In case you don’t remember it from science class, the distance between the Earth to the Moon is 238,000 miles.Ĥ. The Shuttle also flew to the Hubble Telescope, which is maintained at an altitude of 350 miles, a little less than the distance from NYC to Norfolk, VA. However, the Shuttle's trip to the International Space Station (ISS) was only a 200-250 mile journey… approximately the distance between NYC and Boston. The Shuttle had an operational altitude of only 120 to 600 miles. ![]() Watson said, “The public has this mental image of going somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, and the fact is, it’s not true.” ![]() This makes the Soyuz both the most capitalist and the least government-funded space transportation option. It’s also-and the irony here is almost painful-the only one you can buy a seat on. "But even if it cost $80 million to launch, it's still significantly cheaper than Shuttle.Īccording to MSNBC, “Russia is now seen as having the world's safest, most cost-effective human spaceflight system.” Of course, in accordance with supply & demand, they’re now selling seats for $63 million a piece: initially "tickets" were selling for around $20 million. Watson said, “That number has never been publicized by the RSA, but it’s rumored to be as low as $45 million. On the other hand, the Soyuz, the vehicle of choice of the Russian Space Agency (RSA), is less expensive by an order of magnitude. These issues led to rising and rising costs.”įamously, at one point, NASA had to find parts for the Shuttle-parts that no one else made anymore- on eBay. So the cost goes up because they’re not selling to anyone else besides the government, and their entire assembly line to build that piece needs to be maintained by the government. “Over thirty years, some companies go out of business, or basically their entire business is that one component, which is being paid for purely by the government. Designed in the 1970s and completed in the 1980s, the Shuttle had some modifications over the years, but for the most part, it remained frozen in time. Yet another reason is that the equipment was so very old. One of the many reasons the Shuttles were so expensive was because some of the equipment used to launch, such as the external tank, were non-reusable and had to be replaced with each launch. Over the life of the programme, this increases to about $1.5 billion per launch During the operational years from 1982 to 2010, the average cost per launch was about $1.2 billion. The US Congress and NASA spent more than US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars) on the shuttle from 1971 to 2010 (see 'A costly enterprise')…. The average cost per flight from the middle of 2005 through 2010, assuming 22 flights, is about $1.0 billion, he said. Of further interest is the average cost per flight from 2004-2010: It is $1.3 billion. …Given that flight rate, this will result in a total program cost per flight of $1.3 billion, Pielke explained. According to, in an article written in 2005,į the space shuttle program is terminated after 2010, then it will have a total lifetime cost of about $173 billion, Pielke reported. All five Shuttles flew a total of 135 missions. ![]() And I’m not just saying this because I’m jealous as hell, but the Space Shuttle missions cost too much and provided too little.Īlthough NASA says that it cost a trifling $450 million to launch each Shuttle mission, other sources find that price tag vastly underestimated. A total of 355 people flew on STS (Shuttle Transportation System), and not one of them was me. You can’t put a price on scientific research. (There is no hard data available on the deaths of Soviet-era cosmonauts, but unsubstantiated rumors suggest that there may have been Soviet casualties in the early days of the space race.) The Chinese space program has currently had no fatalities.Īs for the Russian space program, one cosmonaut died during the re-entry of the Soyuz 1, and three died on the Soyuz 11 after being exposed to vacuum. ![]() The Mercury and Gemini missions had no fatalities. To compare, the Apollo I mission resulted in the death three astronauts during a launch pad test.
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