Different View of Space Shuttle Costs

Posted by JD 05/26/2010 at 11:27

In a BBC article about the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing the author mentioned a few statistics.

A Few Statistics

*First flight: 3 October 1985
*Total number of flights: 32
*Distance traveled: 195 million km
*Total number of days in orbit: 294
*Total number of orbits: 4,648

Cost Estimates

So if we assume that each shuttle launch and mission costs NASA about $450M on average, that leads to a few other operational cost numbers.

  • $14,400M for 32 flights
  • $48.98M for each day in orbit
  • $3.1M for each orbit

These are just the costs for Atlantis while on mission. These numbers make my next vacation plans seem tiny. ;)

Disclosure: I was employed by the space shuttle program for 5 yrs and by both the shuttle and space station programs for 3 years. I worked at NASA-JSC in Houston, Tx for both of those jobs.

STS-124 - Shuttle Discovery LAUNCHED

Posted by JohnP 06/01/2008 at 10:07

I had planned to watch this launch, but all the viewing Cape Canaveral tickets were sold out. After working as a contractor for 8 years in Houston – Shuttle On-board Flight Software and on Mission Control EDP software, I never got to watch a launch in Florida. I did watch a few from the JSC Mission Control Center and, early on, was forced to sit in the server data center next to the EDP project servers in case there was any problem that required physical correction. Not much fun since there was no headset link or TV or radio in the server rooms.

Anyways, the launch was on a Saturday after a holiday long weekend, so I didn’t want to brave the tourist and traffic to go.
Here’s the launch … youtube embedded video.

Enjoy.

Oh, and watch the landing – I re-wrote the nosewheel steering software and the aileron/elevon control software that makes all the landings since 1992 or so, perfect.

The Landing … on 6/14/2008. Notice how smooooooth it is. Thank you, thank you very much.