No money yet for Astrium spaceplane

They require far too much money upfront, given market uncertainties - of the order of 10 times what US based suborbital manufacturers are talking about.

As Per Wimmer of Wimmer Aerospace (London) said to me a few months ago, this project is a non-starter.

Their problem is not out-of-the box thinking, but out-of-the box cost upfront that requires a huge and certain revenue stream.

Posted by Charles Lurio at 06/07/08 11:48:39

I don't even want to think about where those 10 million Euros went.

Posted by FC at 06/07/08 12:59:49

The Astrium Cost numbers are probably sound.

Virgin Galactic is talking 250Million or more.

Bezos won't even say what his numbers are.

Listening to XCOR for cost numbers is almost
as big a mistake as listening to Rocketplane.

Posted by anonymous at 06/07/08 18:57:22

A billion dollars is a lot to ask for, hence the reason that Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Bigelow, etc. are primarily self financed (or at least have the backing of their founders).

With Astrum unable to secure funding and Dream Chaser disappearing (or at least Bensen Space), I am beginning to suspect that Virgin may be the only one left in their respective industry (as they are at least showing the potential to generate revenue).

Posted by Darnell Clayton at 06/07/08 21:07:00

One problem I see with these groups trying to spend "other people's money" to help build their dream is that a legitimate business case really can't be made yet for private spaceflight. Legislative issues alone (aka Congress or the respective national & local legislative bodies) are so completely uncertain that even if you are able to build a cost-effective space vehicle, there is some real doubt that you would be able to fly it.

Yes, the FAA-AST have helped fix that situation, but it took a few brave individuals to actually build some hardware first and lay the gauntlet down to legislators and regulators that this wasn't just the dream of some SciFi buff, but some actual hardware that was going up regardless of their action or inaction. Unfortunately I think more of that is still going to be needed, and pushing the bureaucrats to at least acknowledge private spaceflight could even be done at all. Read up on the history of the AT&T telecom satellites back in the 1960's and you will discover a huge bureaucratic morass that effectively killed a determined corporation with deep pockets and a justifiable business model with the kind of legislative torpedoing of a profitable business that I'm talking about.

While there are a bunch of hopeful projects that I think will likely "get up there" and start to make some real progress in private spaceflight, very few have been successful so far without huge amounts of government money showing up into the equation as a subsidy.

More to the point, no sane person would get into this business strictly for the economics of private spaceflight. They are individuals who are willing to take some arrows in the back and quite literally go where nobody has gone before and do something genuinely unique. This is something that can appeal to a few private individuals who might be willing to lose a bunch of money to a political cause (in this case private spaceflight) and leave a legacy if they succeed.

I predict that in a 5-10 year timespan, you will begin to see Wall Street tradable companies that are devoted exclusively to private spaceflight and not government contracts except perhaps as a minor side business, but not their primary income source. The difference between now and the near future is these pioneers we have talked about on these pages still have to prove that individuals can get up into space on their own dime and demonstrate that money can be made in space. Once that is proven, the financial floodgates will open and be pouring money into space ventures in a fashion that will make the dot com era look like child's play.

Posted by Robert Horning at 06/08/08 06:45:03

A billion dollars is ludicrously too high. Even if technical and market success were guaranteed, no one is going to invest a billion dollars to compete with someone who is spending $250 million. Especially when there are other potential competitors who might succeed with even less investment.

Posted by Bill Hensley at 06/08/08 09:06:32

If a billion or so dollars is too high to compete, given that they'll have to charge ticket prices and develop a service to compete with, probably, Virgin Galactic and possibly others, why not take a look at investing in some lower-cost suborbital venture in some way?

They could bring finances, business experience, contacts, and so on into the picture, and the lower-cost, probably smaller company could bring their lean-and-mean approach.

It seems like a reasonable approach if they do their homework on the company they'd be working with.

Posted by red at 06/09/08 04:45:18

Part of the reason that EADS Astrium wasn't concerned about their costs being so high is because many of them honestly believed that SS2 will not be safe enough. EADS wants to go for current bizjet reliability levels, which is much harder to achieve than what SS2 is being designed to have. So in a sense EADS is not designing the same product as Scaled.

I'm not saying that EADS is right or wrong - just that their assumptions about the acceptability of risk are very different from the assumptions of most of the US developers.

Posted by James at 06/09/08 07:34:36

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