A reminder that the House Science Committee will be holding a hearing about Orion (formerly the CEV) this afternoon at 2 pm. The hearing will be in Rayburn 2318 and should be webcast through the committee’s web site. I won’t be able to watch the hearing live so I’ll welcome any comments people who do attend or watch the hearing have about it.
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NASAwatch: “Doc Horowitz spoke of a $200 million cost per CEV flight.”: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2006/09/cev_hearing_not.html#more
clearly a misunderstanding… (over!) $200M will be the price of EACH 5-seg.SRB launched…
12 (moon missions in 2020-2025) x 3 (5-seg.SRB/mission) + 15 (test and ISS launches) = 51 (5-seg.SRBs used in 2020-2025)
(optimistic) $60M (5-seg.SRB unit price) x 51 units = $3,060M + $3,000M (5-seg.SRB shared R&D costs) + $10,000M ($500M/year NASA/Navy sea retrieval costs x 20 year) = $16,060 / 51 = $314.9M per SRB launched!
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Mr. Marano,
Can you please provide a source for the numbers you use?
– Al
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the number of moon missions comes form ESAS plan and latest NASA release (first mission in 2020, two missions per year)
the number of test flight from latest NASA press release about the Ares-I development timeline from 2009
the number of ISS flight is an evaluation that comes from the max ISS astronauts (shared between NASA, ESA and Russia) to-day’s missions per year and the fact the ESA and Russia use (and will use) the cheaper Soyuz
the number of ISS missions may be a little more but, if USA will withdraw from ISS in 2016 (as many rumors say), the flights may only a few
the 5-seg.SRB price ($60M) is an (optimistic) evaluation of the new SRB hardware price that starts from the current SRB price ($40M) adding one segment (+$10M) and some costs for the new nozzle, etc. (+$10M)
however, the real price may be HIGHER than $60M since the “low” 4-seg.SRB price is (also) due to some “scale economy” of this product already built (so far) in 230+ units
I think that each 5-seg.SRB may cost $80-100M
for the $3B for the 5-seg.SRB R&D costs I’ve only the NASAwatch source where the news appears (as first) some months ago (now that figure is also on Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Derived_Launch_Vehicle ]
the $500M figure (for the SRBs sea retrieval costs per year) comes from a reader’s comment on “The Write Stuff” blog about the Navy/NASA contract
the reader that posted the comment was not anonymous and I will try to contact him for an official link (that I will post here) but (in my opinion) the $500M figure is credible since it perfectly matches the traditional NASA standard about costs…
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