With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

luggage surcharge

2007 March 24 04:57

I ran across some interesting numbers in Soyuz: A Universal Spacecraft (a recent birthday present). In its section on the Progress supply spacecraft (which is an uncrewed variant of the Soyuz) it mentions that it takes 15-30 kg to sustain a person in orbit for a day. I suppose that includes food, oxygen, air handling consumables and clothes. Elsewhere in the book, it says that a Progress costs $23 million to build and launch. The Progress has a dry cargo capacity of 2500 kg.

Using the lower limit of 15 kg per day per person, that works out to be about $140,000 per person per day in orbit. That's the sustained cost, which does not count the cost of getting the space station/vehicle in orbit or getting the person there in the first place.