[IamCenny]

Unless they have some new type of propulsion, there is no way that this could possibly be cost effective. The cost of fuel it takes to even leave Earth is ridiculous, unless they somehow manufacture their hardware in space...which I think would be more practical in the long run. Get a huge station/factory up in orbit in about 100 pieces, put it together, get staff up there, start constructing hardware.

[JRandomFreeper]

Did you know that Musk is using Matlab for SpaceX? Off the shelf software?

NASA freaked, but he did manage to orbit and retrieve a capsule.

Fuel cost is small. Government cost is huge.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

I checked on some numbers from NASA. It cost about USD$2M per launch of the shuttle for fuel (depending on how you lok at the solid fuel, $2M is the high end. Liquid fuels at market prices cost about $200K). The average cost per launch worked out to be around $1.2B.

Fuel is the least expensive part.

/johnny