An Interview with Peter Diamandis, Founder of X PRIZE: On Colonizing Space and Reinventing the Philanthropy Model | OppGreen Insights
The money quote:
PD: So today, one of my companies, Space Adventures, sends people into orbit privately. A trip is $40 million. Our next customer goes up in 5 days, Guy Lalibertรฉ, the founder of Cirque du Soleil.
If you were to calculate the energy requirement to put you and your space suit into orbit, you can actually calculate the amount of energy, itโs easy to do, itโs a high school physics problem, itโs mass times gravity times height to get the potential energy of the altitude, and then one half mass times velocity squared to get kinetic energy. Itโs about 1.6 gigajoules. If you were to buy that over the electric grid at 7 cents a kilowatt hour, and you had an electric winch that could winch you up into space very easily, and you spend the energy over the course of an hour, it turns out that the cost to get you and your space suit into orbit, if you can convert the energy 100% efficiently, is about $100. So the price improvement curve from the cost of going to space today, which is $40 million, to theoretically what it could be in the future, which is $100, is extraordinary. So thatโs the future that Iโm focused on creating.
Given molecular manufacturing, that (energy) limit can be approached, and using the same kind of advances in technology and construction, the price of the energy could likely be brought down pretty drastically as well.