Those are almost certainly “marginal cost” per flight estimates.

You then need to add in all the other costs of a flight to the Moon. I have heard that the marginal cost/flight to the Moon exceeds $2 Billion. Since the plan is to flights/year, that is >$4 Billion per year.

You then need to add in the cost of the hardware that you will put on the Moon, plus the cost of lunar operations.

LUNAR HARDWARE COSTS: Assume the cost of the ISS hardware as a starting point (I am not sure what the latest numbers are, but I believe they were in the range of $40 Billion) for a minimal lunar base.

LUNAR OPERATIONS COSTS: Assume ISS operations costs as a starting point. ISS operations exceed $1 Billion/year, but this number does not include most of JSC’s MOD and Engineering support costs (which are mostly allocated to the Shuttle program.) JSC is not going to lay off all of mission control, or their engineers, so several thousand salaries will be applied to lunar operations costs.

A NASA version of a lunar base gets very expensive real fast.

– Al

That’s probably low, if you include development costs…

No, I was just saying that we won’t do much better with new large expendable launchers. There’s a lot of room for cost improvement with chemically combusted rockets.

$4000/lb for a pound of payload, not a pound of propellant. I think Rand was saying that chemical rockets can’t do much better anytime soon.

You miss my point. These are private commercial companies owned by the same parent organizations and directed by the same board of directors. ULA is under a similar arrangement. Plus there are a number of private sub-contractor companies under these organizations as well.

A significant “commercialization” of Space will not happen by simply replacing USA with ULA or ULA with SpaceX. At present the Space industry is largely supported by government money the world over. Because of this politics will play a very important role in what happens with NASA being used as an extension of the America’s soft power projection and the DOD hard power.

The only way to truly commercialize/privatize the Space industry is to provide a product or service to the private sector from Space that has a unique or competitive advantage over anything we can do on Earth. The ability to move power to any location on Earth at price that is locality/time competitive (i.e. Space Based Solar Power for example) could be an example of this.

Given how large the energy sector is, if this could be done profitably this expansion in the commercialization of Space would dwarf anything the DOD/NASA or existing private satellite communication/remote sensing companies do. At which point the DOD/NASA could truly just procure COTS services as envisioned by the COTS program. Until that happens COTS is just a mechanism to get ULA to lower their prices and fights that breakout between ULA vs USA will be moderated by their respective boards.

Not true. LM runs MAF and USA runs Shuttle ops at KSC. They are all separate companies. There is no synergism between them. Each has its own processes and are no longer interchangeable. LM and Boeing could develop new technology/processes and they are not available to ULA.

Each has its own people and movement between them is not an “officially sanctioned” process. One would have to quit from organization and be hired by another. There is no transfer of benefits, pay, seniority or title/position.