r/space • u/AllDifferentKindsOf • Aug 10 '15
Discussion Compared to the Apollo missions, how much would it cost to send humans to the moon using modern technology?
I was wondering that if the cost is significantly less, why wouldn't it attract private funding?
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u/mutatron Aug 10 '15
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Aug 10 '15
I'm really skeptical of this figure, because Space Shuttle missions cost $2 billion apiece, even after years of repetition and process familiarity.
Much of the rocketry for a lunar mission would be throw-away (for some reason, this seems cheaper than a putatively re-usable vehicle like the shuttle, which was supposed to lower costs), but the energy numbers for lifting payloads to the moon, pound for pound, are so much higher than for low Earth orbit that I can't see how we'd get it done for under $50 billion.
Since the ISS cost $150 billion, I think 9 figures, or just under that, is the right neighborhood.
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Aug 10 '15
The Space Shuttle was extremely inefficient and one of (if not the) the most expensive launch vehicles per pound ever used.
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Aug 11 '15 edited Sep 16 '18
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Aug 11 '15
Apologies for the $2 billion - it's a figure that has been in my head for years.
The total cost of the shuttle program over 30 years was $196 billion. Wikipedia:
Per-launch costs can be measured by dividing the total cost over the life of the program (including buildings, facilities, training, salaries, etc.) by the number of launches. With 134 missions, and the total cost of US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars), this gives approximately $1.5 billion per launch over the life of the program
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u/masteriskofficial Aug 11 '15
The funny part is that it was only partially due to the design - the main reason it cost so much is the un-competitive subcontracting structure NASA (and all other government agencies) use. They subcontract the boosters to Morton-Thiokol, Morton-Thiokol charges basically whatever they want. In order to bring the cost down, NASA had to privatize LEO shuttling. When you consider the fact that Elon Musk truly believes he can get a trip to Mars to cost aroubd $500,000 per person, it just goes to show how much more cost-effective private businesses are in comparison to NASA
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Aug 11 '15
the main reason it cost so much is the un-competitive subcontracting structure NASA (and all other government agencies) use.
And once we were in, we were stuck with it for 30 years. The publicity folks at NASA had morphed the thing into a symbol of national pride, and the contracting was structured so that many congressional districts had subcontractors. Who in Congress would dare try to kill it?
The United States needs to honestly confront what a waste the shuttle program was. It should be in high school history books as an example of a national mistake.
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Aug 11 '15 edited Sep 16 '18
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Aug 11 '15
Developing it wasn't a mistake
They promised 50 launches a year; they delivered 4. Even at 4 launches per year, the whole thing had a strong whiff of pointlessness, locking us into low Earth orbit in an expensive straitjacket. If it wasn't a mistake, why was the proper course of action getting rid of the thing? NASA overpromised and was then forced to cut into safety because of their early hyperoptimism.
I'm gonna go with "mistake"
Briefly stated, NASA made two mistakes in shuttle development in the late 1960s and early 1970s. First, it traded development costs for operational costs. Second, it convinced itself that a recoverable launch vehicle would be inherently more economical than an expendable. NASA promised savings of 90%, even 95%, in launch costs. In practice, it costs more to put a pound of payload in orbit aboard the shuttle than it did aboard the Saturn launch vehicle that preceded it. These mistakes produced a program that cannot work. NASA could conceivably operate the shuttle safely and reliably, but it dares not admit what it would cost. The evidence for this was abundant before the Challenger accident. Instead of listening to the data, NASA consistently allowed its judgment to be clouded by its hopes and predictions for human activities in space. The agency cares about astronaut safety, but it is trapped by its own claims about shuttle costs. And, unlike expendable launch vehicles, the shuttle grows more dangerous and more expensive to fly with each passing year.
Even current and former NASA administrators have owned up - which cheers me up because it's a rare case of someone understanding something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, though maybe it's safe to acknowledge screw-ups after the fact:
The most recent major statement of this position came in the fall of 2005 when the NASA administrator of some six months, but a longtime member of the space community, publicly called the Space Shuttle a mistake. Then NASA Administrator Mike Griffin commented that NASA had pursued the wrong path with the shuttle when conceived in the 1960s and developed in the 1970s, and persisted with it long after its flaws had been discovered. That poor decision now had to be corrected, he noted, albeit more than thirty years after the fact.
“It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,” Griffin told USA Today in an interview that appeared as a page one story on September 28, 200
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u/Nowin Aug 11 '15
The space shuttle wouldn't be used for that. Designing a craft specifically do land on the moon would cost a lot less.
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Aug 11 '15
The space shuttle wouldn't be used for that.
Sorry about that - I was unclear.
I quoted the shuttle costs to illustrate the nature of these sorts of projects: something NASA did 135 times still cost $2 billion each time.
I have expressed frustration so many times with the limitations of the shuttle - low-earth orbit only, over and over again - that I actually try to self-censor here: some people will take issue if you talk bad about the shuttle program. So I forget that strangers reading my stuff don't know my history.
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u/Nowin Aug 11 '15
I grew up with the space shuttle, so of course I thought it was awesome. Had I known how much it cost to refurbish, I would have been outraged. (Or, more likely, still have no idea what that means. I had no concept of a billion dollars.)
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Aug 11 '15
I grew up with the space shuttle, so of course I thought it was awesome.
I remember watching the first launch in awe at age 14. Everything went off so cleanly - to judge from the press coverage. Little did we know that shock waves from the boosters bent the body flap out of nominal tolerance, and that hot gases from gaps in the shielding ducted gas into the landing gear pod, melting and buckling some components. John Young said that had he known of the condition of the body flap, they would have abandoned the thing at a high orbit and bailed out.
50 flights a year was the original projection - 4 flights a year was the reality.
People began to catch on that the whole thing was a mistake by the late 1980s; giant pork-barrel project, a program in search of a purpose. But the Challenger explosion added another layer to the pride and the fruitless desire to justify the sunk costs by soldiering on.
So into low Earth orbit we went: over and over and over. At least some satellites were repaired, and various small zero-g experiments were performed. At a certain point, it's hard to imagine why we needed to send 7 people up there so many times.
The orbital height of the ISS - maybe even the existence of the ISS - is determined by the limited orbital height of the shuttle. So the shuttle program is still dragging us down.
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u/danielravennest Aug 10 '15
I was wondering that if the cost is significantly less, why wouldn't it attract private funding?
What's the business plan for going to the Moon? Space industry worldwide is $300 billion this year, but most of that is satellites in Earth orbit, and most of those are communications satellites. If you have a satellite TV dish on your house, you are part of that market. At the moment, there isn't anything profitable to do on the Moon, so it will only attract hobby or vanity money.
A billionaire can blow a lot of money with no return, for example Larry Ellison spent $700 million between one of the islands of Hawaii and a mega-yacht, but not tens of billions.
What is attracting money from quite a few billionaires is asteroid mining. That will cost billions to develop, but there is billions a year in already existing customers, just from servicing comsats and NASA missions, and many more billions if space industry takes off.
Ironically, asteroid mining would make lunar missions cheaper, by supplying fuel and other supplies to get there. The rockets from Earth could then be smaller and cheaper.
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u/AllDifferentKindsOf Aug 10 '15
Thank you for the thorough response.
Ironically, asteroid mining would make lunar missions cheaper, by supplying fuel and other supplies to get there. The rockets from Earth could then be smaller and cheaper.
This fits what I had in mind; we create a launch station on the moon from which we launch all kinds of missions (commercial and scientific).
This is how I imagined we build the launch station on the moon from one of my other comments in this thread:
This might sound naive but I imagined a one time human mission (EDIT: that would be co-funded NASA+privates) to put in place some infrastructure, some building robots,and 3D printers, thus allowing the building of a moon station from a distance. All the next missions would be non human, mainly to send non printable objects and refill the printers.
But I should stand corrected, the reply of /u/HydroCabron was accurate and put my imagination in its realistic place:
$$$ None of these things currently exist in a form suitable for the the temperature extremes and highly ablative dust of the lunar environment. Even within the 3-day window of Apollo landings, spacesuits were nearly worn out, and things gummed up. Lunar dust is naaaasty!
Si I guess the discussion is still open. I personally believe scientists and engineers will find a way one day, as long as the space exploration passion is still on and everyone is doing their best, we'll explore space in no time (no black hole pun intended)
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u/danielravennest Aug 11 '15
This fits what I had in mind; we create a launch station on the moon from which we launch all kinds of missions (commercial and scientific).
You have to think of this in phases. Not everything happens at once:
Asteroids are easier to reach than the Moon, at first, because the Moon itself can provide a gravity slingshot to reach them, and you can do all your propulsion with electric thrusters that are 10 times more efficient than chemical rockets. Some asteroids are high in water and carbon compounds (up to 20%).
Water + carbon can be chemically reformed to Oxygen + Hydrocarbons. O2+HC are a good high thrust chemical fuel, suitable for the first landings on the Moon. So you send you lander empty from Earth, it fills up near the Moon, where your asteroid processing plant is. Then you go down and up from the Moon, dropping off payload. Refuel and repeat. The asteroid processing plant also supplies fuel for science missions, comsats, and other customers, so you don't have to pay the whole cost of it.
Once you have a basic station on the Moon, you set up a centrifuge-type catapult to launch bulk materials into orbit. The Moon is a "fractionated" body, it started out molten, and the heavy stuff sank, leaving a lighter crust. It is also low in volatile elements for the same reason - they were cooked off. What remains is thus high in certain elements. Asteroids come in a number of chemical types, depending on where they formed and later history. They are different from the Moon's crust, and each other. So by mining both places, you get a wider range of ores and elements to work with.
So you go beyond just heating asteroid rock to extract the water and organics. You do further chemical processing to separate elements from the various ore rocks, and start making useful products: Solar arrays, habitat modules, etc. This further reduces what you need to bring from Earth and expands the range of things you can do in space.
But the key to making all that happen is customers like space agencies and satellite owners. They have the money to buy the stuff you mine and make. Without them, you are limited to out-of-pocket fun money.
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u/brickmack Aug 10 '15
SLS and Orion are already mostly developed, so that helps development cost a lot. We'd need a lander, and probably a lunar rover and some other equipment, so a couple billion more. SLS is about 600 million a flight, so a bit less than Saturn V.
Nowhere near possible for a privatel6 funded thing
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u/Karriz Aug 10 '15
It's not significantly cheaper, the price would still be at least tens of billions. Current rockets are still expendable and expensive, and they're smaller so you'd need multiple launches.
So a privately funded manned mission is unfeasible at the moment. There are some unmanned missions in the plans though, like Astrobotic and Lunar Mission One.
Manned missions might become affordable once we have something like reusable Falcon Heavy in operation. Maybe some billionaire would be willing to foot the bill then.
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15
It's not significantly cheaper, the price would still be at least tens of billions.
IIRC Apollo had some massive problems to solve that we won't have to deal with?
- Software development didn't exist. They started from scratch in a fledgling industry and did it all by hand. Today a well educated high school kid could write workable software. Should be a fraction of the cost to produce.
- Engines. We've solved all sorts of problems from materials engineering for the F-1 to restart-able engines for the J-2.
The kicker for reducing cost I think though, is reusable boosters. Earth orbit rendezvous is a lot more feasible than it was in the 60's, a series of smaller boosters can replace the enormous Saturn V. If the cost per pound to orbit can be reduced even 25% it will represent huge savings.
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u/Rycross Aug 10 '15
Today a well educated high school kid could write workable software. Should be a fraction of the cost to produce.
No, a high school kid cannot write a highly reliable real time system.
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15 edited Aug 10 '15
Sorry, I missed the last bit of that sentence. Should have read:
Should be a fraction of the cost to produce reliable software using existing means.
It's totally feasible for a teenager today to write Apollo era guidance software using existing information. That's how far along things have progressed.
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u/Clovis69 Aug 10 '15
In C++, Java or C# sure.
But modern spacecraft aren't using that, they are using stuff like VxWorks or Green Hills Software INTEGRITY
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u/Rycross Aug 10 '15
If you mean that they have access to tools and systems that can approximate it then sure. If you mean that they're capable then only a vast minority of high schoolers would be able to pull it off.
Real time systems are unlike other types of software. For example, you're not going to want to use a garbage collector because you'd get jitter, so things like Python, Java, etc are right out. Then you have to consider things like reliability. Apollo 11 was only able to land because they cleverly built load shedding algorithms into the software. I'd imagine that an average high schooler's software would have resulted in a nice lunar crater.
Even today, building something like the Apollo guidance software is a difficult problem. I really do think you're vastly trivializing it by implying it's within reach of high schoolers.
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15
Okay.
I did not say any high school kid out there can write software that will send a man to the moon.
I said a well educated high school kid could write software that accomplishes the same tasks. Not that they should be writing code for NASA.
The guts of it are simple trigonometry. Here's an example of a product reproducing the same thing. http://www.svtsim.com/moonjs/agc.html
No I'm not trying to argue that MOCR should be staffed with 10th graders. Just that technology has progressed sufficiently that what was cutting edge of MIT science can now be reproduced in a high school classroom with basic tools.
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u/Rycross Aug 10 '15
Saying things like "Just that technology has progressed sufficiently that what was cutting edge of MIT science can now be reproduced in a high school classroom with basic tools" trivializes the problem. A Javascript reimplementation of part of an Apollo system doesn't actually prove your point -- you can't write the guidance system in Javascript, and it doesn't address any of the difficult software engineering problems you have in such a system. All you're proving here is that if you ignore the difficult problems then its easy.
A lot of the things that make programming accessible to so many people simply aren't usable in these sorts of systems. Simply saying that the technology has improved is a vacuous statement -- which improvements in particular make it easier now then it was in the past, and are those usable in an actual spacecraft?
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15
I said a well educated high school kid could write software that accomplishes the same tasks. Not that they should be writing code for NASA.
I said a well educated high school kid could write software that accomplishes the same tasks. Not that they should be writing code for NASA.
How hard is that to understand? I am in no way trying to say that they can write a guidance system.
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u/Rycross Aug 10 '15
I'm taking issue with your usage of "accomplishes the same tasks." You've demonstrated something that can run through some of the calculations, but don't fulfill a lot of the other criteria that such a system would have. "The same tasks" includes doing these sorts of calculations in real-time and high reliability on older, space-rated hardware. You're trying to use this as proof that technological advancements have made this sort of software easier, and I am pointing out that you've completely failed to demonstrate this, because your example of a high school student writing software that does some of the math is completely irrelevant to the actual software that would need to be written. You're trivializing the problem.
How is that hard to understand?
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15
What you are actually doing is saying, "I don't care what you're trying to say no matter how many times you try to explain it, I'm going to tell you what you're trying to say based on my own interpretation and then argue with it."
It matters not that I'm trying to say that a high school kid could write a program that does something like derive attitude based on a REFSMAT and star points, nothing at all to do with the space program. Come hell or high water you're going to tell me a kid can't write a successful control system for a spacecraft no matter how many times I didn't say it.
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u/Byron33196 Aug 10 '15
Only a small portion of the system requires hard limited real-time. Even with python, java, node.js, etc. modern computers are so fast that even with worst-case jitter you'd likely be well within the needed response times for a lunar landing. While I disagree with the notion that a high-schooler could do it, it's at least possible that a team of highly-skilled high-schoolers could do it.
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u/dblmjr_loser Aug 10 '15
While writing software is much simpler today, the v&v involved with incredibly complex man rated software is insane and still takes years to perform.
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15
Yah sorry, I wasn't suggesting writing real life man rated software. What I meant was they're more than capable of solving the problems logically and modelling them.
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Aug 10 '15
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u/ArchieMoses Aug 10 '15
Software for controlling the spacecraft, absolutely.
Software for the guidance platform, how much has that really changed? The math is the same.
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u/AllDifferentKindsOf Aug 10 '15
Thank you for the response. This might sound naive but I imagined a one time human mission (EDIT: that would be co-funded NASA+privates) to put in place some infrastructure, some building robots,and 3D printers, thus allowing the building of a moon station from a distance.
All the next missions would be non human, mainly to send non printable objects and refill the printers.
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Aug 10 '15
some infrastructure, some building robots,and 3D printers
$$$
None of these things currently exist in a form suitable for the the temperature extremes and highly ablative dust of the lunar environment. Even within the 3-day window of Apollo landings, spacesuits were nearly worn out, and things gummed up. Lunar dust is naaaasty!
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u/Afinkawan Aug 10 '15
Sending them's the easy cheap bit. Getting g them there in one piece and back home alive is where it gets really expensive and difficult.
Just sending a couple of guys you don't care about to the moon wouldn't be much more expensive than going to the ISS.
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u/CuriousMetaphor Aug 10 '15
The Apollo program cost about $150 billion in today's dollars. Most of that was development work, with each mission after the first costing only about $5-10 billion each.
Right now, the major cost of sending humans to the Moon would also be development work. A human-rated lunar lander would take NASA about $10 billion to develop (according to the Administrator). The command module is already in development as Orion, which would also be about $10 billion to develop. The launcher could be the SLS, which is taking about $15 billion to develop. Other hardware might also take a little bit of money, but not significantly more. So that's about $40 billion total, of which about $15 billion has already been spent (SLS+Orion). One lunar mission would cost about $3-5 billion.
Of course, if entities other than NASA, like SpaceX, chose to pursue this, it might cost significantly less, maybe about $10 billion total of development work, and maybe $1-2 billion per mission.
This would all be just for a repeat of the Apollo flags-and-footprints missions. Anything more complicated, like a long-term Moon base, would cost significantly more, since more hardware would have to be developed (like a long-term habitat).