Space Transportation Costs: Trends in Price Per Pound to Orbit ...

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Western launch vehicles – Ariane, Atlas, and Delta – account for 81% of the commercial GSO launches in this time frame, the average price per pound for these launches in a given year was as much as $1,000 higher than the average for all vehicles. By the end of the decade, however, Western vehicles had reached rough parity on a price-per-pound basis with their non-Western counterparts; this can be seen in Figure 1 by noticing the reduced scatter in the data points in the late 1990s versus the early 1990s. The departure of Chinese boosters from the commercial GSO market in the late 1990s because of reliability and export control issues likely also played a role in stabilizing prices by removing one of the sources of downward pressure on prices. NGSO Experience There is considerably less data for commercial NGSO launch pricing, simply because there have been far fewer commercial launches to NGSO than to GSO: there were 64 commercial NGSO launches in the 1990-2000 period, compared to nearly 200 commercial GSO launches. The price-per-pound data for those commercial NGSO launches, normalized to constant year 2000 dollars, are plotted in Figure 2. $60,000 Figure 2: Estimated Launch Price Per Pound for Commercial NGSO Payloads (constant 2000$) $50,000 Dollars per pound $40,000 $30,000 $20,000 $10,000 $0 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 Year of Launch Unlike the commercial GSO data, there are no clear trends in the price per pound of commercial NGSO launches. Most launches since 1995 cluster near $10,000 per pound, although there are some significantly higher outliers. These results can be explained in large part by the fact that commercial NGSO payloads have generally utilized a far smaller portion of the vehicle’s stated capacity than GSO launches. While GSO payloads used 80-90% of a vehicle’s capacity on average during the 1990-2000 period, NGSO payloads have used less than half of a vehicle’s stated capacity during this time, even though many NGSO launches are multi-manifested with several spacecraft on each launch vehicle. Technical limitations of putting spacecraft in multiple orbital planes on one launch, as well as a desire to limit the exposure of a satellite constellation to a launch failure, put limits on multi-manifested launches that fall short of the vehicle’s payload capacity. Many of the data points in Figure 2 with values greater than $20,000 a pound can be explained by launches that use a quarter or less of the capacity of the vehicles. © Futron Corporation 2002 5
Conclusions The price per pound of launch vehicles can be computed in two ways: a generic estimate using estimated launch vehicle costs and published payload capacities, and a more specific computation for each launch event using the cost of the vehicle for that launch and the mass of its payload. The generic metric offers a qualitative measure of launch industry costs, with lower prices per pound for larger as well as non- Western vehicles. The specific metric avoids a number of disadvantages of the generic metric and permits a more detailed, quantitative study of launch costs over the period. The commercial GSO launch market has shown, on a specific price-per-pound basis, significant reductions in launch costs between 1990 and 2000. This can be attributed in large part to increased competition, particularly the introduction in the first half of the decade of lower-priced Chinese and Russian launch vehicles. The overall commercial launch market adjusted by lowering prices, stabilizing around $12,000 per pound in the latter half of the 1990s, nearly one-third less than launch costs at the beginning of the decade. While this decrease is significant, it has failed to stimulate increased commercial activity. Since the late 1990s demand for commercial launches has dropped dramatically, from over 35 launches a year in the late 1990s to only 16 in 2001. Most industry forecasts show that commercial launch activity is unlikely to return to the peak levels of the late 1990s for the next ten years, despite the reduction in launch costs. This demonstrates the price inelasticity of the current launch market. Regarding NGSO launch prices, there is no clear trend in the price-per-pound metric, other than a clustering around $10,000 per pound in the late 1990s. While this is lower than GSO launches, it is not as low as one might expect, because NGSO payloads have generally used a lower fraction of a vehicle’s capacity than GSO payloads. Although any decrease in the cost of space access is heartening, the decreases in price per pound seen in the last decade, as significant as they may be, appear to fall well short of what is needed to trigger major increases in commercial space activity. Far deeper cuts in the price per pound to orbit, such as the $1,000/pound goal of NASA’s Space Launch Initiative, may be necessary to promote growth of the commercial space sector. © Futron Corporation 2002 6
Page 1 and 2: Space Transportation Costs: Trends
Page 3 and 4: Generic Price Per Pound Calculation
Page 5: Specific Price Per Pound Calculatio

Space Transportation Costs: Trends in Price Per Pound to Orbit ...

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