Costs for LOX and liquid H2? | Propulsion Workgroup | Forum

I've found a rough figure for H2 costs at Wikipedia: "Currently, most hydrogen is produced on site and the cost is approximately $0.32/lb and, if not produced on site, the cost of liquid hydrogen is about $1.00/lb to $1.40/lb".  This is pretty cheap, it puts the cost of our required 750 kg at $2314.86 if we buy it (at the $1.40/lb rate) rather than produce it ourselves.

I've had less luck with LOX.  No hard figures just lots of vague statements about it being very cheap – "pennies per pound", etc.

It looks like the total cost of fuel is going to be pretty low, anyway, under $10,000 per flight.  This will likely be dwarfed by the actual cost of the craft themselves and, of course, the launch (about $35 million for Falcon 9).

It looks like an individual CLLARE flight will end up costing less than $50 million (I can't imagine the crafts themselves costing more than $15 million if we use volunteer labour wherever we can).  That sounds like a lot of money to everday folks like you and me, but it's pretty cheap in the scheme of things – we could fly about 5 missions for the cost of a Boeing 747.

Rocket-To-The-Moon said:

Yes, very cheap indeed. So cheap in fact that it almost could be a vacation for the rich (as with ISS flights).

This idea has some potential.  A lunar flyby vacation, where we put the stack on a free return trajectory and leave it at that, would give an amazing experience (getting to within a few hundred kilometers of the moon), be relatively safe (compared to an actual lunar landing) and be even cheaper than the $50 million figure – we would not need to launch the mass of the lander, or the fuel for lunar ascent/descent or lunar capture and lunar escape.  The mass to launch would be just the CM, a Mission Extension Module, a fuel module with enough fuel for TLI and an orbital bus.  This stack would probably weigh half as much as the full mission stack so we may be able to source a cheaper launch than the Falcon 9 for significant savings.

Heck, even if we're not thinking about vacation options, we'll want to do a mission like this ourselves before an actual landing to test various systems out.  $50 million will be the cost of a "full" CLLARE mission – each of the lead up missions will be cheaper so it may be that an entire lunar mission program (something like suborbital; orbital; circumular; lunar landing – with each phase being unmanned first and then unmanned) could cost around the price of a 747.  What an astonishing achievement!

At this point I can't help but think we must be overlooking something – if going to the moon wtih off-the-shelf 2010 technology is so damned cheap, why isn't everybody doing it?  We've achieved some great things in planning CLLARE out to this level of detail, especially given our small size, but we haven't done anything that hundreds of thousands of grad students around the world couldn't also do.  Hell, if the "big five" on this forum had all been in the one room with an internet connection and enough caffeine/alcohol we probably could have got to this point in 24 (very exciting!) hours.  A mission like this must have been planned before, more than once.  Why isn't it happening?