How much does it cost to send 1kg to lower earth orbit? (opens in new tab)

My understanding for why we don't use those for spacecraft is because people and fine machinery can't take the Gs.

Trash could.

One approach is to capture a number of related issues in one fee at a natural point of contact that is easy to measure. It's not a crazy idea.

Falcon 9 and Heavy lose most of their performance advantage when going to higher orbits, IIRC because their first stages stage lower, and their upper stage has an ISP disadvantage vs. hydrogen rockets.

To maximize payload percentage to both LEO and higher orbits the most optimal rocket configuration is a first stage burning a dense fuel like RP-1 or Methane to minimize your largest tankage size/weight, and use hydrogen on your upper stage to maximum ISP without incurring too large a cost in heavier tankage. That’s how the Saturn V could lift 150 metric tons to LEO and 50 to translunar injection.

But instead SpaceX decided to use the same fuel and engines for both stages to get economies of scale in engine production, and dense fuels to save the most dry mass.

They could have optimized the next generation Falcon platform with a cryogenic hydrogen upper, and increased their GEO payloads 10-20%, at the cost of dual engine designs with less economies of scale and increased fueling complexity and infrastructure.

Instead they decided to brute force the same simple design architecture and build a 10x larger booster/second stage with Starship/SuperHeavy with 3x times the engines. One engine type, one fuel type and bigger rockets with enough brute lifting capacity that you can still put 100 metric tons in LEO while conserving enough to fly back your first stage and make your second stage out of heavy stainless steel so it can re-enter and be reused too.

So probably two thirds the payload to orbit capacity as a Saturn V style rocket, but 1/100th the cost per launch.

Using hydrogen to fuel the first stage required building a massively heavy cryogenic tank, impairing performance so greatly the RS-25s cant lift the SLS without SRBs.

And not only will it cost $20B before it’s first launch, but each flight will destroy over a half billion in engines alone. So the minimum cost per flight is over $1B without counting the R&D, about $3B to $5B per flight in total depending on how many flights are flown to amortize the R&D.

And with all that, SLS has very limited capabilities. The block 1 will be the largest heavy lift launch system (until Starship launches), but it’s only about 30% more payload mass than a $150M falcon heavy expendable.

But worse is the maximum possible cadence for the SLS is twice yearly, making it both useless and unnecessary for more ambitious missions that will rely on in orbit refueling. It’s just an archaic dinosaur built out of nearly 50 year old parts.

No, I can't see that... because I'm not a satellite communications expert. My training is evolutionary biology and international business.

I don't know how many satellites it would take to provide private communications across the United States, or the globe, or any section of area. It sounds like you might though.

Let's say one wanted to create their own personal satellite communications for telephone and data transmission. How many would you need?

Pretty much all money can be bought for very slightly more money. Thus, a price can be cheap.

Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.

Also, you can send the turd alone, you need to attach it to a launcher, and have a deployment mechanism. You are looking at a few thousands $ minimum regardless of the weight.

There is also politics involved, any country putting nuclear 'waste' in high orbits would be a suspect for putting nuclear weapons in space as well.

You actually specifically want things to go to LEO before they die; when they're sufficiently low, atmospheric drag takes care of them quickly.

I agree with the overall direction of your point-that we need to be careful about our space junk-though :)

It sounds awful at first glance, but I wonder what the environmental impacts actually are of nuclear waste de orbiting and spreading evenly over the atmosphere. Normalized out per kwh, environmental radiation release might be less than the equivalent coal power plant? I'll have to break out an excel sheet later.

Now I wonder what exactly about the headline made all three of wonder about sending poop to space? I guess poop is a universal answer to "most ridiculous thing that weighs under a pound"?

The more relevant number is the all-in immediate price per launch, the rate where one could simply wire the money and SpaceX would launch next week, divided by the actual thing(s) launched, which will weigh some intermediate amount. And compare that to the same for the other rockets.

The other responses did help clarify how it can occur with Starship.