Clark Lindsey comments on how Arianespace just raised prices instead of lessening costs. I’m reminded of Rob Coppinger’s recent visit to Kourou, their launch site. It just costs a lot to keep a city going in the middle of jungle, and when that cost must be paid by the monthly rocket flight customers only, it gets expensive per flight.
A lot of ideas have beend expounded on expendable rocket manufacturing and reusable refurbishment costs. But it seems the integration before launch is terribly expensive as well, if not the most expensive part. And the launch control costs as well, as does mission control.
Airports are expensive facilities as well, but they are still cheap per trip since the throughput is large. Though I don’t know how smaller airports manage, if they still need radars, passenger and aircraft services etc…
Anyway, this should be a very important focus. It’s less sexy than the sleek fast machines, but lays the important ground work for space access.
The suborbital trips might be good training and experimentation for this. Virgin galactic seems to opt for grandeur with huge custom facilities, making it into something like a theme park. I do wonder if XCOR’s working on something more modest. This might make a huge difference to their profit margin per flight…
Gravity Loss (now moved to gravityloss.com) 