How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by xyzzyz » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #45

RyJones wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just watching a video where they made the claim that the slag from steel production 100 years ago has more metal than some ores, so it's becoming worthwhile to re-mill slag.

Video games have largely misled us here. Iron ore is incredibly common, it’s not a rare resource at all. The limiting factor for steel production has historically been energy, not ore, and in the modern context the ability to produce pure oxygen for carbon reduction. Historically iron mines were put near forests for fuel, not wherever the richest ore was. The advantage of re-using slag isn’t that it’s richer in metal…

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

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

#52

Post by xcskier56 » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

iguy wrote: post #48

zeroxfe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At a few hundred dollars per kg, I bet you could run a business scattering people's ashes. Maybe even at a few thousand. I wonder if they would turn you down? Edit -- turns out this is a thing, already, I just didn't know. SpaceX apparently does not mind. Flights to the moon are planned.

Had to have a recent loss to learn this, but in the funeral home's options package was to send some of the ashes to space for $2500. The director skipped over that page quickly, but it was a picture of a Falcon 9 taking off

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

#53

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #51

ashtonkem wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games have largely misled us here. Iron ore is incredibly common, it’s not a rare resource at all. The limiting factor for steel production has historically been energy, not ore, and in the modern context the ability to produce pure oxygen for carbon reduction. Historically iron mines were put near forests for fuel, not wherever the richest ore was. The advantage of re-using slag isn’t that it’s richer in metal…

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.

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

#54

Post by simonh » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

aaron_m04 wrote: post #4

It 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.

The upper stage of an F9 or FH costs $10m and is expended every time. The fairings also cost $6m ($3m per half fairing) and are pretty tricky to recover. No part of Starship will be expended every time, it’s all reusable. The only marginal cost per flight is the fuel and operations costs. They’re not going to reach 1/28x with the early models, maybe only 1/10, but eventually they’ve got a reasonable chance.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #14

postit wrote: post #2

Honest 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 shou…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #19

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.

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.

Trash isn't full of valuable materials though. It's full of food (mostly water by weight I guess) and paper and plastic with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.

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

#57

Post by thereisnospork » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #14

postit wrote: post #2

Honest 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 shou…

> 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.

It sounds awful at first glance, but I wonder what the environmental impacts actually are of nuclear waste de orbiting and spreading evenly over the atmosphere. Normalized out per kwh, environmental radiation release might be less than the equivalent coal power plant? I'll have to break out an excel sheet later.

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

#58

Post by dgacmu » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

lend000 wrote: post #22

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

Thanks for asking this, it's super-important to understand it. If they're not infation-adjusted, then there's already been a (very slow) exponential reduction in the cost.

I think they are inflation-adjusted. Here's an inflation-adjusted source that explicitly lets you pick FY2021 dollars as the reference:

https://aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-or...

It puts the Saturn V at $5k USD/kg, the same as this article.

What's interesting is that it shows a general downward trend a little more clearly than this one does, but the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still very shocking outliers.

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

#59

Post by mdorazio » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

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

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

#60

Post by blacksmith_tb » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #56

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trash isn't full of valuable materials though. It's full of food (mostly water by weight I guess) and paper and plastic with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.

True, I was being hyperbolic (oof, the pun material is just too good). But the organics pretty much take of themselves, leaving behind just the bits we might want to reuse. Of course, we could be composting the organics and reusing them now, my city does that, though they give the compost away to any takers, which suggests the economics are still a work in progress.