The goal of this post is to define a ballpark figure on the costs of making this project a reality. With this ballpark figure defined we know what to aim for in the crowdfunding stage of this project.

In the other article we briefly explained the moonshot.express project. One of the key challenges detailed there is to fund the launch. This will come as no surprise to most of you, but as the title of this post suggests: going to space is not very cheap.

So, how do we go about making a price estimate for such a project?

Luckily, launching a rocket to the moon has been done before, so searching for a launch provider is the key challenge here.

Launch vehicles in operation right now. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_companies

There are not a lot of launch vehicles in operation right now that are capable of a mission to the moon, so that limits our search to these three companies:

The SpaceX price estimates are the most straightforward. $62M for the Falcon 9 and $90M for the Falcon Heavy. Both these rockets are capable of delivering our small and light payload to the moon.

Prices for the Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy of SpaceX. Source: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

United Launch Alliance has a great online tool for estimating launch prices. It’s called Rocket Builder. This tool indicates a price of around $65M.

Orbital ATK doesn’t seem to have any cost estimates public.

So that leaves us with a great ballpark figure to aim for at the crowdfunding stage of this project: $65M.

When the community is strong and the project is at a more mature stage we will contact the launch providers to get real price estimates and then we can get the crowdfunding up and running. Stay tuned for that!