We expect mission costs to fall to about $10 million per launch for high product value cargo (e.g. commmunications satellites) $2-5 million for low product value cargo (e.g. science satellites) and for costs per passenger to fall below $100k, for tourists when orbital facilities exist to accommodate them.
Skylon - Commercial Operations
Skylon has been designed as a practical utilitarian machine for use by competitive commercial operators. This is seen as the most effective way to ensure that space transportation assumes its proper place in the economy and its continued improvement under "customer control". This has dictated a configuration as close to a conventional aircraft as technology will permit. In particular a rolling take-off has been seen as essential.
Initially operations will probably begin from existing sites built either for space or aircraft which have been modified to suit Skylon vehicles. However in the longer term (within ten years of introduction) operations would probably move to international equatorial sites since these offer maximum launch opportunities of at least two windows per day and access to any orbit. For easterly missions there is also a performance advantage due to the earth's rotation.
The eventual equatorial launch sites, or spaceports, are envisaged to be international from the point of view of the operators using them and would be established by share investment; profits would be made by leasing the facilities to the spaceline operators. It is expected that three spaceports would be operating at equatorial locations by 2020-2025.
Operating Skylon Commercially
The development of space transportation is very dependent on creating a commercial competitive operation. Whilst the development and purchase cost of equipment is relatively fixed the traffic which it carries is dependent on the motivation of the operator. By increasing the traffic the cost per flight will fall towards the recurring costs of the system which have been designed to be as low as possible.
Each operator's marketing and pricing strategy will determine his capture of existing customers and the creation of new ones. In order to enable this market to exist, attention has been paid to making the vehicle technology as unobtrusive as possible, allowing operators to focus on transport activity, rather than vehicle maintenance and launch operations as is the case at present. It is anticipated that operators will buy or lease vehicles from the manufacturers. Funds to do this would come from the finance community and this would be repaid from the charges made to customers for the service provided.
Vehicle and Operating Costs
The initial vehicle cost is determined by the development cost, the cost of development finance and the production cost of the machines. The Skylon vehicle has been designed with the aim of achieving not less than 200 flights per vehicle. This seems a reasonable target for a first generation machine. Various scenarios have been examined but the uncertainty lies with assumptions on traffic growth.
At present the true launch cost of a typical 2-3 tonne spacecraft is about $150 million. Actual costs paid by customers vary from about one-third to one half of this due to the hidden subsidies on vehicle development, range maintenance, range activity and support infrastructure. For Skylon, if no growth occurred and all operators flew equal numbers of the current approximately 100 satellites per year using 30 in-service spaceplanes from 3 spaceports, the true launch cost would be about $40 million per flight.
Even if the customer paid all of this, it would still represent a large reduction on current costs and would be a true transport operation.
This however is a very naive and pessimistic assumption. The real market would involve benign and aggressive operators with differing flight rates and nationally biased traffic. The total traffic would affect service and facility costs whilst profits and loan repayments would affect operators' cost. Pricing strategy would create different rates for cargo categories and human transport.
View the Skylon Operations Slideshow
The Vehicle | Commercial Operations | Development Programme
