Re:How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
by lend000 on Friday December 18, 2020 @03:53PM
(#25471832)
Are these numbers inflation adjusted? The difference would be far more dramatic if not.
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Re:How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
by dgacmu on Friday December 18, 2020 @04:13PM
(#25472116)
Thanks for asking this, it's super-important to understand it. If they're not infation-adjusted, then there's already been a (very slow) exponential reduction in the cost.
I think they are inflation-adjusted. Here's an inflation-adjusted source that explicitly lets you pick FY2021 dollars as the reference:
https://aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-or...
It puts the Saturn V at $5k USD/kg, the same as this article.
What's interesting is that it shows a general downward trend a little more clearly than this one does, but the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still very shocking outliers.
Re:How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
by quercusa on Friday December 18, 2020 @03:58PM
(#25471913)
It's surprising not to see that anywhere — it's the natural question.
Re:How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
by mensetmanusman on Friday December 18, 2020 @04:27PM
(#25472277)
Not at my computer, but this function in mathematica would help:
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/InflationAdjust.h...
Re:How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
by TeMPOraL on Friday December 18, 2020 @04:29PM
(#25472292)
They seem to be unadjusted. The source link under the picture links to this dataset:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1TPewJ64QNVtM5sbR...
There's a column there for inflation-adjusted prices, but not much data in it.
Re:How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit?
by zamadatix on Friday December 18, 2020 @06:27PM
(#25473386)
This seems to support it being adjusted not unadjusted. There is no unadjusted column and the Saturn V is listed as 5400 adjusted which lines up with the graph, if it were the unadjusted number it'd be ~7x off.