The Moon and the green men

Al Globus wrote:

> For $100 million you can send 5 people to the ISS, or, if the folks in
> at http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital succeed, 500 people on a
> sub-orbital trip. How about funding an international lottery with the
> grand prize a trip to the ISS and 400 sub-orbital trips? That would
> create a large tourist market and generate a lot of publicity.
>
> Another thing you might do, fund the design and construction (or at
> least part) of a tourist module for the shuttle. I think the marginal
> cost of a shuttle flight is $80 million.

Adding a shuttle to the yearly manifest is over $200 million. I
think that due to processing constraints there's a maximum of
two slots. Doesn't the external tank alone cost $100 million a
throw?

> If you can get 18 people in
> the module, there's room for 6 tourists (plus two pilots) in the orbiter
> flight deck and mid-deck. That's 24, to make a profit let's say you need
> $100 million per flight. That's $4 million per passenger for, say, a
> weekend in space.

I think mass-wise you might be able to get over 100 in.
I think a person in a spacesuit is ~200kg. The payload of the
shuttle is over 25 tonnes. You'd need some acceleration
couches that's extra mass, probably not too bad though-
inflatable? I'm not sure what the return payload is for the
shuttle though.

Given Challenger I can't imagine NASA ever, ever going for it.

Meanwhile the russians- their whole rocket costs about $5
million. They could easily stuff another tourist in if they
had to, if they ditched a cosmonaut. They might be able to
fill it with tourists if they really had to.

> Al Globus

--
- Ian Woollard (ian.woollard@...)

"Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding
technological civilization?"
- Gerard O'Neill