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Jeff Garzik commented on a previous post:

Perhaps I am naive, but I sincerely believe that technology is cheap enough to permit matching of the right business plan with investment funding, sufficient to get a commercial venture going to the moon or Mars.

That supposition is being tested now. There's some success, such as the investment of $280 into Virgin Galactic, and something that's less than success, such as the Excalibur Almaz program. But "cheap enough" is not cheap, and the required investment is nowhere near that of Internet companies. Elon Musk mentions in every interview how the key difference in space business how it's very capital intensive. Just to see the scale, here are a few numbers:

• Mr. Musk spent $100 million to get Falcon 1 developed up to the flight 1 (after that sacks of government money started falling from the sky on Falcon 9 and the accounting became convoluted).
• He also said that the development of the escape system for otherwise ready capsule will cost $200 million.
• Mr. Bigelow offered $760 million to anyone who would develop him a capsule, there were no takers.
• Orbital announced this week that they'll man-rate Taurus II and make a crew module for Cygnus for $2 to $3 billion.

Mind, these are not traditonal, expensive space contractors (with the possible exception of Orbital, who found a niche of a cheap government contractor). All of the above is firmly in the "NewsSpace" area.

Of course we have things going on like the Microlauncher contest (the $8K launcher), or Garvey Space etc. But these things are nowhere, nowhere near dealing with manned launches. Realistically, anything going into orbit requires hundreds millions before it can make a business case. It's still pretty cheap, on the scale of 5% of what NASA burns on similar tasks, which is an amazing progress. Yet, it's not where two guys in garage can have a go at it.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 05:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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