The Skywalker Space Hotel - You Can Visit It For Just $500,000

The Falcon Heavy launch has produced a recent dramatic reduction in the dollars per pound cost for launching a payload into space and has made considerations like a space hotel and space tourism closer to reality. This post does the math for what it would cost to spend a 10 day vacation in space.

So, the year is 2033 and the Skywalker Space Hotel has been up and running for a few years. The hotel has been built using the inflatable modules from Bigelow Aerospace. Due to the dramatic reduction in launch costs made possible by Space X and their Falcon Rockets the cost has come down to where the "regular rich" can afford an extended vacation in space.

Calculating The Cost to Get Into Low Earth Orbit

This table calculates the cost to get a kilogram (or pound) of payload into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Looking at the table we see that the cost is starting to get into the range where space tourism might soon be possible. The table also shows how expensive the other rocket systems are now in comparison.

Launch System	Payload to LEO	Cost	Cost Per Pound	Cost Per 170 lb Person
Falcon Heavy	63,800 kg (140,700 lb)	$90,000,000	$1400 per kg($640 per lb)	$110,000
Falcon 9	22,800 kg (50,300 lb)	$60,000,000	$2600 per kg($1200 per lb)	$205,000
Proton-M	23,000 kg (51,000 lb)	$65,000,000	$2,800 per kg($1275 per lb)	$220,000
Ariane-5	16,000 kg (35,000 lb)	$165,000,000 (minimum)	$10,300 per kg ($4700 per lb)	$800,000
Delta IV Heavy	28,790 kg (63,470 lb)	$400,000,000	$14,000 per kg($6300 per lb)	$1,100,000

Detailed Cost Calculation

The Falcon Heavy is not human rated so you will have to go up on a Falcon 9. The cost for someone who weighs about 170 pounds would be about $200,000. A person eats about 5 to 6 pounds of food per day, so for a 10 day trip this amount to about 60 pounds of food. This can be delivered on the Falcon Heavy in an earlier separate launch so the cost for your meals will be about $40,000.

You will consume about 550 litres of oxygen per day to survive (5500 litres for a 10 day trip). A mole of gas at STP occupies about 22.4 litres. This means you will need to transport about 250 moles of oxygen to LEO to survive for your trip. 250 moles of oxygen has a mass of 4 kg. Your fee for oxygen will therefor be about $5,600.

We will assume that the nitrogen in the air is efficiently recycled and not charged to you. The water you use will already be up there and it will have been recycled from previous guests (don't think about it) so the cost for water can be spread out over many guests.

So, in general the cost to get just you, your food and your oxygen to the Space Hotel will run about $250,000.

The cost of the constructing and launching the hotel and all of the other factors will be spread out over all of the customers over time. This is hard to accurately calculate so let's just assume this doubles the cost of your trip, so your ticket will cost about $500,000. It may be more, it may be less, the success of the hotel will depend on this factor.

In Closing

These are rough estimates but I think that they illustrate the impact that the Falcon Heavy Launch will have on the space industry. It looks like it might be possible for the 'regular rich' to get to take a trip to space for a holiday of a lifetime.

Once an industry like this gets up and running costs will come down as they usually do. Who knows it might even become a possibility for the upper middle class to get into space one day. Failing that, if you have no money but are healthy and talented you might even get a job at the space hotel serving the guests.

Sources

1. Falcon-9: USA
2. Falcon Heavy: USA
3. Ariane-5: Europe
4. Delta IV Heavy: USA
5. Proton-M: Russia
6. Food Per Day
7. Air Per Day