Total Cost of A Privately Funded Edwards' Space Elevator
A space elevator built according to the Edwards proposal is estimated to cost $20 billion ($40B with a 100% contingency). This includes all operating and maintenance costs for one cable. If this is to be financed privately, a 15% return would be required ($6 billion annually). Subsequent elevators would cost $9.3B and would justify a much lower contingency ($14.3B total). The space elevator would lift 2 million kg per year per elevator and the cost per kilogram becomes $3,000 for one elevator, $1,900 for two elevators, $1,600 for three elevators, until construction costs are recovered, after which this drops significantly.
For comparison, in potentially the same time frame as the elevator, the Skylon, 12,000 kg cargo capacity spaceplane (not a conventional rocket) is estimated to have an R&D and production cost of about $15 billion. The vehicle has about the same $3,000/kg price tag. Skylon would be suitable to launch cargo and particularly people to low/medium Earth orbit. Early space elevator designs move only cargo, although to a much wider range of destinations. Later, tourism would seem possible as safety parameters are established.
Read more about this topic: Space Elevator Economics
Famous quotes containing the words total, cost, privately, space and/or elevator:
“For youth is a frail thing, not unafraid.
Firstly inclined to take what it is told.
Firstly inclined to lean. Greedy to give
Faith tidy and total. To a total God.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Rape is a culturally fostered means of suppressing women. Legally we say we deplore it, but mythically we romanticize and perpetuate it, and privately we excuse and overlook it.”
—Victoria Billings (b. 1945)
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)
“The cigar-box which the European calls a “lift” needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like the man’s patent purge—it works”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)