Space Tourism Economics: Reusable Rocket Cost-per-Seat Simulator

Fleet Economics

Flight #1 · booster new

Ticket price per seat

$—

Seats per flight 6

Refurbishment cost / flight $250,000

Fixed ops & margin $400,000

Landing guidance gain 1.0

Booster on the pad — ready for flight #1.

Flight Telemetry

Altitude

0 m

Velocity

0 m/s

Propellant left

100%

Successful reflights

How it works

The booster's flight uses the rocket equation and a simplified 2-DOF ascent/landing model (gravity, thrust, mass depletion). Each successful landing raises the vehicle's reuse count N, which feeds a real amortized cost-per-seat formula — the same logic that let reusable boosters cut real launch prices from ~$54M (expendable) toward far lower marginal costs per flight:

Cost/flight = Vehicle_cost / N  +  Refurb_cost  +  Fixed_ops
Price/seat  = Cost/flight / Seats

Vehicle_cost is fixed at $62,000,000 (a realistic medium-lift reusable booster build cost). As N grows, the amortized share of that build cost falls hyperbolically — Vehicle_cost/N → 0 — so price/seat asymptotically approaches Refurb_cost/Seats + Fixed_ops/Seats, exactly the floor real reusable-launch economics is chasing.

Launch — runs one ascent → coast → boostback → propulsive landing burn. A soft touchdown (landing velocity below the safety threshold) counts as a successful reflight and increments N; a hard landing destroys the booster and resets N to 0.
Landing guidance gain — how aggressively the autopilot throttles the landing burn. Too low and the booster hits hard; too high and it overshoots and cuts thrust too early — both fail the landing.
Seats / Refurbishment / Fixed ops sliders — let you explore how flight cadence and per-flight cost assumptions change the ticket price a real space-tourism operator would need to charge to break even.

This is the mechanism the article "Space Tourism: An Overview" points to when it credits reusable rocket technology with "dramatically reducing launch costs" — reuse count, not raw thrust, is what ultimately makes a $250,000+ seat affordable.

Phase: On pad t = 0.0 s

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