For NASA, the cost of a space shuttle launch scrub—like that which afflicted the Discovery orbiter on Thursday—can come with a hefty toll.

A typical weekday scrub like Discovery’s carries an estimated cost of about $500,000 on top of the mission’s total price tag due to the additional unloading—and later reloading—the spacecraft’s 15-story external tank of the more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold propellant required for launch.

Discovery and its seven-astronaut crew are currently slated to launch on Dec. 9—a Saturday—at 8:47:34 p.m. EST (0147:34 Dec. 10 GMT). Their STS-116 mission is bound for the International Space Station (ISS) to continue assembly of the orbital laboratory.

Weather predictions call for a 70 percent chance of unfavorable weather, so if Discovery is forced to scrub again it will add $600,000—the extra $100,000 is because it’s a weekend—according to NASA officials.

Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson at the space agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, tells me that the total cost of Discovery’s STS-116 mission (which includes launch preparations, workers’ salaries, launch equipment, transport vehicles, spacecraft hangars and other vital infrastructure) comes in at about $1 billion. That figure apparently comes from NASA’s annual shuttle budget, which is set at $4 billion for the 2007 Fiscal Year and includes not only Discovery’s STS-116 mission, but next year’s STS-117, STS-118 and STS-120 spaceflights.

The bare bones cost of the shuttle mission alone, without the other costs—all of which, however, are currently necessary to prepare a shuttle for flight—is about $100 million, Beutel added.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Space & Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.