Economic Rationality of On-Orbit Servicing by Reduction of Transportation Cost

Abstract

The costs of transportation from the Earth to the orbit are very high. Decreasing the transportation costs should increase the launch market significantly. However, the objective of transportation costs is ambiguous and few studies have examined the relationship between transportation costs and commercial profits of businesses. On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) is a business that could profit from lower transportation costs, and we quantified the relationship between costs and profitability for this business. Real-coded Adaptive Range Genetic Algorithm optimized the OOS method. The results showed that the revenues generated by OOS would support the outlay required to decrease transportation costs.