That said, I’d like to live in your world where having an expendable $55 million per seat is merely rich.
$220M / (40000*50) = $110/Km. Still expensive, but at least we now have a number (a trip from NYC to Paris, first class cabin, is roughly $1/Km)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Adventures_Crew_Dragon_m...
A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical hardware to commodity; SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware. Contrast that with previous generation engines (the RS-25 comes to mind) with a sticker price of 125 millions... per engine! [0] Meanwhile we're looking at ~60 millions per seat on this flight. Incredible.
https://spacenews.com/aerojet-rocketdyne-defends-sls-engine-...
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/space-tourism-20-year-ann...
The math is a bit different though, since that sum was propping up Roscosmos, which is a government org with opaque accounting and already had everything in place. By contrast, at whatever price Isaacman paid, SpaceX made a clear commercial profit.
Is this some way to write the trip cost off as charitable deduction? Spend $50m sending self to space as 'advertising' and if you dont raise more via fund raiser its oh well we tried?
Edit: Thought it fair to add, this may well be a genuine attempt to raise money for a good cause with good intent. I'm a bit jaded from seeing people around offices spend money on expensive holidays and tying it to a cause where they raise fractions of what is spent on the holiday. My feeling is if they cared for the cause they'd skip 'hiking across country X' or whatever and donate the money while having a cheaper holiday elsewhere. So my bias is towards being a bit sceptical when it come to people trying to raise money for charity via expensive personal experiences.
Bezos spent 10 minutes in space. Why bother? Al Shepard did that in 1961. NASA did a second launch with Gus Grissom. Those were just tests before they tried orbiting. After that, nobody bothered again until 2004.
Since we're talking about stupidly rich people, Bezos makes more than that every day.
