>> The Smart-1 ESA Demonstration space craft used an Ion Drive to get
>> to the moon. Took it 9 months (IIRC) to get its earth orbit large enough to
>> get captured by the moons gravity.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-1

> $170 million dollars

> I wonder how much the space craft cost and how much the launch process
> cost ?
> Anyone know ?

1. 750 million international monetary units up (including the 3
satellites it carried). Maybe as high as 1 billion IMU.
Depends also on which apples you are counting.

or

2. ESA does for sure. And Gargoyle nearly certainly thinks it does.
But/and it depends on what you mean by the question (or, as Lewis
Carrol has Humpty Dumpty saying to Alice, "what the name of the song
is called".

Smart-1 was launched on Arianne 162, which also carried two commercial
satellites - Insat 3E, and eBird 1. So, from one perspective the space
craft (presumably you mean the launch system as a whole) cost nothing.
The term "launch process" is hard to assign meaning to in the context.
Is that exclusive of commercial payloads and Smart-1 and Arianne 5
launcher proper but inclusive of propellants, staff costs, pad
amortisation, transport from Sweden (probably in the 110M Smart-1
cost), etc? And is mission cost the whole launcher cost plus all
satellites and insurance?


BUT

Smart-1 flew on the last of the Arianne 5G launchers. Net 5G payload
was 6200 kg.
Smart-1 massed 367 kg wet at launch or 6% of total liftoff capacity.
So, you may wish to divide gross costs by 20 to get your answer
depending on what you are aiming at. The two commercial satellites
probably cost in the order of 500 million Euro.

Insat 3e is claimed here to have a laucnh cost of 70 million dollars
and to mass 2750 kg at launch

    http://www.tbs-satellite.com/tse/online/sat_insat_3e.html

Europesat 1 cost "$200 million with insurance" (no launch cost given.)

An Arianne 5 launch cited here at $US120 million.

           http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/ariane5_specs.shtml

That's a later variant with >> 5G specs - but earlier quotes give 120M also.

So:

Satellites maybe 500M maybe more - say 700M
Launch 120M
Pocket money at 20% 125M

Total ~ 750M ($US or Euros or something similar due to uncertainty).

How much of that is a pro rata'd part of the 10 year x $7 billion
development cost I don't know.


    Russell









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