What are Launch Costs?
Launch costs refer to the cost of sending a payload from the ground to outer space, specifically low Earth orbit (LEO). Typical launch costs today are $10,000 US Dollars (USD) to $25,000 USD per kilogram ($4,500 to $11,000 USD per pound), though some countries subsidize space launches, occasionally reducing cost as low as $4,000 USD per kilogram ($1,800 USD per pound). For a typical five tonne communications satellite, this adds up to between $20 million USD and $125 million USD. For launching the Space Shuttle, which weighs about 2,000 tonnes, the cost is about $800 million USD, or nearly a billion dollars. Including other expenses, the total average cost per Space Shuttle flight is about $1.5 billion USD. Clearly, this makes activities in space expensive. Launch costs have been pretty much the same since the earliest days of space exploration, mostly due to an unchanging underlying technology: chemical rockets. Launch costs for chemical rocket launches have been reduced somewhat thro
