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MISSION FINANCE

This page is an overview of the costing of various equipment which is required for the mission to Mars. For an in-depth review of the specific equipment see the DESIGN and EQUIPMENT tabs.

OVERVIEW AND TOTAL COST OF PREVIOUS MARS MISSIONS

The first successful Mars mission was the Mariner 4 spacecraft which launched on 28th November 1964 (Williams, 2020) from Cape Canaveral. Mariner 4 performed the first successful flyby of the planet Mars, returning the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface. The total cost of the Mariner 4 mission is estimated at $700 million (inflation-adjusted) (Williams, 2020). The Atlas 5 rocket was used for the mission and currently has a cost of $100 million per rocket (if the rocket is purchased today) (Kelly, 2020). 

RECENT MISSIONS

  • Mars Pathfinder in 1996, which had a mission cost of approximately $265 million including launch and operations. Development and construction of the lander cost $150 million and the rover about $25 million (Matijevic, 2020). The delta II rocket was used for launch and had a cost of $137 million before being retired in 2018 (The Annual Compendium of Commercial Space Transportation: 2018, 2018).

  • Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched a space probe which reached Mars orbit 24th September 2014 where it has been sending information back to Earth ever since.  This Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) had a total cost of $73 million dollars (India Successfully Launches First Mission to Mars, 2020).

  • The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO or ExoMars Orbiter) is a collaborative project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos (Russia) that sent an atmospheric research orbiter and a lander to Mars in 2016. The cost of the ExoMars programme is $1.54 billion (Exomars, 2016).

FUTURE MANNED MISSIONS

  •  Mars One (once they receive the necessary funding), estimates the cost of bringing the first four people to Mars at $6 billion. This is the cost of all the hardware plus operational expenditures (Mission Budget - Finance and Feasibility - Mars One, 2020). The caveat is that this will be a one-way mission.

  • SpaceX believes that it will cost $10 billion for their Mars mission initially and subsequent flights will have a cost reduced to $200,000 per person (Wattel, 2020).

  • NASA's Mars mission (Moon to Mars) is estimated by The Institute for Defence Analyses to have a total cost of $217.4 billion (Link et al., 2019). This is much larger than all other Mars mission estimates. However, the analysis comes from an independent source so can be considered the least biased source.

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Figure 1: A graph of the overall costs of various Mars missions, both past and planned. Note that NASA's Mars mission is not included due to the large relative cost compared to other missions.

Fig. 1 shows a weak correlation between mission year and Mars mission cost and therefore this cannot be used to accurately predict the cost of a 2040 Mars mission. The equipment cost is broken down below to give a more accurate representation of the various costs.

ROCKET COSTS

On October 4th 1957, the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 kicked off the cold war space race. This was the first artificial space satellite to successfully enter a low Earth orbit and proved that space travel could soon be a possibility for humans. The cost of Sputnik itself is still kept secret but the rocket used to launch it (Russian intercontinental ballistic orbital launch vehicle R-7 ICBM) had a cost of $80 million per rocket (Wade, 2019). (note this cost is adjusted for inflation)

The space race, of course, climaxed with the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Kennedy on July 1969, sending man to the moon. The American Saturn V launch rocket was used and had a cost total cost (including R&D) of $1.23 billion (adjusted for inflation) (Wade, 2019).

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Following this trend of increasing cost, it can be expected that a rocket capable of transporting mankind to Mars will be a step up in price yet again. However, this is not entirely the case;

  • NASA is currently working on a new super-heavy-lift launch vehicle which will enable mankind to travel to the moon with fuel to spare and a possible follow-on human mission to Mars. The Space Launch System (SLC) is currently budgeted at $9.1 billion (NASA, 2020).

  • Over at SpaceX, they are developing the Starship spacecraft which will be capable of transporting humans and cargo to Mars and back. The cost per rocket is estimated by SpaceX to be $40 million. Over 100 times cheaper than the corresponding rocket at NASA (SpaceX, 2020).

 

The upper cost of R&D for a rocket with human-rating certification, i.e capable of safely transporting humans to Mars, along with the building cost will have an upper estimate of $10 billion USD if NASA's estimate is accurate. (however, until NASA or SpaceX complete their rockets, this number is an estimate).

However, the Atlas 5 rocket can currently be bought for $100 million dollars (Kelly, 2019) and can transport smaller probes and building material to mars. The Titan IIIE rocket (which is discussed below) costs $380 million and is capable of transporting a lander to Mars surface. A combination of these two rockets along with the human-rating certified rocket will be needed for the successful Mars mission.

Assuming that a maximum of two Titan IIIE rockets, five Atlas 5 rockets and a single human-rating certified rocket are needed to transport all required equipment to Mars surface, the total cost of rocketry will be $11 billion (see summary below for further details).

HABITATION COSTS

It has been estimated that the cost of bringing a brick from Earth to the surface of Mars to be about $2 million per brick (Sumini and Mueller, 2017). However, Elon Musk believes that it will only cost $100,000 per ton of building material (SpaceX Mars city, 2020). A solution to this high building material cost is to use raw Martian material to build the habitation. There are many companies offering 3D printed habitats, however, none of these has a publicly available cost.  

The cost to 3D print a house on Earth can be as low as $10,000 (Gregurić, 2020). The cost of the 3D printer itself is only $44,000 (Sertoglu, 2014). A 3D printed habitation is well within the 100 billion budget, and the main logistical challenge will be transporting the 1.7 tonnes (Bhavnagarwala, 2020) printer to Mars. The Titan IIIE rocket discussed above can transport 3.7 tonnes to heliocentric orbit, which is much greater than the printer weight. 

ROVER COSTS

  • Curiosity - $2.5 billion (including rocketry and salaries of engineers, programmers, managers, scientists, and independent contractors) (Folger, 2020)

  • Spirit and Opportunity - $800 million combined (Howell, 2018)

  • Sojourner – $25 million (NASA - NSSDCA - Spacecraft - Details, 2020)

Let's assume that a new rover will need to be designed for the mission. This will arrive before humans and set up the 3D printer and all other housekeeping. The cost can be estimated from Curiosity because a similar-sized rover will be needed, and it will also travel to the same planet (Mars) as Curiosity.

The weight of Curiosity (the heaviest of the rovers) was only 900kg (Gregersen, 2020) and if this new rover is roughly the same weight as Curiosity, it can therefore fit onto one of the two Titan IIIE rockets with room to spare.

LIFE SUPPORT COSTS

If we assume a crew of six will travel to Mars and they spend 180 days in transit and 500 days on the surface, the estimated cost for life support for the transit period is $1.12 billion dollars.

For the human habitation on Mars, the estimated cost is only $87 million dollars for the 500 days. This is similar to the International Space Station costs (Jones, 2012). 

COST SUMMARIES

  •  Rockets: one human-rating certified rocket, two Titan IIIE rockets (one for rover, one for a 3D printer), five Atlas 5 rockets (for any other materials needing transport to Mars), $11 billion.

 

  • Habitation: $44,000 for the printer and $10,000 per Martian building, Assuming 20 buildings will be required for the Martian base ( a high estimate), the total cost will only be $250,000.

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  • Rover: Using the Curiosity mission as an estimate, a new rover project can be completed for $3 billion (this is the Curiosity cost rounded up).

 

  • Life Support: total cost for 500 days on Mars and 180 day transit period is $1.21 billion and including a further 180 days for the return journey this total cost is $2.33 billion.

 

Rounding up, this total cost is only $15 billion USD. Further costs can be included such as laboratory equipment and a return lander but even if they double the cost, the project is still $70 billion USD under budget.

The research provided here was completed by Chris Cotsford, for more information about his professional interests and project responsibilities check the WHO WE ARE page.

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REFERENCES

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