Question about cost breakdown of a real Rocket, E.g. Falcon 9

[Raukk]

Looking at Wikipedia; they quote the cost per launch of the Falcon 9 at around $60 million and quote the weight at 1,115,200 pounds. If this cost is just for the rocket then it’s about $50 per Lb, which seems like a lot given that most of the weight is fuel (which is much cheaper). So my question is, does anyone have the cost breakdown of a real Rocket, ie. How much of the cost is fuel, structure, legal, development, etc.?

Thanks,

Raukk

[Kryten]

That information is proprietary.

[Jouni]

There are some public figures available. For example, fuel costs are said to be around 0.3% of launch costs for Falcon 9, while first stage hardware takes roughly 70%.

[Raukk]

That information is proprietary.

HAHAHAHAAA.... oh wait, that was serious huh?

There are some public figures available. For example, fuel costs are said to be around 0.3% of launch costs for Falcon 9, while first stage hardware takes roughly 70%.

Hum, I guess that explains why they are trying for re-usability so bad.

Personally I'd look at reductions to the cost of the hardware even if it increased the fuel amount (though that can cause more hardware I guess).

[lajoswinkler]

Designing and testing is the most expensive part. The actual material, fuel, and even the building isn't very expensive. It's about the idea. Lots of people had to thing very hard and lots of stuff had to be used to ensure everything will be ok. That's what consumes money the most.

[Beowolf]

In a talk about reusability, I think I remember Elon Musk saying the fuel in a Falcon 9 first stage costs $300,000.

At the Dragon 2 unveiling, he also mentioned they've invested half a billion dollars in Dragon development. So yeah, there are lots and lots of R&D costs to earn back.

Edited October 17, 2014 by Beowolf

[Godot]

I guess lots of development time could be cut, if we didn´t have a situation of competition between the different Space agencies and spacecraft companies and all engineering information went into public domain after its development.

I wonder how much (in %) of development time and money is spent with developing the wheel anew, which some other Space Agency or Spacecraft Company already invented

[Raukk]

Thanks for all the informative responses, I am trying to ignore R&D costs since those are spread between an undetermined number of launches.

I understand that the Falcon 9 is kept as a trade secret, are there any Rockets which have been disclosed more fully, like the Saturn V? (Since the space shuttle is not a traditional rocket it may not be as good for a comparison)

[Nibb31]

There are fixed costs and per volume costs. Attempting to separate one from the other is a mistake. It is very difficult to to determine the actual cost of a single launch vehicle, because it depends on the fixed costs divided by the number of launches.

The price of a launch includes:

- Several years of R&D

- Production (including sourcing, testing, firing ranges)

- Consumables (propellant)

- Launch Infrastructure (multiple launch sites, fuel storage, factories, IT, coms, mission control)

- Integration (white rooms, power and test fixtures)

- Logistics and handling (transporting people and stuff around)

- Sales and Marketing (PR, selling flights, responding to RFPs, etc...)

- Business stuff (finance, taxes, operations, HR, IT, maintenance, catering, etc...)

- Taxes

- Employee benefits

- Profit (if any) for the shareholders

To manage all that stuff, a company like SpaceX pays for thousands of highly qualified (=very expensive) employees and maintains some very expensive facilities. The cost of the actual rocket is only a small fraction of the $60 million price tag (which is why reusablity isn't as big a deal as some people think it might be).

Edited October 17, 2014 by Nibb31

[Sky_walker]

To manage all that stuff, a company like SpaceX pays for thousands of highly qualified (=very expensive) employees

Actually one of the major sources in savings is that SpaceX does not employ thousands of highly qualified employees opting instead for younger graduates with little experience in the industry willing to work after hours.

SpaceX got whole series of lawsuits over infringing labor law and the reviews from their current or former employees are mixed towards negative.

They work in a similar fashion to the advertisement industry - picking talents, squeezing them out and then throwing out. That's got very little to deal with maintaining thousands of highly qualified employees. There's a core team made of experienced qualified people and then there are thousands on engineering monkeys working overtime every other day. But as said - it's a great way to save money that obviously works very well for them.

[rdfox]

Consumables cost is very easy to calculate. Market prices for the various sorts of rocket propellants are easily found through Google, and the capacities for said consumables are public information. Multiply the market price per unit volume (or unit mass, as appropriate) by the booster's capacity, and you have the price for any given consumable for each launch. Add those up, and you have the consumables cost of the launch.

For example, if one was to launch a Saturn V today:

The S-IC first stage carried 810,700 liters of RP-1 fuel and 1,311,100 liters of liquid oxygen oxidizer. (All capacities per NASA's official technical history of the Saturn boosters, "Stages to Saturn.") Other than the eight solid-fuel separation motors (which I cannot find cost data for), it used no other consumables, as it steered entirely via engine gimbals, and the hydraulic system for gimballing the engines used RP-1 as its actuating fluid. This works out to 214,164.28 gallons of RP-1 kerosene and 1647.57 short tons of LOX. (Conversions courtesy of aqua-calc.com, and you'll see the reason for the odd selection of units momentarily. Aqua-Calc doesn't cover liquid hydrogen or hypergolics, so I used conversion tables available at http://www.uigi.com/h2_conv.html for LH2, and density data on Wikipedia for others)

According to a public listing from the Defense Logistics Agency (http://www.energy.dla.mil/customers/standard_prices/Documents/Aerospace%20Energy%20Standard%20Prices/Prices%20for%20FY%202008.pdf ), in US government Fiscal Year 2008, RP-1 cost $3.50 per gallon, and LOX (at Kennedy Space Center, where there was a production plant on-site not requiring transport) cost $66 per ton. This means a cost of $749,574.98 for the RP-1, and $108,739.62 for the LOX, or a total first-stage consumables cost of $858,314.60.

Continuing up through the Apollo/Saturn V stack:

S-II: 331,000L LOX, 1,000,000L liquid hydrogen. This works out to $27,452.45 for LOX and $468,164.79 for LH2.

S-IVB: 253,200L LH2, 92,350L LOX, 95L nitrogen tetroxide, 114L monomethylhydrazine. $118,539.33 LH2, $7,659.32 LOX, $6,644.49 N2O4, $23,336.97 MMH.

Lunar module: 3800L N2O4, 4500L Aerozine-50 hydrazine. $265,779.60 N2O4, $953,306.51 Aerozine-50

Command and Service Modules: 9727L N2O4, 8000L Aerozine-50, 379L MMH. $680,325.84 N2O4, $1,694,767.12 Aerozine-50, $77,585.19 MMH.

I couldn't find numbers on the total capacity of breathing oxygen in the LM and CSM, so we'll count propellants only.

This adds up to $1,510,111.95 in consumables to launch a Saturn V in 2008; if we add the Apollo spacecraft as a payload, it increases to $5,181,876.21. By comparison, Wikipedia lists the 1969 cost of a Saturn V, including launch, at $185 million, which adjusts for inflation to $1.094 billion. Thus, the consumables cost of launching a Saturn V would be about 0.1% of the total launch cost.

Moral of the story: propellants are cheap. It's everything ELSE that's expensive.

[Guest]

IIRC, most of the rocket's cost is in it's engine. Fuel is the least costly thing in a rocket. Tankage and fairings are fairly cheap, too, usually being made mostly of aluminium isogrid. I imagine that the instrument unit is somewhat costly, because it needs advanced, space-rated electronics. The engines are the most complex, costly and the most failure-prone rocket components, which is why solid motors and pressure fed engines (which lack the turbopump, in turn the most complex, costly and failure-prone thing in an engine) are so attractive.

[Kryten]

There are more costs involved than the parts of the rocket itself, don't forget. Launch costs have to cover maintenance on launch facilities, maintenance on payload preparation facilities (massive areas under clean-room conditions-not cheap) transport of any rocket parts (oversized cargo-not cheap), insurance, and the payload fairing. Some of these smaller costs are publicly available, and they're higher than you might expect-for Proton, transport is over $1 million, the payload fairing is over $3 million, and insurance is nearly $20 mill.