China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

Re:China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout by zokier on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:15PM (#18913965)

You can ship a 40ft container with about 25t capacity for about $2000-$5000 between any major ports on Earth, and probably for even less for bigger volumes.

SpaceX BFR has about 100t capacity to Mars. While the total cost of a Mars mission has not been publicized, I suspect it would be fair bit more than $20k.

Biggest container ships these days carry about 20k TEU, or about 500000 tons of cargo. You can try putting that number to the rocket equation just for fun.

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Re:China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout by ryanmercer on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @10:21AM (#18921539)

>SpaceX BFR has about 100t capacity to Mars. While the total cost of a Mars mission has not been publicized, I suspect it would be fair bit more than $20k.

While we don't have SpaceX numbers, Zubrin said in 2012 that if given to NASA Mars Direct (A Mars proposal from 1990-1991, updated in 1996 in Zubrin's book The Case for Mars) would cost 30-50 billion but a private company could do it for around 5bn. That still put you at several million dollars per metric ton delivered to the Martian surface BUT that included all design and administrative costs.

You can see some of the Mars Direct figures here http://www.astronautix.com/m/marsdirect.html

We also know what SpaceX quotes 90 million dollars for 16.8 metric tons to Mars with Falcon heavy which puts us at 5.35 million dollars per ton which is already quite a bit cheaper than the most optimistic Mars Direct figures. https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

BFR should be able to do way better than that if it ever becomes a viable system.

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