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http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/3722
Pretty neat. $15M for a 4-week stay on orbit; that's quite an improvement over $20M for a 5-day stay. And $88M/year to lease your own 300-m^3 space station module? That's a real bargain. In such an environment, I can imagine a lot of smaller countries developing an astronaut corps that way. NASA will look a bit foolish when there are twice as many Japanese astronauts on orbit as Americans, and they're paying a fraction of what we pay for that capability. The cool thing about this is, even if the schedule slips and the prices creep a bit (as they are almost certain to do), it's still a starting point much lower than anything governments have done. And once there are regular paying customers, prices will continue to come down and performance will go up, both in the launchers and in the on-orbit facilities. Bigelow won't long be the only player in that space. And besides direct competitors, there will be lots of room for support companies providing on-orbit fuel, power, tug service, and much more. Real space infrastructure at last! |
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