X-Prize Executives Promise Space Tourism Will Be Cheaper -- Some Day

By ANN Editor Pete Combs

If you want to go to space right now, your only avenue would be to contact the Russians, pony up $20 million and hope you pass an abbreviated astronaut training course.

In a few years, that might change. But in practical terms, it won't change much -- at least, not right away. A sub-orbital trip into space might soon cost as little as $30,000.

But Dr. Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the Ansari X-Prize, says it probably won't get much less expensive than that for some time to come.

"Aviation was expensive in the beginning as well," he told ANN at AirVenture in Oshkosh (WI) Saturday. "It was getting lots of it that brought prices down."

Still, Diamandis said, one of the results of the $10 million X-Prize is that innovators involved in the competition are already driving down the costs.

"We're taking the first massive leap," Diamandis said. "We're bringing it down by orders of magnitude for suborbital flight. As we learn over the next ten or 20 years, it'll bring the price down even further."

Right now, private satellite boosters, NASA and the ESA charge about $10,000 a pound to put a payload into space. You might think that's because the cost of fueling such a launch is so high.

Not so, said Diamandis (above). The energy-related costs of sending one person into a 100-mile high orbit at 17,000 miles an hour, "the cost of you and your spacesuit... is about $100." The problem, he said, is that the current way we launch vehicles into orbit is "so antiquated and so infrequent that we really need to bring up the volume of flights." More flights, he reasoned, means less cost per flight.

Diamandis believes the ultimate way to bring the cost of space travel closer to the realm of affordability is to take it away from governments and give it to entrepreneurs who will, in turn, find ways to make a profit and apply economies of scale.

"And that will happen," he said. He believes the price to boost someone into orbit will soon come down to "$30,000 to $40,000 per seat. Theoretically, it can come down even further."

FMI: http://web1-xprize.primary.net