The launch of the Commercial Space Era Now that we have explored the history of robotic Mars missions a little, the next obvious topic to cover is manned ones. But before we begin, we still have something very important to contemplate: The space launch market. In 1957, the first ever satellite launch vehicle blasted off from a launch pad in the Bikanour Cosmodrome. In total, that rocket cost approximately 80 million 2019 dollars. The total payload to orbit was around 500 kg, so the cost per kg was $160,000. By 1980, that was down to $130,000 per kg. In 1995 it was $40,000 per kg. Today, on a government rocket, it is $8,400 per kg. On a reusable SpaceX rocket it is $2,700 per kg. Over the last 62 years, launch costs have dropped by a factor of 59. This is, needless to say, huge. This huge drop in launch costs has come about for a number of reasons. The first, is the decrease in the ratio of the rocket to the payload caused by the development of advanced alloys, more powerful engines, etc. The second is the explosion in the satellite launch market, which resulted in rocket builders adopting an assembly line style approach to building rockets - aka, build lots of them simultaneously instead of building just one at a time. And thirdly, the appearance of private space companies. The privatisation of space is very important for a number of reasons. Public organisations like NASA work by figuring out what the want to build, and then getting a bunch of subcontractors to build it for them. This causes a lot of money to be wasted, as multiple contractors might compete on designing the same thing, effectively doubling or tripling the preliminary development cost of that thing. Also, something people often forget is that the subcontractors are actual companies, so when they sell their product to NASA they add a profit margin on top. When you have hundreds of subcontractors you need to buy from, these profit margins add up quite significantly. And on top of all of that, everything often ends up tangled in politics that is quite hard to break free from. Private companies on the other hand don't really need to worry about any of that. By not having to deal with as many subcontractors, if any at all, they drastically reduce the complexity and the wasted money for a product, mainly by eliminating those excess profit margins on all of their costs. And if they make almost everything in-house, they can very effectively control how their products are made, more so than if they were working with a lot of subcontractors. This is of course a vast oversimplification, but it's close enough for our purposes here. That's not to say that public spaceflight organisations are bad however, in fact its quite the opposite. Public organisations like NASA have the advantage of being intertwined with their host country, so when that country's government makes a declaration to do something, the public spaceflight organisations will often end up getting huge amounts of funding to do it. That's basically what happened in the Apollo program back in the 60s. Public organisations also have proven to be exceptionally good at organising people, staging competitions, and directing spaceflight operations. They can also act as funding hubs, taking government funding and supplying it to various subcontractors to provide services they need. As a result of all of this, cooperation between public and private companies will prove critical in the future of spaceflight. One could easily imagine a future where NASA takes government funding for a project, and supplies it to a company which builds and launches the spacecraft, at which point NASA takes over controlling its operations in relation to the other spacecraft already flying, acting as a sort of air traffic controller. They could also provide the ground service equipment, launch sites, tracking stations, etc to private spaceflight companies that handle the spacecraft themselves. This is not to say that organisations like NASA would be completely removed from the spacecraft development process. NASA and other public companies have time and again shown incredible competence in designing, building and operating cutting-edge vehicles, but routine, bulk-production things like satellites or space launch vehicles would probably be left to the private sector. In this way, as described above, we can see that though the development of the private spaceflight industry over the past decade or so, launch costs have been pushed down, and spaceflight has been revolutionised forever.
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