Interested in developing and placing your own satellite or experiment in orbit? For that you'll need a rocket, and according to the folks at United Launch Alliance, you can get one starting at $109 million. Of course, costs vary depending on the type of mission, but the Rocket Builder portal lets us calculate several details, as well as access a 3D model of the Atlas V rocket that will supposedly do the job.
A harsh reminder from orbit
Roscosmos yesterday confirmed the loss of the Progress 65 mission, whose objective was to send supplies to the International Space Station. From every point of view, Progress 65 qualified as a routine mission, and the record of the Progress/Soyuz-U combo is excellent, but this unexpected failure in its third stage reminds us of something we already know deep down: Space doesn't negotiate. The two and a half tons of cargo were completely lost, and although it won't affect the station's performance in the short term (the Japanese HTV-6 mission will be launched next December 9), placing material into orbit (or at least attempting to) still demands respect. It's a strange situation if we consider that SpaceX is trying to convince the world that economical launches on reusable rockets are possible, and that has taken a lot of shine away from its direct competitor, United Launch Alliance.
Configure and price your launch
In an attempt to improve its profile with the public and reveal details about the true costs behind a launch, ULA presented a portal called Rocket Builder, which lets us configure and budget the launch of one of its Atlas V rockets. If we follow the site's data, the base cost for an Atlas V is $109 million; however, the number changes quickly once we input additional parameters. ULA lets us choose the launch year and quarter, the rocket type (including payload size and mass), and associated services (more testing, on-board video, promotion, launch tickets, etc.).
Once finished, Rocket Builder gives us the total cost, and what ULA calls value added, a polite way to justify certain prices. ULA does not hesitate to highlight the record of its Atlas V, the certainty of its schedule, and the so-called orbital optimizations that enable the extension of some missions by two years or more. In the case of my rocket with a LEO orbit, ULA suggests a final value of $131 million, but that doesn't include the parallel costs necessary for the mission to be certified by the US government. That makes me think of... an extra 50 percent?
