Theoretical costs of spaceflight (For discussion)

[Oldsalter]

Good day all,
I m posting this to argue that in transport you have to
use the asset you have to make the most of the time
you have it available.

How much would a Delta Glider IV cost?
If you had a run of 30 ships how much per unit?
Lets estimate a F-35B costs $122.4m, ball park
a glider could cost 5x that say $612m
If I borrowed that sum for 10 years at a good rate thats doubled
that figure to $1224m.

How much per day capital cost 1224/ 3650 (365 x 10 years) = $335,342 per day.
Insurance thats say 10% of $612m per year = $167,712 per day
Crew say 4 plus 4 (50% on) and 2 on the ground at $100,00 each per day.
(10 x 100,000) / 365 = $ 2,739 per day
Maintenance say $20m probably more (20 /365) = $ 54,794 per day.
-------------------
Ball park total cost for it just sitting there = $560,547 per day

That is at least half a million a day sitting on a runway ready to go.

Cape Canaveral sitting on the ground with 9552 kg of fuel.

How much would 9552 kg of fuel cost?
I have no idea how much this fuel would cost but out of interest lets
estimate it at a dollar a kg then we can multiply up if better figure
is available.

So I am sitting on the runway on the 10th May 20 at 00:00 hours waiting
for the (IMFD) Planar Intercept program to tell me its time to go.
I tend to launch at a heading of 89 using prog 903 spec 90.
I have 4 payloads aboard 2 are Fuel and 2 Jack Daniels.

TEj 0 and TIn 3d so at 01:21 I launch execute. So we get to orbit with
2898 kg of fuel left. We have used 6654kg but importantly we have to wait
4.3k seconds for the cosmic schedule so we can launch to the moon.
That is nearly 1.2 hours waiting for our slot.

So to me the fixed costs of the vehicle will outweigh the costs of the fuel.
The quickest transfer will be the most economic as long as we have the fuel.

I hope this post raises some comment.

All the best
stay safe
oldsalt58.

 

[jedidia]

It's all a bit of a spherical cow in a vacuum of course, but I'd say your example tells you one thing: That something like the delta glider would only be used to get stuff up into orbit and back down, where its ridiculous and expensive complexity actually offers an advantage, and where you can keep it flying at as high a frequency as its operational limits allow.
You'd use something much cheaper and less complex to ferry stuff from orbit to the moon. As long as you can come up with an efficient, reliable procedure to shift your cargo.

A direct earth-surface to moon surface flight for cargo or passengers would probably be prohibitively expensive unless there was an emergency justifying the cost to whoever orders it. Probably worse than chartering a Concord back in the olden days.

Though you're kind of mounting the horse from the wrong side. Operating a Delta glider would be comparable in cost to using conventional rocket launches. That's a reasonable assumption, because if it wasn't the case, there would be no delta glider...