Abstracts Category : Other

Financial Operational Losses in Space Launch

by Tom Boone

The high cost of access to space has been a problem since the beginning of thespace age. Most attempts to reduce this cost are centered on improvements tolaunch vehicle design. While this approach has been fruitful, less attention hasbeen paid to other causes of high cost. Two of these are wastage of launch vehiclepayload capacity and use of cost-ineffective launch vehicles. Both of these areassociated with the way the launch vehicles are operated, and so are operationallosses. This work examines the extent of operational losses in space launch overthe period January 1, 2000, to September 29, 2013, and considers strategies forreducing these losses. The cumulative worldwide wastage for this period was 654tons, which is 20.4% of total payload capacity, and represents a financial loss of noless than 8.72 billion (2014). The cumulative loss due to cost-ineffective launchvehicle selection is less certain, but is no greater than 43.8% of total launchcost, or 19.3 billion. Two possible strategies may combat operational losses:changing launch vehicle selection or rearranging payloads. Changing launch ve-hicle selection can in principle eliminate cost-ineffective launch vehicle use, butis prevented in some measure by non-economic considerations. Rearrangementof payloads cannot eliminate wastage, but can reduce it considerably, to as littleas 2% in some cases. Combining these two strategies by applying a bin-packingalgorithm to the set of launch vehicles and payloads can yield a considerable costsavings, reducing total launch costs to geosynchronous orbit by as much as 53%if both launch vehicle selection and payload arrangement are unrestricted. Evenin the most restrictive scenario where payloads must be launched in the samecalendar year they actually were and launch vehicle choice is restricted to thelaunch vehicles actually used during that year, cost savings of 19.1% over theactual launches are possible.Advisors/Committee Members: Miller, David (advisor), Siddique, Zahed (committee member), Striz, Alfred (committee member), Kilic, Mukremin (committee member), Attar, Peter (committee member).