At present, we are watching wealthy individuals fly into suborbital space for $250,000 and up, and fly into orbital space for millions. At some point in the coming decades, people without such sums of money to hand will be able to fly into space. Here I describe what that might look like.
The high cost of orbital flight is because, for the moment, the passengers in a space capsule have to pay for the manufacture of at least part of their spacecraft between them. The cheapest orbital vehicle, SpaceX dragon, needs an expendable upper stage with a vacuum-optimised Merlin engine, which is discarded when used. The price charged to NASA is $55 million per seat, whereas the charges for private customers are not publicly available, but the need to manufacture an upper stage lets us put an absolute lower limit. The capsule takes 4 people (although it could potentially carry more) who have to split that cost (claimed by Elon Musk to be about $10 million, and the most expensive part of a reused F…
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