How Cheap Can Spaceflight Become

Commercial spaceflight is currently only for the rich. It won't always be such - how low can the price get? Will you be able to buy a ticket in your lifetime?

During the development of the Space Shuttle in the 1970s, a number of Shuttle variants were studied by Rockwell, the contractor tasked with building the orbiters. One of them was a passenger module that could be carried in the payload bay, and would allow the Shuttle to take an extra 74 passengers to space

This was never developed; not only did the Shuttle never reach the required safety for it to be considered, but it would have also required aerodynamic modifications to the orbiter. Perhaps more significantly - there was no demand for so many passengers on orbit. For such a transportation system to be useful, a very large space station would be needed for them all to disembark to.

A Shuttle flight cost about $1.4 billion (adjusted for 2023 prices) in practice. Using a very rough regression on the same data, I found the marginal price per flight in the years it most flew, 1989-2002, to be $415 million in 2023 dollars. I’ll be generous and take this figure as a the actual cost to a comm…