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Originally Posted by Planetside
Hey good responses by everyone!
I tend to look at things and ask why not. I was thinking that the privatizing of space would lower prices, increase competition and get these companies interested in being the first private company to give space rides.
The pricing structure would be funny:
$5000 per person, $3000 for kids or elderly.
$1000 per UFO photo, screened and brushed out by NASA.
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That isn't feasible.
Here, assuming you could build your space plane for $500M let's have a look at how long it would take to pay it off.
Currently the Shuttle can carry 7 people all crew, but let's say that your space plane can carry 30 paying passangers.
We'll say that a launch costs you the rediculously low figure of $500k to have your crew paid, the flight techs check the spacecraft (remember safety is a bigger thing here then at NASA because you have paying passangers and killing them ruins your business) all the flight control people, fuel, etc.
Okay we are going to charge $50,000 a ride. (That's 10 times your figures Planetside) so that nets us $1.5M per trip.
Our expenses are $500k so we have a profit of $1M per trip.
To pay off our plane and start making a profit we need to launch 500 times.
So, how often can we launch? Well assuming a 3 day trip, then the rest of the week to get the plane back, strip it fix problems service and get it back to the launch pad in another 2, that gives us a 3 week launch period and with 52 weeks in the year thats 17 launches a year. Divide 500 by 17 and we get a grand total of......
29.4 years.
Now my figures are on the conservative side, but it shows the point. What company is going to wait 30 odd years to show a profit?????
Note that this doesn't include the fact that you'd most likely have had to replace your space plane inside that 30 year period anyways meaning you'd never make a profit.