). I had a place up in the mountains where we had to buy speci…

True, I should have said "in places I have lived in the USA".

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#106

Post by RyJones »

ashtonkem wrote: post #53
xyzzyz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might also be that slag might be closer to smelters than ore, reducing transport costs.

That also seems quite likely. That or slag is much lighter per lb of refined product, reducing the transit cost. Iron ores are incredibly common, but they’re also very heavy, what with them being literally rocks.

of course I can't find the original video I was watching, but since the slag is directly outside the steel mill, transit is about as low as it could get.

If you search on YouTube for "deskulling slag pot", you'll find a bunch of videos showing slag trains going maybe a couple miles from the mill to a pit to deskull?

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#107

Post by cbozeman »

mdorazio wrote: post #59
cbozeman wrote: post #23

Given these insanely cheap prices, I have to wonder about the viability of sending your own microsatellites into space to create your own personal communications cluster. I don't know enough to know what all would be required, how / if you could communicate with other networks, etc., but even just having your own personal LEO satellite-based communications network seems relatively plausible based on these launch cost…

You're still looking at over a hundred thousand dollars to put a single 1U cubesat in orbit (including development, testing, and certification for the sat itself). And that would be moving at 6-7km/s relative to the ground, so you can see how expensive it would be to put any kind of useful personal constellation into orbit still

> And that would be moving at 6-7km/s relative to the ground, so you can see how expensive it would be to put any kind of useful personal constellation into orbit still

No, I can't see that... because I'm not a satellite communications expert. My training is evolutionary biology and international business.

I don't know how many satellites it would take to provide private communications across the United States, or the globe, or any section of area. It sounds like you might though.

Let's say one wanted to create their own personal satellite communications for telephone and data transmission. How many would you need?

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#108

Post by gpm »

amelius wrote: post #102
gpm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR - it's a rounding error. A falcon 9 launch burns roughly 260 metric tons of liquid oxygen [1]. CO2 is 1.375 times the weight of O2, so assuming complete all that oxygen turns into CO2 we're looking at 357 metric tons of CO2 (which is an exaggeration, because a good portion of it turns into H2O instead... but the H2O is actually slightly concerning because it's in the upper atmosphere... so whatever). Canada wan…

Ok. How much kg of CO₂ is that per kg of payload?

Seriously? Just google the payload size and divide... Also... Do you have a point?

Re: How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?

#110

Post by Triv888 »

satellite2 wrote: post #11

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.

If you keep sending trash to space, earth will disappear
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