So obvious question is, why the price has been so extremely high historically. That is a whopping $200 million per passenger. Yet a few private tourists who have been able to afford space travel have paid ten thousand times that amount, with bill to taxpayers for launching astronauts costing even more, as much as ten times greater. Right now, such round-trip flight tickets cost around $2000 per passenger. The energy to send a spacecraft to orbit is about same as what is required to fly a jet roundtrip from Los Angeles to Sydney. At a typical price of $0.08 per kilowatt-hour, this amounts to a cost of $72 to send an eighty-kilogram person with twenty kilograms of luggage to the space station. The energy per unit mass required to send an object from ground to a low earth orbit (LEO) in Space is about nine kilowatt-hours per kg. There is no constraint from laws of physics that requires spaceflight to be very expensive. This belief, however, is not based on any facts. There are a lot of people among us who still believe that making Space easily accessible to Humans is an impossible dream. Let us navigate this ocean and understand its depth and vastness while also understanding the risks, of this new space investment voyage. Their business is a Blue Ocean, that we have found in outer Space. Momentus is establishing itself as an early leader in the high growth area of Orbital Space Transport Infrastructure. The company Momentus Space, with its unique proprietary technology of Microwave Electro Thermal (MET) Water based Plasma propulsion, stands to gain a tremendous advantage here. However, one aspect of space travel that people are not familiar, is the amount of work required to transport satellites in space to the target orbits after leaving the rockets at Low Earth Orbit. Such cost is expected to go down several fold in the coming years, as large rockets like SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn go commercial. This New Space Age is driven by improvements in technology resulting in re-usability of space rockets, that has driven down the cost of launching payloads in Space. However, a lot has changed in Space Technology especially over the last decade, making space launches efficient and cheaper. If we ask a common man to think about Space, he may think about scenes he remembers from Star Wars or Star Trek. Chan Kim, Author of “Blue Ocean Strategy”. “Don’t compete with rivals, make them irrelevant”
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