Will Anybody build a commercial space station for NASA?

[@neobrandeggen]

How much did Lego pay you?

[@personzorz]

Shill in the pocket of big Lego.

[@EagerSpace]

LOL

[@EagerSpace]

I regret that I cannot comment on the existence of any sponsorship deals.

[@PetesGuide]

@@EagerSpaceKZbin terms of service will be entering the chat shortly …

[@javaman4584]

Eager Space: De-orbiting your space fantasies one concept at a time.

[@SatoshiKitagawa]

After watching a bunch of these, I think it all comes down to launch cost, which is why I have all my fingers crossed for Starship literally launching these concepts again

[@EagerSpace]

Don't forget my asteroid mining opinion...

[@sankao]

@@SatoshiKitagawais there really a commercial need for a space station if you have starship ? You’d just run whatever experiments while on it.

[@APMI-OFICIAL]

@@sankao The maximum time that a crew dragon can spend in orbit is 6 days, it could be useful for short experiments, but experiments that take months to complete will not be possible (for example any plant, animal or cell growth experiment in microgravity)

[@winstonsmith478]

After reading this book one realizes that human spaceflight is a horrendous waste of limited space exploration funds: The End of Astronauts: How Robots are the Future of Exploration (2022). Just say no to SPAM in a CAN in SPACE.

[@danmosenzon1477]

As usual in space development, all roads lead to the need to reduce launch costs.

[@scottmatheson3346]

not in this case. reducing launch costs leads to missions based on rockets becoming more attractive relative to missions to a dedicated space station. if launch costs are high then the added cost of the space station itself is relatively insignificant.

[@admarsandbeyond]

NASA CLD always seemed like a pipe dream to me. I think that's why SpaceX never made a serious offer for it. Commercial Space stations imo will only make sense when starship is flying crew. I see a future where cheap mass produced Starship hulls will be outfitted as stations and operated by 3rd party companies, with spacex providing launch, resupply, transport, maintenance, and professional crews (that's what the astronaut core Isaacman is preparing for them is for). Easy and cheap to make and lajnch, cheap access, easily expandable, these stations are going to be the first true commercial destinations; hotels, research stations, manufacturing, large science experiments, space docks for outbound missions, even residences.

[@GuardsmanBass]

The irony is that a cheap Starship could also wipe out the business model for most commercial space stations. Why maintain a permanent station in orbit when the internal volume of Starship is so large that you can basically use it as a "temporary" station and bring it back down between uses?

[@admarsandbeyond]

@@GuardsmanBass I agree. Eventually most space stations will not be permanent, it's much easier and more practical to bring them down for maintenance and resupply and send them back up, functioning like an oceanographic research ship. Only the really big stations will be permanent, stations combining several full starships (payload bay + tanks= ~3200m^3) with 10s of thousands of cubic meters of pressurized volume for things like large hotels, venues, manufacturing, big research experiments etc

[@EagerSpace]

See my (probably) future video on tourism and manufacturing in space. *Way* easier to build a uncrewed factory into a starship - or other reusable 2nd stage - with "good enough" quality, launch it and let is run for 1-6 months, bring it back and then refurbish it on the ground. If something breaks, you just bring it back down and fix it on the ground.

[@GordonWrigley]

@@EagerSpace That sounds like an interesting video

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

I expect Musk to focus on getting gargantuan amounts of hardware up there, once Starship flies often. I also expect them to start experimenting with used hardware, to see what practically can be done to reuse all the materials in Space and on the moon. Musk already spoke about one-way starship missions to deliver cargo, and then be scrapped on the moon for resources.

[@TheBrain0110]

I appreciate your content. It gets the right amount of factual info vs. speculation vs. science and stays more grounded than many of the popular space channels.

[@EagerSpace]

Thanks.

[@juliancrooks3031]

If the U.S. wants a new space station it needs to start building it now as it will take several years to complete to be ready when we retire the ISS

[@EagerSpace]

No money to build it now because ISS takes up all of the budget.

[@marshallfischer3667]

I can see it now. They will begin developing in 2030, and run 25 years overdue...

[@jackdbur]

​@@marshallfischer3667Only if Boeing is involved!

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Trust me (Yeah, I know I know), but really, trust me, NASA is never building a space station ever again. It's all going to be commercial after ISS and independently from NASA. NASA will eventually just focus on unmanned probes to scout the solar system for interesting places to go. Getting your space work & travel license will become a thing like getting your driver's license. Standard training for this many $$$. Officer's training for $$$$$$

[@spifnar]

While I like that you run the numbers with current passenger lift capabilities, it's easy to see that the numbers come out very different when scaled up. For example a 7 passenger Crew Dragon bringing people to a larger station that can accommodate 15 people makes for much less expensive seats

[@EagerSpace]

A fair point. However, note that more people means more mouths to feed and fewer provisions carried on the flight. If you need to be flying cargo flights to bring those extra provisions you don't get the benefit of flying more people.

[@jackdbur]

​@@EagerSpaceProvisions go in the trunk or come up on Starships doing Starlink launches in the last pez slot 😊 Too simple

[@EagerSpace]

If I have a big starship with tons of volume I'm fitting one out as a cruise ship, not using it to visit small space stations.

[@NickPoeschek]

The algorithm finally sent me your way a few days ago and have been binging your content since. This channel is great, I love your approach to covering topics. A unique approach compared with most channels that don’t delve as much into politics and other human factors.

[@EagerSpace]

Thanks. If you do podcasts, give anthony colangelo's main engine cutoff a listen; he spends a lot of time on the non-tech side.

[@mirfjc]

very timely given Axiom descope news

[@SatoshiKitagawa]

What about using Starship as some sort of temporary space station? Couldn't you launch a couple astronauts in a Starship and have them live and work there for half a year before landing and reusing the thing again? The pressurized volume of Starship is greater than the internal volume of the ISS and resupplying shouldn't be a problem since Starship needs to be able to be refueled anyway. I have a feeling I'm missing something why this would be a bad idea

[@snakevenom4954]

It seems like the only real option for Commercial Space Stations is Starship. Everything else is too expensive and cannot possibly get the job done. My best guess is Space Factories will become a thing before Space Tourism. The more flights Starship has under its belt, the safer it becomes and the more likely it becomes people will pay to be flown in it

[@DeltaVHeavy]

You just reinvented Spacelab.

[@AmericanCrusader222]

I think that’s actually a great idea. It’s an all in one deal, reusable if designed appropriately, docking is possible with at least one other Starship, what’s to say we don’t have variants of the Ship to accommodate for the necessities of living in space?

[@EagerSpace]

It's a logical idea. If you can bring it back when you want you can get away with a little less redundancy. Though I'll point out that you can get away with less redundancy if you fly with zero crew and they also don't mess up your manufacturing with their movement.

[@SatoshiKitagawa]

@@EagerSpace Given that it's such an obvious idea I find it weird that we've never heard of anything in that direction from SpaceX

[@nisenobody8273]

I was waiting for this

[@Wisald]

Good analysis, I always find it baffling how some people just assume commercial space stations will be a thing in this decade using nothing but hopes and dreams to back up this idea

[@kingfisherb90]

Love the Lego stations

[@EagerSpace]

Thanks. I was happy to be able to find a lot of ones to use and it fit the "we don't really have useful details" theme.

[@alansnyder8448]

Interesting analysis. Is there any version where a future commercial space station is also the fueling depot that supplies the Starships heading to the moon or in the future Mars? I don't see a SpaceX version here, but it seems someone needs to be thinking about what the long-term maintenance of a LOE fuel depot looks like.

[@gasdive]

I can't see any reason why fuel depots would be crewed.

[@EagerSpace]

Interesting idea, and I haven't thought about it enough to have an opinion.

[@alansnyder8448]

@@gasdive If the fuel depot is as heavily utilized, it seems to me some of the equipment, especially early unrefined versions, will need to be maintained and replaced. I could see a need for spacewalks that replace any damaged radiator, Whipple shields, etc. Maybe tele-operated robots could handle a lot of the work, but there will always be a need for someone close by to hit the reset button. Also, if Musk is thinking ahead about manned missions to Mars, then it seems like a fuel depot would be the place where people flying up from the surface would transfer over to a Mars flight.

[@chrissouthgate4554]

Unless you can find a way to generate fuel from a source not on Earth (Battery storage?) then a fuel station is pointlessly expensive. In a station, non-station scenario, both cases require the vehicle & fuel to be launched. The station one also requires the building & maintenance of the station. If you are having trouble getting a funding source for a space station I cannot see this argument swinging it for any financing. Plus you have the Route 66 problem. How do you survive when the traffic goes away?

[@kukuc96]

There is no real point in co-locating the fuel depot and crew modules. Any crew Starships, especially interplanetary ones will have a good crew section of their own anyways. So the station doesn't do anything useful for the refueled ship, I don't see any use for a crew on the fuel depot, and station wouldn't benefit anything from the fuel depot, or the visiting beyond LEO Starships either. So out of the 3 things, nobody benefits from being in the same place as the others (except for the refueling depot+interplanetary Starship that's already a given).

[@artos607]

correction: its not inflation, its a risk-free interest rate. It theoretically includes inflation as well as the value of locking up money for an amount of time.

[@EagerSpace]

Yes. Most people understand inflation and most people do not understand risk free interest rate.

[@artos607]

@@EagerSpace I figured you did, but I think the idea of comparing an investment to putting the money in a treasury(or a savings account) is pretty digestible

[@walterlyzohub8112]

Remember Varda Space Industries W-1 mission? That might be the way to try things without a major resource commitment. Then the results (obviously) would help direct future missions. But they had trouble getting their package back thanks to bad people.

[@lowstrife]

Your math is wrong by an order of magnitude. it's 63 million profit per year, not 630 million. 630 million profit per year would return a 100% investment on 1,000 million in about 1.35 years.

[@bbgun061]

Even so, I think his point about a commercial station being nonviable still holds.

[@EagerSpace]

You're missing the time value of money. Those $630 million payments aren't worth $630 million because you don't get the first one until year 5. The cash flow I used was -$250 million a year for 4 years, then $ million a year for 5 years. If you want a 30% return, it turns out that = $630 million. $63 million a year for 5 years only gets you $315 million in total. If you accept a 0% return on your investment, you would need to net $200 million per year.

[@qwerty112311]

@@EagerSpacewhy are you using a static outflow instead of adjusting the outflow for NPV, as you do when you discount revenue? And the numbers are still dramatically overestimating the return. You’re confusing all sorts of numbers here. $2.1 billion in nominal net profit is slightly more than 30% of $1.0 billion. $1.8 billion more. I’m not going to open excel right now, but that is discounting the revenue a whole hell of a lot more than any rational inflation number will ever give. The core concept of this making no financial sense for a commercial entity is correct, but the numbers to back it up are devoid of reality.

[@qwerty112311]

@@EagerSpacedid open excel and your numbers are (as expected) very wrong. At a 4% discount rate, an IIR of 30% following your model of $250 out for the first four years yields a required gross profit of $315 million for the next five. At a 2% discount rate, which is what the fed targets for inflation, it would be $285 million. It appears you just went for 0% IRR in 9 years using a 30% discount rate.

[@WasatchWind]

I wonder how Vast fits into this picture, as they aren't going for a NASA contract.

[@ThomasHaberkorn]

International cooperation in space is a important thing to pursue und sustain. Especially in times of war

[@thanksfernuthin]

I'm just thrilled that "space tourism" has become a part of NASA's vocabulary and objectives. I remember people laughing at and hating on some of the millionaires who wanted to and/or did make it to space. They were leading the way for something everyone might be able to do someday. It's all good.

[@TomDrez]

That's still a privilege so rare and uncommon that even most of richs will not be able to go to space, there are health problems and more importantly, there's an energy problem for a very limited amount of weight sent up there and therefore a limit on the benefit we're reaching peaks in rocket optimization and while it's amazing that they could have become so efficient, there's lie something dramatic we can't do much more with rockets, and it's not starship that gonna do much more, despite the claims, first it's still insanely dangerous to fly on thoses things next to any others mean of transportation, then the question of training peoples to go up there, it's hard, it's costly, it take time, and even if a bunch of billionaires are invested enough to go up there, we're still at less than 20 peoples in space at the same time, the logistical capabilities of every nations on earth can only allow so much, we've not made much progresses on this, this is problematic, if we want to transport many peoples in space it's not one ship that will do this but a network of nuclear space plane and space stations for peoples and space elevator for cargo, there's no other way out of this.

[@frjoethesecond]

That's what nobody seems to get about Polaris Dawn. Sure, a billionaire funded the mission, but he was supported by normal people doing a job. That's how most people will get to space. Polaris Dawn was a preview of the world of normal people going to space for work.

[@realnameverified416]

If i understood correctly the private station model already slightly makes sense? I think that’s promising if we consider all the possible innovation and new revenue streams.

[@mikus4242]

Another interesting and insightful episode. -Thanks

[@EagerSpace]

Thanks.

[@ghost307]

Not until NASA's attitude changes. Why should anyone spend their efforts only to be told exactly how to do every single detail of their space station, from the size of the windows to the color of the knobs by a single tenant? NASA will have to get used to accepting that their requirements are requests, not edicts.

[@jackofclubs8791]

I don’t know how accurate this is but I’m pretty sure that dragon has the capacity to carry more than 4 people (not in its current state but if spacex wanted to I think they could)

[@AGoodOldRebel]

It was designed to carry 7 originally, I've heard conflicting reports that it was reduced to 4 to account for the different landing angle (the original SuperDraco propulsion landing plan was dropped for parachutes), but the other explanation was that NASA wanted more return cargo space and was willing to give up 3 seats for that.

[@davevann9795]

Crew Dragon can carry 7 people. But for current flights to the ISS, they are limited to 4 people, because of the need for space to store cargo on the Crew Dragon. People on the ISS require many supplies, plus their own belongings. Such as food for the crew, many clothes since there are no laundry washing facilities on the ISS, and new experiment equipment so the people on ISS have something to do besides maintenance and housekeeping.

[@GoldenTV3]

What about Sierra Space that's planning on creating an inflatable space station module that itself is the interior volume of the entire ISS, in one launch?

[@scottmatheson3346]

the problem with space tourism is you can already do that more cheaply just flying on a rocket, there's nothing a space station can provide that would justify the added cost, not until they build a luxury hotel in space. that dynamic will remain the same, even be exacerbated, if spacex rockets get cheaper, so the hopes of some commenters along those lines are futile. And chartering your own rocket mission will always be more flexible than having to go to the same old space station everybody else uses - tourists will always prefer to do something like the fram2 rather than going to a space station.

[@matsv201]

It would seam to me that we are closing in a on a price that would make commercial only space tourist somewhat viable. If they only want to be in space for a shorter period of time, there is really no reason to go out to ISS orbit, and then a lower orbit would be viable, hence a considerably larger crew capsule could be used. The trajectory of launch could also be cost optimized with a boaster ground landing. Of cause, we still talk about multiple millions of dollars, but then on the other hand, this is still falcon 9 numbers and not starship numbers.

[@plainText384]

At the end of the day the business case for building a commercial LEO space station is relying on: 1) NASA/ESA will want to continue LEO research operations, if only for political reasons, and will therefore accept a significant budget overrun on any program 2) Commercial LEO destinations will not be a competitive market. Only one, maybe two of the station concepts will end up making it to space, letting the few winners set up a monopoly/ duopoly and charge whatever they want.

[@KaiWipfler]

Good video and also good discussions in chat. A pity that not very feasible nevertheless.

[@scott6129]

It seems to me that a modified Starship would make a very nice space station.

[@CompleteAnimation]

How important is maintaining a low-earth orbit presence? Would it be better to work on making a permanent lunar presence, even if the funding meant we leave low-earth orbit uninhabited?

[@EagerSpace]

The answer has to be "it depends on your goals". A lot of the reason the US did ISS was because it was a way to keep the Russian space industry focused on good things and because shuttle needed a job and NASA really wanted a crewed station, but the political climate has changed a bunch and shuttle is retired. My personal read is that you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you take the $4.2 billion NASA currently spends on ISS each year and spend it on vehicles that can go into space for short periods of time and then come back. You could fly 10 crew dragon missions a year - taking up 40 astronauts rather than the 8 that go up each year now - and you could fly true microgravity missions with cargo dragon and do research that doesn't get messed up by all the stuff needed to keep astronauts alive, plus you could get it back in a few weeks rather than 6 months. Seems much nicer than the current model. If starship works, then you just build a research/manufacturing lab inside a starship, send it up, and bring it back. These approaches are always going to be cheaper than a space station because you only pay for the transportation, not the station.

[@notapplicable7292]

They want a station built in 2030. Im hopeful by then Starship and New Glen will be flying and at least one will be human rated. With that in mind I think there's a chance we will see dramatically lower prices which may entice more countries to get into maintaining a space presence. I think its fairly likely we never have a station like ISS again though. We probably would want a station that generates ~0.4g or ~0.17g

[@SlocketSeven]

I hate this video. but I liked it anyways because it's not wrong, it just tells me I will never spend a week in low earth orbit for vacation.

[@frodo4627]

Can you do a video on the OG Space Transportation System and whether the general plan would still be sensible with modern hardware?

[@EagerSpace]

What do you mean by the OG STS? Pre-shuttle? Shuttle? Something else?

[@frodo4627]

@@EagerSpace en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System Thomas Paine’s original post-Apollo plan to colonize the solar system and where the shuttle program got its name from.

[@EagerSpace]

I added it to my list. Not sure there's enough there to make a video, but I'll consider it.

[@SCComega]

Ok, but what about a hypothetical station of 3-4 starships joined together with a central hub module?

[@EagerSpace]

It will depend on how cheaply you can get there.

[@jackdbur]

​​@@EagerSpaceCrew dragon was designed for 7 pax until NASA wanted seating changes revert that and you get 7 seats for a launch. So if 4 is 50mil each then 7 is 29 mil per. An expendable aka Starship 29 is 1000m3 of space without extending into the methane tank or adding an inflatable hab. 4 docking ports spaced around gives you ample parking for crew dragons. Visits by starlink launchers could bring you supplies and return stuff. So you could have 21 seats & a cargo port without much difficulty. This obviously makes your budget easier. Adding 2 rings of 4+ ports 1 forward and 1aft & 2 inflatable habs gives you a ridiculous amount of habitable space & parking. 😮 Starship bare build is below 200 million per. 😊

[@rays2506]

Multimodular space stations like Mir and ISS are old late 20th century technology. The 21st century design will be a unimodular space station based on the SpaceX Starship. Like the unimodular Skylab of the 1970s, the Starship space station will be sent to LEO in a single Starship launch. The pressurized volume in the Starship space station is 1000 cubic meters (ISS has 916 cubic meters). ISS required 11 years (1999-2010) to deploy to LEO, requiring ~25 Space Shuttle launches at $1B per flight and a half dozen Russian Proton launches. The ISS cost to build and deploy to LEO exceeded $150B in current dollars. The Starship LEO space station will cost less than $5B and could be in LEO in the next 3 or 4 years. SpaceX can easily foot the bill for its own Starship LEO space station to condition its own astronauts for Starship missions to the Moon and to Mars. And there will be enough room on that space station to sell rides to NASA and other parties who have a need to live and work in LEO. Side note: My lab spent three years (1967-69) designing and testing subsystems for Skylab.

[@bbgun061]

I think your idea seems likely, but I doubt it will meet NASA CLD requirements.

[@gasdive]

If we're talking "could be" time, it really could be as soon as the FAA grants a launch licence. Starship has demonstrated the ability to reach orbit in expendable mode. Stripping out the header tanks, flaps, heat shield, landing propellant and three sea level engines leaves a lot of spare mass to add 5 IDSS and some internal fitout. Everything else could come up on Dragons as the crew rotated in and out. But it still leaves the question "what is it actually for?" Unanswered.

[@nirbhay_raghav]

I don't blame you. Its SpaceX. They have a bad habbit of openly showcasing all the development of the largest ever rocket in the human history. That too reusable. This rapid iteration approach tends to make people think that just by deleting some parts and adding a few more like it was KSP would work. SpaceX is struggling to finish the design on the Lunar lander right now. Challenges that it did not forsee due to the rapid approach. Yes, it is wayyyy ahead of Blue or other stakeholders in Artemis in terms of hardware. But SpaceX has to be measured with a different stick. Just shedding heat shield and prop and flaps won't instantly make a space station module. There are A TON of other requirements that the spacecraft has to fulfill.

[@gasdive]

@@nirbhay_raghav that is a very weird take. SX is building this ship with the intention of supporting 100 people in deep space, with no resupply for 2 years. They've been working on this for over a decade. Your take is that they've done no work on how to fit out the ship and it's harder than Kerbal? SX has done the work. They know what it takes to keep people alive in space and exactly how that will fit into a Starship. They already build spaceships that keep people alive in space, packed into the much more restrictive size and mass constraints of a capsule. They wouldn't need years to figure this stuff out.

[@nirbhay_raghav]

@@gasdive exactly my point. Space hardware is very different from hardware in other sectors. That is why even if SpaceX were to slightly modify the current Dragon crew, NASA will re-evaluate it. When a ship is as big as starship there are a ton of things that have to go right. Yes, they are doing phenomenal work but their prior experience with dragon isn't going to help them much other than with life support and a few hardware. SX is competitive and has everything going good for them but things don't become easy just because you have a bigh ship and experience in human rated space hardware with a completly different spacecraft. This is also evident from Tim's video with Elon where he states that they did get help from landing Falcon for writing the RTLP or RTSea code for booster but thats where the translation ends. He mentioned that some thing they learnt helped them to not make the same mistakes. Ultimately what I am trying to say is if people wanna be optimistic, good for you but don't become unrealistic or else you will realize at the end that this was way too much to expect in such a short time.

[@kingfisherb90]

Gateway moved to LEO, combined with HLS depots as an anchor, then let CLDS builders attach for 6-12 month proving missions before they separate and become free fliers.

[@EagerSpace]

I'm not sure it helps much. If NASA has a station that is subsidized nobody is going to want to pay the premium to go to a free flier, and gateway is *tiny* so it's not really a very good station for what NASA wants to do in LEO.

[@TheSwissGabber]

Making up numbers and then drawing conclusions - the 20 minute edition. This will be similar to the commercial crew and resupply program. You could easily make the same type of "make stuff up"-video there and say nobody is going to bite.

[@kukuc96]

NASA paid 8.6 billion for the Commercial Crew DEVELOPMENT only, not including buying operational flights. And that was just 2 small spacecraft. Here, they are proposing paying nothing for the development, for something a lot more complicated (and heavy, which is significant for launch costs). No surprise that noone is biting. Comparing this to Commercial Crew is apples to oranges.

[@jackinthebox301]

@@kukuc96 ...that isn't how corporate accounting works at all. For Axiom, the cost they charge for use of the station is going to include the amortized development costs (plus profit, of course) over the proposed lifetime of the station. NASA may not be paying dev costs up front as usual, but they're absolutely still paying. edit: It's worth adding that the CLD program is meant to spur LEO development. NASA wants them to court businesses and tourists to offset the development and upkeep costs, rather than relying entirely on NASA. However, NASA is basically a guaranteed customer so long as the station fits their requirements. But other customers are not guaranteed. It could turn out that NASA is the *only* customer for a while. Meaning they would be paying the ENTIRETY of the stations amortized development costs.

[@kukuc96]

@@jackinthebox301 That's great, but it's blatantly obvious that there is no non-NASA demand for CLD. So the only thing they might achieve is offloading the upfront cost and the risk to private sector. Which in turn will demand higher returns (compared to the safer money upfront for development) to offset the risk (what if NASA doesn't buy your services in the end, or buys only half what you expected, or only buys it for a shorter while), and the front heavy cost curve, and back heavy income curve. So their prices will include that risk premium, and the compensation for the delayed income. If any will even take the risk that is. The only thing this will achieve is that it will be more expensive than the previous model (for NASA).

[@jackinthebox301]

@@kukuc96 It is not blatantly obvious. You've made that up whole cloth. At the very least ESA, Jaxa, Roscosmos, ISRO, etc. will want to participate. Tourists exist. Commercial companies wanting to dip their toes into LEO operations exist. Manufacturing prototypes have been tested on the ISS. But the ISS is a lab. It isn't designed to have any sort of permanent place to manufacture goods for companies. We'll never know what the economics of on orbit manufacturing truly are until someone does it. This is the Field of Dreams. Maybe that's optimistic, but if we don't build it we won't know. If that means Axiom puts a few modules up into orbit and then goes bankrupt because the economics didn't work out, oh well, then we'll know. It may turn out that the other CLD companies are deeply unserious and are merely posturing, but Axiom and Sierra are deep into active module development. Those two will put *something* into orbit. That's all but guaranteed.

[@EagerSpace]

If you want to look at project and there aren't public numbers, you need to inherently make estimates. COTs was fairly simple. You need a rocket that can launch into orbit (solved problem) and a capsule that can navigate to ISS (solved problem), and that makes the models fairly easy to deal with, though I usually note that SpaceX underbid and did not make their expected profit on the first CRS contract. Commercial crew was a lot harder; you need to have a crew-rated launcher and a capsule that can hang out at ISS for 6+ months and meet a bunch of requirements that weren't actually defined at the time. One huge success, one huge failure. Commercial LEO is different because it's not "build something and launch it" like the other two are; it's build something, launch it, and then operate it profitably. You can come up with a model for commercial crew profitability, but NASA's expectation is that they aren't the only tenant, so you need to create a new market and if that doesn't work you are SOL.

[@nolsp7240]

Seems to me they can lower the costs down significantly by using modern automation, remote operation, reducing all the manhours spent on maintenance and even in-flight research. What if you can build a station which requires no constant astronaut presence for maintenance and research? There would be minimal life support equipment and researchers would just do 1-week visits to set up their experiments. The bulk of the life support will handled by the launch vehicle like Dragon.

[@EagerSpace]

The problem is that with current transportation costs that 1-week visit costs about $70 million per person.

[@kukuc96]

Yeah that's about what I thought about the Commercial LEO Destinations program, but illustrated much better with numbers. The problem that nobody besides NASA wants to be a customer in this market is not something you can solve.

[@EagerSpace]

At least at the current prices...

[@thecocomonk2657]

So what we’re likely gonna get is the Axiom station concept but basically run as ISS 2?

[@r-saint]

Starship will lower the cost to LEO like 80 times, correct? NASA's priority should have been lobbying for deregulation of Starship program.

[@EagerSpace]

We don't really know where starship is going to end up, but it could easily be the case where launching an "orbital tourist" starship and bringing it back after a week costs a lot less than visiting a space station on Dragon.

[@r-saint]

@@EagerSpace Oh totally... With reusable Starship "Hotel".

[@TheEvilmooseofdoom]

Deregulation tends to be a bad idea.

[@joewilson2258]

I think that we should not depend on nasa to build and operate a new space station because we have enough private companies that can accomplish the project of a new space station that can have a higher orbit than what the space station is now in orbit around the globe.

[@NorrthStar]

Can you do a video on a potential space x fuel depot station? Add in some modules for maintenance and some extra to be rented out and you got a good commercial station with genuine use Add in some docking ability for data centers Add in the ability to beam power And you have a solid business plan All enabled by starship

[@nirbhay_raghav]

Yeah, thats what we call a pipe dream.

[@nirbhay_raghav]

Talk about pipedream!!

[@TheEvilmooseofdoom]

You save yourself a lot of money and engineering to keep it un-manned. The issue remains to generate a ROI.

[@stumpysolo]

Could have mentioned a couple ofwords where these stations are in their projects, like: - Axiom already suffering funding issues and scoping down their project, although have all the Nasa political backing as ex-nasa management people - Blue Moon, probably already sidelined by Blue Origin, so won't really happen - Vast, probably a Secret SpaceX subsidiary, that has very tight collaboration with SpaceX and probably will get the launches at a very discounted price, making your math viable. - etc.

[@EagerSpace]

For Vast, the hard part is the crew part, at least until crewed starship is a thing. And if you can do that, you just build a space station into a long-duration starship, launch it with people in it, and then bring it back when it's done. Much better as a business model.

[@snakevenom4954]

Do Raptor 3's need propellant flowing through the regen channels to prevent them from being damaged during Re-entry? If so, where does the propellant come from? The pumps pump the propellants into the engines but supposedly they're not on. So how does the propellant flow through the engine when the turbine isn't on? Is there a secondary cooling pump installed on the booster that would pump the propellants through the engines? I would think so since every engine would need propellant flowing through it. Not just the inner 13. Just wanted to see if you had any insight that I don't or if you already knew the answer

[@EagerSpace]

I don't think any of the raptors require this. Raptor 1 and 2 had shielding for the outside but I don't see any reason you'd need to do stuff to protect the nozzles.

[@snakevenom4954]

@@EagerSpace Not for the nozzles. For the turbo machinery and the engine itself. I'm assuming the booster experiences high heating Plasma during re-entry before the landing burn. So where would that energy go? Idk if this is clear or not

[@snakevenom4954]

@@EagerSpace So Raptor 1 and 2 needed heat shielding. But shielding from what? The landing burn is just a few seconds where the booster is fast enough to interact with it's flame plume. So it has to be from re-entry no? When the booster hits the dense atmosphere at over 4,000 km/h. The nozzles would be fine since they're designed for that temperature but other pipes and the engine itself need the regen channels and secondary cooling system. Or else they would melt. So where does the propellant for that cooling system or regen channels come from when the engine is off? How does the engine keep itself cool when it's off is my question

[@TheEvilmooseofdoom]

@@snakevenom4954 Partly from entry and partly from themselves. The engines burn longer than you think. Even F9's landing burns are 30 seconds or more.

[@Cammymoop]

I think you could also get some profits from ride-along uncrewed payloads, scientific or otherwise. they might be paying a premium compared to a satellite rideshare launch but there's also a lot unique opportunities, like being able to have someone check up on it frequently, and also things you no longer have to provide yourself like power, shielding, maybe atmosphere if that's relevant. Also you do need to balance cargo but you could probably 1 or 2 more people on the dragons than the 4 they're currently taking. There may be something to say for having a few uncrewed supplemental supply deliveries as well, to help maximize human carrying efficiency of your dragons, but I don't know if there's any existing delivery system that could do that within a useful budget.

[@foke449]

What is it that makes a F9+Dragon cost 288m when a normal F9 "only" costs 70m? Is it really that expensive to operate Dragon? Or is it a huge mark-up? If so could it potentially be reduced in case it becomes a company to company negotiation in contrast to a company to government negotiation (or if a more competent competitor joins the market for crew transportation)?

[@bbgun061]

I've always heard it explained as extra services that NASA requires. Apparently Inspiration 4 only cost $50M. We don't know if SpaceX made a profit on that. The bulk of costs with any mission are going to be launch and recovery. NASA crew missions spend six months docked to the station, but I doubt that adds much to the cost.

[@EagerSpace]

F9 is a rocket and a fairly simple one that SpaceX flies all the time. Dragon is a capsule so it has to have a lot more systems, it's small so all those systems need to be as compact as possible and they are crew rated which means the systems need to be redundant and everything has to be deeply tested every time. Capsules are probably the most complicated space things we currently make.

[@EagerSpace]

$50 million per seat. Ish - Isaacman said the total cost was under $200 million.

[@bbgun061]

@@EagerSpace Oh, thanks for the correction.

[@filcer_X]

i really like the usa of lego to illustrate concepts

[@keithrange4457]

Love it

[@jenakuns]

I've been saying to all of my 3 drills that the commercial market for this commercial station will be foreign governments. Smaller ops and increase in efficiencies (you would hope) would push annual cost down to the ~1.5B range. So then just NASA at $1B + rest of world to cover 0.5B would get there for ISS 2.0.

[@donjones4719]

You are right. We're already seeing several foreign governments buying Axiom flights. No need to develop a human rated spacecraft and rocket, just lease some space on what's already there and you have a space program.

[@zukacs]

Hello. Is it possible to place two planets really close to each other on exactly the same orbit? Maybe even share atmosphere? How would flying to the second planet work? Maybe they are tidaly locked and not so bit to rip each other apart?

[@scottmatheson3346]

the two planets would disassemble and eventually reassemble as a single, bigger planet.

[@DragongeekAndCo]

What do you think about the US military? They've got money... More specifically, while "space marines" aren't a thing that's gonna happen anytime soon, military research already operates the x-37 to do on-orbit military science and the Space Shuttle did plenty of classified missions. Could one sell the Space Force on purchasing seats? They'd have an orbital laboratory where they can carefully control who goes there, and they wouldn't have to worry about international partners peeking over their shoulders. Granted, a lot can be done (and is being done) robotically, but there's also the argument that eventually there will be military personnel in space, and it probably isn't too early to start gaining experience to create doctrine and institutional knowledge on how to perform manned military space activities.

[@EagerSpace]

Shuttle did a fair number of classified missions but most were satellite launches and by the 1990s the DoD was switching away from them - that's why they spun up the EELV/NSSL program. I think the X-37 is a great fit for the kind of research the DoD wants to do and I don't see much reason for them to have humans around.

[@mphRagnarok]

The discount rate you use when calculating NPV is the rate of return of your next best alternative, not inflation. Your alternative is to invest your 1000 today at that alternate rate of return, which may be completely different from the rate of inflation. Please take an intro corporate finance class.

[@murraymckechnie2086]

I suspect it's you who needs to take a "how to make good KZbin videos" class

[@nathankoren]

Correction to the correction: the discount rate isn't the rate of return for the "next best alternative", it's the "risk-free rate of return" -- typically something like AAA bond yields. You want your NPV discount rate to be risk-free because you want to be able to consider the risk of your proposed investment in isolation from any other risks. If you used an also-risky alternate investment as the NPV basis, then now you have two sets of risk to weigh, and you need to start thinking about the degree to which those risks are independent or correlated, etc.

[@EagerSpace]

People understand what inflation means, so you can think of just holding onto the money as the option we are comparing against. People don't understand corporate finance and I think this level of complication is pretty much all they can handle (and need, frankly). BTW, I have taken a finance class though it was many years ago.

[@BrianKelsay]

I think NASA could spec out a NASA exclusive module and a rough concept of accommodations for sleep, exercise, leisure and food prep which the commercial and NASA split or share. They have to agree on the crew accommodations module and the commercial entity should build it to keep costs down. The commercial side would also have a dedicated science module and other modules as needed, like cuppola or other recreation for visiting tourists, call it the resort module. Thing is, NASA and Congress are going to have to guarantee level funding for a number of years or its a no go. They should allow unlimited flights of tourists (govt clearance required), how ever many the commercial side can squeeze in. SpaceX has a high flight rate of Falcon, but a lower rate for Dragon due to refurbished. But if it's worth it to them by way of customers, let them Amp it up. The issue will be total number of customers limited by the huge cost and speed limited by FAA licensing and traffic at the cape.

[@ericjorgensen6425]

Please run the numbers for a functioning starship that can take 100 tons to LEO for $10 million.

[@KirbyTheEpic]

I know little about investment, but expecting a 30% or even 20% rate of return seems a little high. Is it really normal to expect this rate of investment if you are 1 billion in the red after 4 years (in this case after 4 years of station construction)? Axiom is already cutting metal for their station and I doubt that it will be completed before 2030, and because it is planned to attach to the ISS first that might delay its deorbiting. I wonder what will happen to Axiom in the next few years as their design seems to be the furthest along of all these private stations, did they find a way to make the financials work or something?

[@EagerSpace]

The question is around the risk and in this case it's very hard to quantify them and many of the risks are out of the provider's control. You can maybe handle some of them contractually (what happens if you can't fly a scheduled astronaut because your launch provider is grounded?), but there are going to be many situations that you can't conceive of and therefore can't quantify. That's what the high rate of return is covering - the very real chance that things won't go right and you won't get that rate of return. If you slip a year in your development but don't spend any more money that year, just that one year knocks your return down to 24%. Very simple things knock your rate of return down quickly, and if that happens up front may not be able to handle things that go wrong later. If you can only get 15% on your investment, why would you bother? Lots of other things out there that are more sure that you can make 15% on.

[@Matyniov]

How is creating a middleman supposed to help anyone? If you add a 5th wheel that needs a profit it just sounds ridiculous

[@EagerSpace]

Yes. You could just pay the company to do what they do well - build a module - and then pay another company to do what they do well, but that doesn't align with what congress says they want. Though congress is very Jekyl & Hyde when it comes to commercial space; authorizations typically support it but appropriations generally so only grudgingly.

[@donlindell1994]

I propose that we are missing a functional description for a market based LEO economy without direct NASA control. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time, NASA is no longer capable of LEADING the technology or even the regulatory management of LEO. On the other hand, corporations cannot be given a free hand, unbounded by government oversight or control of the people from whom they receive their license to operate. A framework that teeters back and forth between these two forces over the coming decades would provide the competitive freedom that drives down costs and uncovers new markets for LEO products and services.

[@EagerSpace]

Yes. We kindof had that with the human spaceflight regulations which have minimal requirements and are mostly relying on informed consent. But I'm not sure I want to head into orbit with a capsule that is built the way New Shepard is, and I'm sure I don't want to go with a system that is like Virgin Galactic's. I read through a bunch of the requirements NASA has and a bunch of them do make sense. Currently we have commercial aircraft, private aircraft, and experimental aircraft and they have very different requirements in a lot of areas. NASA is wanting to do the gold standard.

[@khankrum1]

What is the problem with leaving it up there?

[@EagerSpace]

Leaving what up there?

[@khankrum1]

@@EagerSpace The ISS! Surely it would be more valuable as spare parts!

[@TheEvilmooseofdoom]

@@khankrum1 Spare parts for what?

[@crunchyentertainment2680]

Please stop obliterating my space fantasies with boring stuff like "reality" or "economics"

[@juanalarbert]

We need starship deorbit space station part by part

[@zukacs]

So, if starshp> all good, if not > back to zero

[@Jason-gq8fo]

Thoughts on the new faa delays?

[@EagerSpace]

No deep ones except that whenever SpaceX pushes up the difficulty of their test flight they will find it harder to get approval.

[@chrisp1601]

I’ve heard timeshare presentations less mathematically disparaging.

[@clipwhatcherdude]

10% annualized Inflation is crazy

[@BartJBols]

Your inflation percentage calculation is wrong. 10% every year for 5 years makes $1,610 and change. You need to calculate the 10 percentage inflation every year on the outcome of previous year. Your point entirely still stands, and its just a detail, but its a detail people get wrong often.

[@thorin1045]

so, more or less we are back to the base problem, space is expensive, because no infrastructure, that is so expensive, that no one will make it for us for cheap space...

[@EagerSpace]

I think the base problem is that getting there is so expensive

[@regolith1350]

So NASA wants the government-controlled model but at the cost of a fixed-price contract. It seems the big legacy aerospace contractors aren't the only ones unable to move beyond the cost-plus mindset.

[@EagerSpace]

If you look at the firm fixed price guidelines, you will find that they suggest that they are used only when the product already exists. NASA kindof fakes it by using space act agreements to give out development money up front to make the firm-fixed price contracts more palatable. It mostly worked for commercial cargo, worked about 50% for commercial crew.

[@richardmalcolm1457]

@@EagerSpace And, obviously, it is an extremely small sample size with CRS and CCtCap. That said...Commercial Crew is especially hard to make out as a precedent for anything. SpaceX had developed into the true unicorn of success by the time they had Dragon in advanced development; meanwhile, Boeing had degenerated into the model of dysfunction that can hardly do anything right now. I have few illusions now that Sierra could have got DC over the finish line as a crew vehicle much faster; OTOH, Blue Origin has the resources and competency now that they likely *could* do a LEO taxi if Bezos really wanted to -- but I am not sure who else could.

[@EagerSpace]

People miss that COTs only succeeded because Congress unexpectedly tossed them a bunch of extra money ($300 million IIRC) partway through the program. Without that, neither Dragon nor Cygnus fly. And that SpaceX underbid CRS by a lot and didn't make the profit that they had planned to make.

[@richardmalcolm1457]

@@EagerSpace I am not sure what extra funding you have in mind -- I'm looking through Gerst's testimony to the House subcommitte in May 2011 and there's no mention of that, beyond the Kistler money to diverted to OS. That said, no one can doubt what a close shave it was for SpaceX. SpaceX *did* underbid CRS according to multiple accounts, but no dollar figure has ever been put on just how much they underbid. We know that SpaceX increased its bid price by 50% in cost per kilogram, but it is also unclear how much of that was for capability upgrades in the Dragon 2, accelerated cargo loading and unloading etc. Perhaps Eric Berger's book next week might have some insight into that...

[@nathankoren]

It isn't exactly easy to make a convincing business case for a commercial space station, but I think your analysis has a couple of flaws which make it unnecessarily harder: 1. Two non-paying crew members funded by the operator, in order to provide 7-days-per-week services. I very much doubt this is necessary. A single crew member who is on call for emergencies during weekends seems like it would be viable. Astronauts can microwave their own meals themselves. 2. A space station is a piece of infrastructure with a lifespan far beyond 5 years. You simply never use a 5-year IRR to evaluate an infrastructure project. On Earth, 30-year IRRs are not uncommon in infrastructure finance, and I've seen many that are longer. For a commercial space station, it probably (hopefully, maybe?) wouldn't have an ISS-class shelf life, but 20 years of service -- and thus an IRR based on development time + 20 years -- is how this investment would be evaluated. This means your requirement to net $630M/year does not exist. 3. Taking the current Dragon price as the basis for future Dragon prices. $288M may be the cost to NASA, but that price is determined by A.) the need to meet a lot of expensive NASA requirements; B.) The need to be cheaper than Boeing; and C.) not much else. It is *not* an accurate reflection of SpaceX's internal costs, which from [sources] I believe are closer to $100M per Dragon mission. Under the current ISS regime (eg. profound limitations visiting vehicle schedule), there is no incentive for SpaceX to lower their prices to the customer -- no demand elasticity which would net them more revenue overall -- so they're not going to do that. With a more flexible station operations concept, this could be possible, and you'd see customer prices fall to closer to SpaceX launch costs. Taking the above -- and ignoring NASA's requirements for the time being -- what would a commercial station business model look like? Let's take your R&D + deployment costs and timelines of $1.5B and 4 years, which seem fine-ish. Let's further assume that the private company has $20M/year in overhead, and once the station is deployed, a further $50M/year in station maintenance. Finally -- and here's where the models diverge -- let's say we can get SpaceX to sell us 12 flights per year for $120M/flight. We load each of those flights with one of our own astronauts plus 3 tourists paying $55M each for a month in space. What does the cashflow look like? Y1-Y3: -$353M / year Y4: -$520M (we're launching) Y5 onwards: -$1,510 in costs vs. $1,980 in revenue, for an EBITDA profit of $470M/year. If you only consider consider 5 years of station operations, that's an IRR of 13%, which is... pretty awful. But if you consider 20 years of station operations, that's 22%, which would be pretty okay for a low-risk infrastructure project. Obviously that's not what kind of project this is; you'd want a fair bit higher. So if we take that $500M R&D subsidy from NASA, that brings the IRR to 31%... and that could work. It's in the ballpark at least.

[@jackinthebox301]

Thank you for doing this. I had an intuitive sense his numbers were unrealistic, but didn't know how to put it into math and words. My one disagreement with your numbers is the cost SpaceX charges. Inspiration 4 supposedly only cost around $50 million. That included the modifications to the Crew Dragon capsule. Obviously they aren't trying to profit off an internal mission, but it illustrates there's a lot of wiggle room in the potential future cost. If they're contracting 12+ launches per year with Axiom, as opposed to the 2 or 3 with the current CC program, they're probably going to be going for much, much closer to that Inspiration 4 cost floor. It also bears repeating that all of this is moot the moment Starship comes online. Even with the FAA mucking about, trying to slow SpaceX down, I don't see a world where they aren't crew rated by 2030. A marginal cost of launch below $10 million and the ability to launch dozens of people or entire stations in one go, well, changes everything.

[@EagerSpace]

1) ISS has a crew of 4 and they spend roughly half of their time on maintenance and housekeeping, so I made the assumption that you need two people to keep up with that. I thought about 1, but a) a single support astronaut means that you have no redundancy if they get sick/injured, b) you really can't expect somebody to be either working or on call for 6 months and c) crew dragon carries 4 people (and could actually carry more though the cost might go up), so having only 1 person doesn't save you much money. 2) I agree with what you say, I just don't think this qualifies as that sort of project because the risk profiles are so different. If you are building a solar farm, you are buying commodity materials so you can estimate your construction price well and you have a well-understood market model that you can use to project your revenue out into the future and what you are selling has a wide and growing demand. And you can make a decent guess at the competitive environment going forward. In this case, you are building a one-off station as part of a program with strict but not fully-defined requirements and where the funds you get from NASA are subject to congressional whims. NASA is currently your only customer but that customer is hoping very much that you will be able to charge them less by defraying costs via a market that does not exist yet. You have risk *everywhere*; schedule risk, customer risk (congress may cancel the program 3 years in), physical risk (your space station may get broken), partner risk (your transportation provider may raise prices or be grounded for 6 months), legal risk (you end up killing private or NASA astronauts), and technology risk (somebody may come along with a new concept that kills your secondary market). Oh, and NASA is going to fund your competitor at the same time so your commercial market opportunity is cut in half. You are *nuts* if you push your model past 10 years. I chose 5 years because of the risk environment. 3) Crew dragon still has to meet NASA requirements for these missions and that's why I chose NASA prices. What force are you counting on to convince SpaceX that they should charge less for their flights? Their only near-term competition might be starliner, and starliner flights are inherently going to be more expensive. I don't think you can get away with only 1 crew member for a month stay with *tourist* because if something goes wrong with that 1 crew member there's a decent chance that those tourists will end up dead, and people who would pay that kind of money for a month vacation are not going to accept the level of service that one person can supply. You need to be *plush*. But assume that you can get away with that. Re-run your model and tell me what happens if a) it takes you 5 years to get through development (congress extends ISS again and/or slow rolls the program funding) or b) you are wrong with your projection of who will pay that much money to spend a month in space and it's only 3 or 6 flights per year.

[@EagerSpace]

All we know on Inspiration 4 is that Isaacman spent less than $200 million; we don't know how much. But the thing to remember that SpaceX and Isaacman are partners in the Polaris program. You can plug in 200 or 150 million into the model if you want and it does move the numbers but it doesn't change the basic result.

[@nathankoren]

1) ISS has a crew of 7, but your point stands. Back when ISS had a crew of 3, before Dragon came online, about 80% of their time was spent on maintenance and housekeeping. Nevertheless, it's worth remembering that the ISS is an assemblage of hardware from dozens of nations and thousands of contractors, in some cases with starkly different engineering and operational paradigms, and with much of the designs dating to the 1990s (or earlier). This is not a good way to make a low-maintenance piece of hardware, and it doesn't provide a good baseline for how a future station would be operated, if designed in a consistent and coherent fashion by a single company or small consortium, employing 2020s-era automation. Making a first-principles argument that a 4-person station could be maintained by a single person isn't something that can be done lightly -- it would require a LOT of justification to be part of an investible business case -- but my point is that it's not beyond the pale. If you do need a precedent, however, I could point to Tiangong -- a far more modern station than ISS, which by all accounts doesn't require too much crew time spent on maintenance. That said, a 2-person staff would of course be more robust. Doing this with a 4-person capsule would require sacrificing 1/3rd of the bookable seats however -- which if you're trying to justify this with commercial rather than NASA passengers (more on this later), kills the business case. An 8-person station serviced by 2 dragons and 2 staff would be better operationally, but I'm already getting hand-wavey enough trying to argue for a market of 36 paying astronaut-months per year. 2.) The way to account for risk in this type of finance is not to artificially truncate the cashflow, but rather to require a higher rate of return. Capping the model at 5 years of operations means that you *fully expect* the station to be deorbited after that point, with no more operations afterwards, and no residual IP of any value. That's not how you build the model. Both your expected revenue period *and* your residual IP at the end of that period should be considered. The investors who would be backing a project like this will necessarily have both a higher risk-tolerance and higher reward-expectation than the pension funds etc. that typically back infrastructure projects. (Source: I have an MBA from Oxford and have worked in business case development for high-tech, high-risk infrastructure projects, so this has been my bread and butter). Risk-modelling would be an important part of the investment decision -- but it would include upside scenarios (eg., "Starship starts flying passengers and we're the premier destination in orbit") as well as numerous downside scenarios of course. This can't be easily captured in a single toy scenario, but if for the sake of argument you do want to create a toy scenario, the "median" financial model would be one where the asset more or less performs as expected with nothing dramatic happening on either the upside or the downside (but with a high rate of return required, to account for fundamental risk). The median financial model would *not* be "after 5 years we walk away with nothing" -- that would be a catastrophic failure scenario. So basically by looking at the 5-year IRR, you're asking the question "can a private space station be a success, if it's a guaranteed failure?". No business case would ever be constructable under such a premise. 3.) The force I'm counting on to convince SpaceX that they should charge less for flights is a combination of market elasticity and financial self-interest. The market for ISS flights is inelastic, so it's in SpaceX's self-interest to charge what the market will bear, and that's what they do. In order to drop the price, they'd need to be convinced that the reduction in per-mission profit was more than compensated for by an increase in the number of missions they can sell. If it is, then they'll drop the price. If not, then they won't. Eg., let's say that their current internal costs for NASA flights are $180M per flight, and they're charging $280M, for $100M profit per flight. Do that 6 times per year (2 crew dragons, 4 cargo dragons) and that's $600M profit per year. Now, let's say that a commercial provider comes along and says "we'd like to buy 12 flights per year, but at a price of $150M per flight". SpaceX crunches the numbers and concludes that the greater economy-of-scale would reduce their costs by $40M per flight, and the simplified paperwork from a more standardised cadence with a commercial customer would result in a further $40M savings per flight. Now their internal cost is $100M per flight, and the the annual profit would be the same in both scenarios. At that point, it's a break-even proposition from a cashflow perspective, but the all-NASA scenario means you're serving at the whims of an inelastic monopsony, whereas the all-commercial scenario means that you're serving a more speculative but potentially far more elastic and lucrative market. At that point, if I were in SpaceX's shoes, I'd be asking whether there are price-discrimination mechanisms which would allow me to serve the commercial market at the price-point it needs, while still charging NASA the prices it can bear. If the answer is "yes" -- and I'm pretty sure that it would be -- then SpaceX could have their commercial cake and eat their NASA cake too -- and that would be a great position for them to be in. I admit there are a ton of risks and contingencies in the above scenario: 1.) The market for private astronauts needs to exist and be sufficiently elastic; 2.) The internal costs for Dragon launches needs to be sufficiently low and/or amenable to economies of operational scale; and 3.) SpaceX, as a company, is a single point of failure for the entire industry, until it's got some real competition. These would all need to be de-risked to the satisfaction of whomever is financing a private space station. So I'm not saying that these things *are* de-risked; I'm just saying that with a lot of effort they *could be* de-risked -- and if so, then the business case is within the realm of possibility. Based on the fact that both Axiom and Vast have gotten enough investment to start building flight hardware and booking launches, I would *hope* that their business cases have addressed these questions. If so, then it wouldn't really be in their interest to make the answers public, and fortunately we'll only need to wait a few years to see what they've got up their sleeves. If not, then, well, I guess they've just found some gullible investors (which is always a possibility), and it's unlikely that they'll succeed. As for re-running the model, I'll keep the $500M input into R&D costs the same, so that it's still $1B to get the station into operations: * If R&D time goes from 3 to 5 years, the 20-year IRR drops from 31% to 26% (this is probably too low for a high-risk venture) * If the flight rate then drops to 6 per year -- at the same prices -- then the IRR goes to 13%. Nobody would invest if this is what they expected to see. However if you raise those prices back up to $280M per flight -- with SpaceX taking $200M of that -- then the IRR goes back up to 24%. If this was *guaranteed* NASA-backed demand (as opposed to speculative market-based demand), then that might actually still be investible. In any case, those would be pretty realistic ways for such a venture to fail, for sure. Like I say, the business case for private space stations isn't a slam dunk -- if it were, we'd already be swimming in them.

[@nathankoren]

@@jackinthebox301 Personally I would be very surprised if the charge to Inspiration 4 was that low, even if SpaceX was supporting it purely at-cost. Do you have a source for that? I also think there's plenty of scenarios where Starship isn't crew-rated by 2030, and doesn't come anywhere close to a marginal launch cost of $10M. Frankly even if it misses its target costs by an order of magnitude it'll still be a game-changer in the industry, but the uncertainties are such that at this point I'd never put crewed Starships into the critical path of a cashflow projection. Rather, it's a potential long-term strategic upside which might convince an early-stage investor to accept additional risk. (It's worth differentiating between different stages of investment when talking about these things. An investor paying for flight hardware and launches will expect a very high degree of certainty that they'll see a modest return on their large investment. An investor paying for early-stage market research and engineering will expect a large degree of uncertainty that they'll see a very large return on their relatively small investment. It's probably okay to factor Starship into the latter -- but not the former.)

[@joeker1013]

If space x starts hauling people in 6 to 7 years in starship with 50 people at a time, the plan starts to make sense.

[@APMI-OFICIAL]

A space station to house 50 people for months would be absurdly gigantic and of astronomical cost if it has to be with NASA quality standards.

[@debott4538]

If

[@veedrac]

You're assuming the value of capital and partnership is ~0. Unless NASA plan to burn the station up and then the contractor dissolves after 5 years operation, this is incorrect. You should also subtract inflation from the returns since you aren't inflation-adjusting any of the prices or price comparisons. (These prices would then be in 2024 dollars.) I agree commercial prospects for commercial stations are iffy though, and if NASA won't provide milestone payments they need to at least commit to being a long term customer. Frankly, although I think you're presenting this as a refutation of commercial space, IMO it's really much more a refutation of government incoherence. Expecting an investment by NASA of $8B over 9 years, tail-heavy and not owning risk, to outperform an investment of $150B over 25 years... the fact it's not even completely implausible is remarkable.

[@EagerSpace]

I chose a 5 year operational timeframe because there are so many unknowns and risks that I'm not willing to push it out farther. To use my tropical resort analogy, two years in a hurricane comes by and hugely damages my resort. I have a bunch of rebuilding costs and I don't bring in any revenue for 6-12 months. Long timeframes are fine if you have static situations that are well understood, but that's not true in this case and there's a decent chance you lose your shirt.

[@veedrac]

Yes, it's really NASA's job to assure the market that, given they're not willing to invest upfront anywhere near reasonable amounts to build a space station, they will at least be a viable long term customer. Any risk NASA abandons course is going to force the ROI to happen earlier for the economics to make sense. It will be very sad if NASA offers firm fixed price for a peanut, and then (when nobody can build it for a peanut) turns around, builds ISS V2.0, and ends up paying $50B or something like that, under the excuse that there wasn't a fixed price bidder.

[@EagerSpace]

The problem is that NASA can't assure the market. ISS was designed to be a program that was hard to cut - look bad in front of our international allies, a US government asset we spent a lot of money to build, and an official NASA astronaut program. Commercial LEO has none of that, and I can see congress coming back after an initial contract and saying, "yeah, we're not going to do that any more".

[@veedrac]

​@@EagerSpace Sure, and I agree NASA's dysfunction is a practical issue for commercial stations. At the same time, that list is all bad things I don't want. If assuring a contractor requires having a project that's designed to be costly and difficult to cancel, I'd rather the government just kept to themselves.

[@peterodua]

What if ISS 2.0 is a Lunar Gateway?

[@EagerSpace]

I'm thinking about the gateway video but honestly it's such a bad idea I'm having a hard time to get motivated... I talked about what NASA's goals were at the beginning. I think you can test deep space tech at gateway - though I'm not sure why you would bother because you can do that in LEO - but the stays are too short to do most biomedical research and they can't afford to keep astronauts in it all the time.

[@Yizahi]

The obvious solution for the government is to play word games with the word "continuous presence", until it loses it's original meaning :)

[@EagerSpace]

NASA already does it when they talk about Gateway.

[@Nemophilist850]

Do you not like the word "billion" or something?

[@EagerSpace]

I originally kept switching between million and billion and found that to be confusing so I switched to just using million, but I agree that the result still ended up not being great. It is true that billion means one thing in the US and another thing elsewhere.

[@jchidley]

Compelling analysis. I'm not a space expert ;-)

[@khankrum1]

Why build a space station when the better commercial prospects would be on the moon.or Mars?

[@gasdive]

The *FIRST* problem is that no one knows what the ISS is *for* beyond studying how to keep people alive in a space station. We've done that. Nothing else the ISS does can't be done better and cheaper with uncrewed missions. (Ok, maybe tourism)

[@cube2fox]

The most embarrassing thing about the ISS, in my opinion, is the fact that in multiple decades of operation they never bothered to include a test on whether lab mice can reproduce in space and produce viable offspring. Which would be very relevant for any long term Mars ambitions. (If Mars babies come out crippled, why send humans to Mars in the first place?)

[@gasdive]

@@cube2fox even that shouldn't need a crewed orbiter.

[@amentco8445]

Removing the human element isn't an improvement. We're trying to get people into space. We need to keep doing that. I do not care if automated labs would be cheaper, if that's even correct in most scenarios.

[@gasdive]

@@amentco8445 the people paying the bills for space manufacturing don't have the same goals as space enthusiasts. You might not care if automated labs are cheaper, can be deployed sooner, will produce better product in larger volumes and I probably don't either. Our opinions don't matter.

[@APMI-OFICIAL]

@@cube2fox Mice in microgravity will be too scared or disoriented to want to reproduce, the only option would be to artificially inseminate them.

[@winstonsmith478]

I see you aren't MISUSING the term as NASA does by calling NASA FUNDED efforts "commercial." For example, what "commercial" usage would Dragon get other than for recent, scientifically useless joy rides paid for by a billionaire if the white elephant ISS which costs as much just to support each year as a Perseverance class Mars rover didn't exist which it thankfully won't after 2030? And what commercial advantage does a space station offer that can't be reproduced MUCH more cheaply on the ground? Just one: continuous microgravity.

[@EagerSpace]

Commercial crew is commercial in the sense that a) the providers put in a fair amount of money during the development stage and b) the projects aren't run as fully NASA-owned projects. Oh, and c) they generally use firm-fixed-price contracts. The problem is that NASA is directed by congress to grow commercial space as much as possible and not go off and do things that commercial space could do, but NASA still has unique things that they need to do. Commercial crew and cargo are huge successes for NASA because a) they failed at building it themselves on constellation and b) they are a lot cheaper than shuttle was. Commercial crew has created a tiny market for non-NASA spaceflight. NASA has flown 8 operational flights with crew dragon, and SpaceX has flown 5 non-NASA flights and may hit 6 later this year. Half of them have been to the ISS, but that is something. The point of Polaris dawn is pretty simple. It's a private gemini program, a way of decoupling what SpaceX and Isaacman want to do is to decouple future human spaceflight from NASA. SpaceX didn't put two of their engineers on the flight just for a joyride.

[@davidk1308]

So for commercial stations to make sense, it can probably be broken into 3 main categories? 1) Transport of crew and cargo needs to be cheaper and more frequent; 2) The station needs to be large enough to accommodate significant projects (while also having viable projects in the first place); 3) And like SpaceX did with Starlink, some company needs to be able to bite the bullet on eating the cost of the station until those projects can begin to make money. Blue Origin is probably best positioned to succeed in CLD, since even if 1 doesn't work out, they can eat the cost either way, and I believe it's the largest proposal, so they have the most flexibility to grow and support commercial projects, while the others like Axiom and Nanoracks seem to be equal to the ISS's capabilities give or take. This hampers future growth, and even if there was a killer app of some sort, they probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of it without stepping on NASA's research.

[@jackdbur]

And SpaceX haven't positioned themselves? What is that huge stainless steel thing that they are building it only has about 1000m3 of usable space? 😅 SpaceX could launch an Starship station with more volume than the ISS within a year if they wanted to! 😮 Plus currently they are the only Western anything with a human rated vehicle!.

[@davidk1308]

@jackdbur SpaceX isn't currently competing in CLD, they did make a proposal, but it wasn't selected by NASA. In any case, yes, Starship itself could make a single launch space station, which could change things depending on how much it costs to outfit it, and maintain it.

[@JameBlack]

There only solution is to stop being childish and stop sending people to LEO. It doesn't make any sense.

[@waldmeisterexperte]

it wasn't possible for me to explain to my girlfriend what Alpacas have to do with rockets.

[@EagerSpace]

Did you try Vicuñas?

[@debott4538]

Well, the proposed Dynetics HLS or the moon was called ALPACA. :] Didn't work out though, sadly. :(

[@joseeduardobolisfortes]

Space exploration isn't a good capitalist endeavour yet; That's why China is ahead by now. Launch a station module and keep it in orbit is too much budget to be a good business.

[@jackinthebox301]

I deleted my comment because it turns out I paused the video to comment seconds before you did exactly what I was saying you should do lol

[@EagerSpace]

I was planning ahead; I knew that you were going to do that.

[@TCarneyV12]

Honestly the only company capable of launching a space station any time before 2030 will be SpaceX so Elon will launch the station he wants... NASA is concerned about all their eggs in one basket because it's Elon's basket

[@APMI-OFICIAL]

The thing is that SpaceX has no interest in building a space station in LEO, unless someone pays for it, of course. Their goal is the starship and with it to open possibilities in deep space

[@onepunchman4ever168]

Nasa waiting for star ⭐️ 🚢 to be ready from space x we need trump to give them money

[@snek9353]

Sadly in many ways this all hinges on the upcoming election. It sucks that politics matters but it does and always has. Here what matters most is Space X and Starship. It's pretty at this point to make any planes based on the abilities of Falcon when Starship is in the works. And in many ways it's only StarShip that might make it economically feasible. But as the FAA has made clear lately, the current admin hates Elon and will punish him if they can. Thus if Trump doesn't win the white house Elon and Starship are F'd. and with them go any viable plans for further space expansion.

[@jespado]

Don’t worry Elon will solve this in two weeks. It’s not that complicated.

[@JC-IV]

Eager Space reviews Elon timelines? That would be a interesting look into understanding aspirations vs operations

[@frankv7068]

Yea just like he initially said he’ll have humans in Mars by 2024

[@snakevenom4954]

​@@frankv7068 NASA said humans would be on Mars by 2018... Nothing wrong with optimism mate

[@frankv7068]

@@snakevenom4954 he said Elon would solve the commercial space station situation in two weeks, that’s not optimism that’s stupidity.

[@snakevenom4954]

@@frankv7068 He never said he'd get it done in 2 weeks. Just a solution being put forward is sufficient. If you don't think SpaceX could have a solution in 2 weeks if they really put their time into it, you really shouldn't against them.

[@jackdbur]

Without NASA regulations crew dragon can loft 7 people!

[@EagerSpace]

NASA wanted 4 people and more cargo because the US side of ISS was designed for 4 people. You could ask SpaceX to carry more people but that means you carry fewer supplies and that might mean that you need cargo dragon flights for those supplies. I didn't explore different crew sizes because the discussion was already too complicated.