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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?

#71

Post by ska »

centimeter wrote: post #24
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.

I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (b…

If you want every negative externality to be precisely captured by a fee, you will be paying fees all day long.

One approach is to capture a number of related issues in one fee at a natural point of contact that is easy to measure. It's not a crazy idea.

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

#72

Post by cody8295 »

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.

Isn't water a valuable resource?

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

#74

Post by blt »

huhtenberg wrote: post #44
centimeter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stand stuff like that. There's no way the actual negative externality of a small bag of trash is $2. If I lived in a place with a ridiculous rule like that, I would be more inclined to protest the rule by dumping illegally than going along with it. Trash disposal here is great; free unlimited household trash disposal if you drive it to a dump, with only larger things like tires and mattresses costing money (b…

Swiss trash bag fees pay for garbage collection and improvements to the recycling infrastructure. They aren't meant to offset the damage to the Earth or some abstract puffery like that.

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.

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

#75

Post by maxerickson »

cody8295 wrote: post #72
maxerickson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't water a valuable resource?

Not really no. Clean water is valued where it is scarce, but it is relatively cheap to conjure (expensive desalination costs $0.004 a gallon).

In a modern landfill it already gets recovered (there's a liner underneath, so they have to have a way of dealing with water).

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

#76

Post by mabbo »

bgroat wrote: post #65
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.

Or a rail gun. My understanding for why we don't use those for spacecraft is because people and fine machinery can't take the Gs. Trash could.

The main issue with concepts like rail guns and what-not for orbital launches is atmosphere. Your atmospheric drag is a function of velocity squared times the density of the atmosphere- a very non-linear function of how close to the ground you are.

Rockets have a huge advantage in that they go slow near the ground, where the atmosphere is thick. They're not dealing with as much air resistance. As they reach altitudes with less atmosphere, they can throttle up. This saves a lot of fuel, mass, energy.

A rail gun, however, can only add velocity, energy, at the beginning, and will slow down every moment for the rest of the launch. This is the worst possible condition. You're at your highest velocity while you're in the thickest part of the atmosphere. You'd need to put an incredible amount of extra energy into the system because of that.

So maybe you put the end of your rail gun on the top of a very high mountain. But the construction costs, the transportation costs, all of this, probably makes it simpler to just use rockets instead.

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

#77

Post by adolph »

908B64B197 wrote: post #50

That's one of the reasons I'm not really interested in the Artemis program. I'd rather fund Starship to get that massive launch cost reduction and then start looking at returning to the moon. Being able to ship more hardware means you don't have to make it as reliable since you have spares. That further drives down the cost of R&D.

Artemis != SLS. Artemis is a program for which the SLS and other vehicles are under development. SpaceX and other commercial launch providers are also being engaged by the Artemis program to develop vehicles.

While Starship (and maybe New Glenn) does look more attractive than SLS now, a effort as large as Artemis is more concerned with capability than immediately driving the cost down. SLS is a capable vehicle moved forward by proven methods by experienced vendors. The lower risk drives higher and more predictable up front costs.

Check out Everyday Astronaut for some interesting perspective on what is going on with SLS and Starship:

https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/

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

#78

Post by gpm »

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 wants it's Carbon tax to reach $170 CAD per ton by 2030, which seems to be considered a pretty agressive carbon tax [2]. At this rate the fuel burnt in flight would cost a whopping 61 thousand dollars CAD... or 48K USD. On a multi million dollar launch.

[1] https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...

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

#80

Post by hughes »

dougmwne wrote: post #73

I was wondering, so in case you were too, that other recently introduced rocket that has a <$5k/kg launch cost is the Russian Angara A5. It has flown twice. Falcon 9 has flown over 100 times. SpaceX really does have an incredible lead on the competition.

How much useful payload did the A5 deliver in those two flights?
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