Costs

Note

Ported from the UKSDC resource Numerical Approximations and Costings. The original PDF is available from the official UKSDC site. It is written in the first person by a former competitor and judge, and that voice has been kept here.

Introduction

By my last UKSDC event, the 2018 Nationals, I was calculating every single cost for every single item in the settlement for my company. Everything from bleach, computers and the pipe runs for the pneumatic delivery tube system (a feature critical to evoking a steampunk theme in your moonbase) was accounted for. I was able to do this due to a gigantic spreadsheet and way too much time on my hands before the competition to prepare.

While that spreadsheet exists out there on the internet, I don’t recommend anyone try to use it as it is difficult to get it working without inside knowledge. I also, in hindsight, don’t recommend anyone to create a spreadsheet of that scale. It isn’t required. Automating the last 20% will double the work and, especially during the nationals, you will barely save yourself any time on the day by having it fully automated. However, for me, it was primarily a learning experience for Microsoft Excel, which I didn’t know how to use before, and to explore the intricacies of costing for the UKSDC.

Over the many competitions that I have now taken part in and all the presentations that I have seen from ones that I haven’t, these are my major points of what to do and what not to do.

Use the universe

UKSDC is set in a large universe in the future, use it. There are over 25 separate settlements set in space, some that will always be there, some you might build yourself in a competition. If you are building a space settlement in 2053, you can get materials from the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and comets. Anything that comes from Earth must have a reason to come from Earth, whether that is required validation, subcontractor location, or just the scarcity of the required resources outside of Earth.

Do use subcontractors

Ideally, you should aspire to use every subcontractor in the programme booklet if appropriate. You should also buy stuff from other companies. Don’t compromise the design or construction of the settlement though, some subcontractors are really quite useless.

On the subject of the programme booklet, if you are responsible for costing, it is the most important document that you have. Read it from cover to cover twice and then underline every product you can buy from subcontractors, other companies, and the ones that your company can supply. You can do this all the night before the competition so it doesn’t even take time during the working day.

There is usually something that you can get for free if you read the press release, so it is a good idea to give it a skim and underline as well.

Include all costs

If you buy something from a subcontractor, it costs money. If you buy something from another company, it costs money with some extra money going to Litigation Limiters. If you have to provide the service yourself, it costs money. An example I see all too often, from a company that has been assigned Grumbo Aerospace:

Person 1: We have the Grumbo Jumbo, a transport spacecraft, therefore all shipping is free for us.

Person 2: That’s a great idea, we can undercut the competition…

Just because you own a spacecraft, it does not mean you can transport everything in the world for free. You may offer a discounted service because you own the spacecraft, but don’t discount these costs altogether!

Don’t include inflation

You are told everywhere not to include inflation but people still do. Don’t include inflation.

Shipping costs will be your largest single cost

For the ISS, shipping costs were around 33% of the total cost. You should ideally aim for something similar to 50% depending on the location.

When I did costs, I always made the mistake of having shipping being 60% or higher of the total cost. I only realised my mistake afterwards, which was that:

• High quality military and space grade stuff can cost fantastic amounts. Nuts and bolts are known to be quoted at up to $12,000 each.
• You can’t just buy everything and expect it to assemble itself. The cost of piping is not the same as the cost of installing piping. Buying every component of an atmospheric regulator is not the same as having one. You need to account for construction and validation.
• The reason why the ISS was so expensive is the R&D, and you should account for some amount of that. Your R&D won’t be nearly as expensive as that, but should cost a measurable percentage of your total cost. Whether it is a simulations team or a scouting mission, it costs money and should be included.

Have sensible shipping costs

Frustratingly, UKSDC does not always provide you with all costs. This is generally fine and expected (estimating costs is part of the competition), however if UKSDC does not provide you with shipping costs you have a problem. Let’s say you have to find out the cost of one kilogramme to lunar orbit in 2040. Two estimations of the cost are given below:

• The SpaceX Falcon Heavy is predicted to cost $1,700 per kg by the mid 2020s. Therefore by 2040, it will cost around this much to go to the Moon.
• It cost roughly a billion in 1972 to send up 48,600 kg to the Moon. That’s roughly $20,500 per kg. The estimated improvements in spaceflight counteract the fact that this mass isn’t a true payload, meaning we can present this as the final cost per kg for 2040.

Editor's note (October 2026)

The Falcon Heavy figure above was a mid-2020s prediction and it was for low Earth orbit, not the Moon. Updated figures as of 2026:

• Falcon Heavy to LEO: roughly $1,500 per kg, based on a published launch price of about $97 million and a 63,800 kg payload (Orbital Radar, Space Odyssey Hub).
• Delivery to the lunar surface on a commercial lander: about $1,200,000 per kg on Astrobotic’s Peregrine and Griffin landers, with lunar orbit at $300,000 per kg (Astrobotic payload user guide via NASA).
• Delivery to the lunar surface on Starship: about $100,000 per kg, implied by ispace reserving 500 kg of Starship cargo space for roughly $50 million in July 2026, for a flight no earlier than 2030 (ispace notice). This is a forward sale, not a demonstrated price.
• Starship to LEO: SpaceX’s stated target is $100 to $200 per kg once fully reusable (Space Orbitals). Treat it as an aspiration rather than a cost you can quote today.

The gap between launching to orbit and landing on the Moon is the point of the original advice: the two estimates below differ by a factor of ten, and the real 2026 figures differ by a factor of a thousand depending on which step you count.

The issue is that there is not really a correct answer, but also that there is no consistent datum of what would be considered a sensible cost. I would say that the first method is a more accurate cost, given the space crazy universe of UKSDC. If you get me as a judge at one of your regionals, I would prefer the first value over the second. However I’ve attended regionals as a competitor, where I was told the second value wasn’t high enough, and was challenged because of it.

I would recommend asking the judges directly for what they would say the shipping cost is, if it isn’t included. Even if they don’t give the value they will give some insight of what it should be. Personally, I would imagine the true cost would be somewhere in the middle of the two values. The reason this is a large problem is that the wrong shipping budget will dramatically alter your final cost.

Construction and manufacturing costs

Perhaps the most criminal of costing offences performed by almost every team at every competition is to neglect the huge cost of actually manufacturing a product. Having all of the materials required is a completely different thing to having a functioning settlement, and this is often overlooked. Even if you do want to write off all of your manufacturing costs under the “we built everything with robots” guise, you still need to consider the vast number of highly specialised machines that will be required for each process along the way and, more importantly, the cost associated with each of these! There is a reason that space missions like the James Webb end up costing so much money; building things for space is very hard, and building machines to build said things is an even harder (and more expensive) task!

Include a contingency budget

All engineering projects have a contingency budget built in to account for the factors that are often referred to as “unknown unknowns”. These are the costs that, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to predict. NASA had a 10% contingency budget for the R&D of the Space Shuttle, which came in on budget, but at the compromise of having far lower capabilities than had been planned.

The spreadsheet my team had was capable of auto-generating a contingency percentage and applying that to the total cost. This was mostly a waste of time (this is disputed by the other author who developed the automatic contingency percentage system). Just use your intuition and “calculate” a percentage. A settlement on the Moon will have a fairly low percentage. A settlement in the asteroid belt will have a much higher one. A settlement without a contingency budget is useless as you haven’t given the true final cost.

Be reasonable when calculating profits for the Foundation Society

For the 2017 Nationals, a certain B&M team calculated a profit of “$20 trillion” a year. For the 2018 Nationals, a certain B&M team calculated a profit of “$959,600,000,000” a year. Both of these numbers are way out.

What has happened here is that the person assigned to profit calculations decided to trust their calculator rather than their intuition. Ideally all costs should be based on calculations, but mistakes are incredibly easy to make and it takes practice. Don’t be afraid to query and change your numbers to make them more reasonable.

We always included a percentage profit for the company we were representing as well. No one ever noticed it, there wasn’t much point to including it, but we thought it was a nice little touch.

How I calculate a cost

Doing costs is unfortunately a skill that you don’t learn overnight and it relies a great deal on your intuition, built up from experience. You will need to have:

• Good research skills and fundamental knowledge. Knowing what to Google and how to Google really helps. I am from an Automation and Operations background, and I felt this has always helped me. It isn’t always possible, but don’t calculate a cost about something you know nothing about, get someone who knows more to do it instead.
• Some calculation knowledge. I am no whizz at maths or anything of the sort, but I do know how to quickly multiply, add and read standard form, and that is really all you need to do.
• Intuition. The final quality control is always when you ask yourself “Is this a reasonable number?” This is the most important step.

An example. For the 2018 National finals, we had to calculate the operating costs of the silicon bucky structure plant as it slowly increased production. I immediately went to look into carbon fibre production and the costs associated with that. I took information from 3 different sources, and generated a number which I multiplied by 10 for good measure.

Some general advice

• Use US dollars. This is a rule that you must obey.
• Don’t list costs by department, list them by system or object.
• Make sure your cost table is legible, this was something that I always missed. Strike the balance between legibility and detail. Knowing each cost for the different piping systems is no longer interesting if you can’t read anything on the page because of it.
• Don’t quote costs in standard form. No one reads money that way. Write $5,000,000.00, not $5×10⁶.
• I would recommend only quoting costs at the very end of your presentation. If you do them by slide, you will end up with discrepancies between the slides and your final costing table.
• CASSSCs are a pain. Just calculate a rough number using the density, don’t think about trying to actually geometrically fit everything in. If you are required to do this (i.e. Internationals); good luck! It is worth simplifying the problem into smaller loads and applying maths and brain power til you get an answer. Also, isolate what can actually fit into a CASSSC and what can’t before doing the calculations.
• Make sure your costing table actually adds up. This goes wrong more often than you might think.
• If you have the space, a pie chart is a nice touch, but don’t try to fit every cost on to it. Group small costs into a miscellaneous group.

Just don’t be too wrong

No one really looks at costing unless it’s wrong. Perhaps the best example of this was when a company at the national final confidently told the judges that 96% of their entire cost was to provide spacesuits to their residents. You had to be there to believe it as they tried to justify that one!

The UKSDC is trying to change the way it looks at business and finance with time by expanding the department to have more responsibilities, but for now, what judges typically look for is that:

• The cost is in the same area as their “back of the envelope” calculation
• You haven’t missed costs (i.e. shipping)
• Your cost table looks clever with many subcontractors

That is all. At the end of the day, the most important skill you need is the knowledge of what is a reasonable cost and what isn’t. You could make everything else up and no one will notice, except me. I’ll notice as I compare your numbers to my spreadsheet. Good luck!