When the Space Shuttle was retired back in 2011, NASA found itself lacking the capability to send its astronauts into orbit. It was forced to book rides on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft for close to a decade but that finally changed on Saturday when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday. The launch has been described as the dawn of a new era for American space flight, given that it’s the first privately designed and built spacecraft to carry astronauts into orbit and the return of a vital capability lost with the Space Shuttle. Both crewmembers, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, safely reached orbit and docked with the International Space Station on May 31.
Aside from eliminating NASA’s dependence on Russia to send astronauts into orbit, the SpaceX launch is significant for another reason: cost. Under a program called Commercial Crew, NASA awarded SpaceX and Boeing
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contracts worth $3.1 billion and $4.8 billion, respectively, to develop a new spacecraft. That has turned out to be the cheapest space flight development effort in nearly 60 years and a November 2019 NASA audit found that the cost per seat for each astronaut is significantly lower than previous programs and the Soyuz.
Research from the Planetary Society found that when adjusted for inflation, the Apollo program had a cost per seat of $390 million while the Space Shuttle’s figure was $170 million. According to the NASA audit, the SpaceX Crew Dragon’s per-seat cost works out at an estimated $55 million while a seat on Boeing’s Starliner is approximately $90 million, not a bad deal for the American taxpayer. The former option is noticeably cheaper than what NASA has been paying Russia for the latest round of Soyuz launches since 2017 when it contracted 12 trips that worked out at around $79.7 million per seat.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
Estimated cost per seat for astronauts on selected spacecraft
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