Space Shuttle cost overrun

Original Shuttle goal of reducing orbital payload cost from $10,000/lb to $1,000/lb (1970 dollars) used as the benchmark for current SpaceX-era price points.

First of all, it's a one-year trip one way. And the $20,000 — the people who are going to colonize the moon, let's not go to Mars, they're going to colonize the moon at twenty thousand dollars a pound. The original Space Shuttle was supposed to reduce the price of a pound in orbit — that was in 1970 dollars — from $10,000 a pound to $1,000 a pound. Let's say we can do it for a thousand dollars a pound. SpaceX or whatever is going to get payload in orbit for a thousand dollars a pound. You know what it's going to cost for me to buy a ticket? I would be incentivized to lose some weight. A thousand a pound.

Apollo cost $5-10K/lb in 1960s. Space Shuttle was supposed to drop this to $1K/lb but came in at $30-40K/lb. Used to illustrate that "value of weight saved" calculations for spacecraft depend on actual program economics, not promised economics.

Look at the numbers back when we were shooting rockets off in the Apollo program. It was costing five to ten thousand dollars a pound in the 1960s to get a pound of payload in orbit. If you go back and read the 1970s documents, the purpose of the Space Shuttle was to drop the price from ten thousand dollars a pound to a thousand dollars a pound. That's what they told Congress when they asked for the program. If you look at the Space Shuttle in its history of 30 years of use, its actual cost was about thirty or forty thousand dollars a pound — because of the Challenger, the disasters, the efficient management we have at NASA, and all these other things. It was supposed to drop the price by a factor of 10. It actually came in at thirty thousand dollars a pound, or 40,000. I'm sure it depends on how you do your accounting.

Cargo bay sized for chemical laser weapon. Original promise was $1,000/lb to orbit; actual cost reached $50,000/lb over the 25-year program. Used as an example of how military programs are sold to Congress as civilian programs.

How many of you think the space shuttle was built for civilian purposes? It was built to hold the lasers they were going to put in space to shoot down the missiles coming at us. The cargo bay just happened to be the exact size of the chemical laser weapon — amazing. But you couldn't have gotten it through Congress if you were just proposing it as a 20-billion-dollar military project. But if you said we're going to make space travel cheaper so it only costs a thousand dollars a pound to get into space, rather than twenty thousand dollars a pound of payload — now, did they achieve it? The space shuttle over the 25 years or so, they increased the price to about fifty thousand dollars a pound in space. They didn't get it down to a thousand; they still talked about trying to get it down to a thousand dollars a pound.

Original 1970s goal was $1,000/lb to orbit at 1–20 flights/yr; actual cost ~$20,000/lb, possibly higher than expendable rockets. ISS critique. Tom's running cost-benefit complaint as a taxpayer.

The highest-value structural materials are worth about $20,000 a pound. They go into — does anyone know what they go into?

Brief mention. Shuttle was supposed to lower payload-to-orbit from $10,000/lb to $1,000/lb; instead raised it to $300,000/lb. Used to anchor the cost-of-weight discussion. Treated as a known case; not developed here.

The space shuttle in the late 1960s was supposed to lower the price of a payload into orbit from $10,000 a pound to $1,000 a pound. How successful was the space shuttle? Well, it upped the price to about $300,000 a pound, because it had a few problems — but that's another story. It didn't meet its goal. Then there was the X-33 space plane that was supposed to give us a reusable space shuttle, and it had problems too. We'll tell you some of those stories in some of these other lectures. But you have to decide which modules you want to take.

Promised $1,000/lb in orbit; delivered $40,000/lb. The Shuttle was "never cost-effective."

So if you look this up, Lockheed Martin — I guess it was Lockheed before Lockheed Martin that did the C5-A and beat Boeing out for the aircraft transport back in the 60s — the X-33 Lockheed Martin was supposed to replace the space shuttle. It was supposed to be single-stage-to-orbit. The problem with $10,000 or $20,000 a pound in orbit is that you have to throw away your vehicle on every trip, and that's expensive. That's one of the things SpaceX has done. SpaceX has a returnable vehicle, in theory, as long as it doesn't blow up on the pad, which they do. We can talk about those statistics. If you can bring back your structure and reuse it — that's what the Space Shuttle was supposed to do. If you go back and look at the claims and the justification, the Space Shuttle was going to take $10,000 a pound in orbit and drop it to $1,000 a pound. It turns out they had enough problems that they actually raised the price to about $40,000 a pound. The Space Shuttle was never cost-effective. But it was our main way of getting things in space for thirty years. We had a fleet of five, and when we lost one we built another. Finally it was just too expensive to maintain and they decided to go back to the old disposable rockets.

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The shuttle missed its $10,000/lb target; was supposed to fly 100 missions a year. "An absolute disaster from a financial point of view."

You actually have to look at what type of transportation you're doing. For space-based things, it costs $20,000 a pound to get something into orbit. If you go back to the 1970s, the goal of the space shuttle at that time was to lower the cost of payload in orbit from $10,000 — and it sort of missed the target, it would be cheaper. They were going to have space shuttle shots twice a week, 100 a year, except they never got there because it was a little more complex than they had anticipated and a lot more expensive. The space shuttle was an absolute disaster from a financial point of view. But it was great for NASA, bringing in billions, tens of billions of dollars every year.

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Background to the X-33 project. The shuttle was sold to the public on a $20,000/lb → $1,000/lb cost reduction promise, which it never met, and was secretly justified to Congress by the Defense Department's space-laser-weapon cargo-bay size requirement.

Another example from the aerospace industry is the X-33 space plane. [Tom holds up a piece from the X-33 hydrogen tank.] This came off one of the two liquid hydrogen tanks. The X-33 space plane was a project in the early 90s, a $1.3 billion project to build a prototype to replace the space shuttle. NASA had five space shuttles, they weren't going to last forever, and they weren't economical like they were supposed to be. That was their purpose in the early 70s. Most people think the space shuttle was a civilian project. No. It was sold to the public as, we'll be able to colonize the moon and we'll reduce the cost of a pound in space from $20,000 to $1,000. That was their goal. If you go back and look at the 1970s data, it wouldn't have gotten through Congress if they didn't have the support of the Defense Department. The space shuttle main cargo bay just happens to be the same size as a space laser weapon. Just a coincidence. If it weren't for the fact that the Defense Department was cheering on NASA and the committees in Congress, they wouldn't have gotten it approved, because you couldn't justify it on purely commercial reasons.

Goal was to drop space-launch cost from $10,000/lb to $1,000/lb; operational problems pushed it to $40,000/lb instead — a factor-of-four increase rather than factor-of-ten decrease.

And this is the X-33 space plane. When you're going to twenty thousand dollars a pound for material into space — it always cost about ten thousand dollars a pound to get a pound of useful material into space. In the early 1970s, NASA had a goal to drop that to a thousand dollars a pound, and so they designed the space shuttle. The goal of the space shuttle was to drop the cost to about a thousand dollars a pound of useful material into orbit. So whenever you read about these things — any Course 16 folks in here? — they say, "Oh, we're going to colonize the moon, and we can send all the rich people to the moon." The only people who can afford ten thousand dollars a pound — it's going to cost $1.8 million to send an average person, just to get them there without their clothes or anything else. So there's a little problem with this "we're going to colonize Mars." It's because you haven't looked at the cost of these things.