Xenon Pricing

[Kym Wash]

Inreal life, Xenon is fairly rare, but easy to obtain, you basically just chill air and get Xenon by fractional distillation of the liquid (since air contains a lot more krypton, you can get a lot more krypton this way, and air is chock full of argon -about 1.3%- , making argon a really cheap propellant.

Furthermore Xenon has a boiling point 75K higher than liquid O2, and is more than twice as dense. These factors combine to make it easier to make a high mass ratio Xenon tank relative to a liquid O2 tank.

Well as far as game balance it makes perfect sense, if you're having cost proportional to how much dV you get out of it. It's not just the dV you get from that stage, it's the fact that since the top stage is lighter, the launcher and orbit stage is also lighter. Really saves on credits! (if you don't plan on landing and returning anyways)

Or it could be another element that just happens to share the same name. Also you are forgtting the cost to extract said substance. Perhaps they don't have an efficent way to do so or the subtance is a bio-hazard to dem poor Kerbals. But, yes it does seem a bit odd in pricing. Then again. We are talking about Kerbals and their universe.

And besides, in some cases, a small ion probe might actually be cheaper than a larger LV-N probe. (And heck, ion probes are so small most of the time; you could put them on an LV-N ship and double your overall delta-V (provided you ditch the LV-N stage later)

Plane parts seems to have higher costs, maybe to encourage/balance reusability. But I agree Tail fin and AV T1 (no control, but can put a CoL far the CoM of a rocket) should be far cheaper. What's more, one could argue that rocket boosters are simple expendables designs, therefore not that expensive.

Cantab answered. Gameplay-wise, they can be usefull to ballance crafts that have not the same inertia along each axis. For example a tall thin ship barely need more than reaction wheels to roll, few RCS far from COM to pitch/yaw, and more RCS to translate. As the stock RCS thruster aren't tweakable, linear port can be used to have the same sensibility along each axis, without having the same inertia.

You make a point. But then why the price of a rocket is the sum of its part? And why can we recover a rocket a receive it's full price? IRL raw material (including fuel) are dirty cheap, but conceiving (R&D) and assembling them is the challenge, that's why reusable launchers are not especially better than expendable ones. You can see it at as a maintenance cost.

Well, big liquid engines are precision devices too (moreso than an RCS-type thruster, as those are generally hypergolic or contact-catalyst designs that are basically a bell-shaped tube, and some valves, vs. the large scale turbopumps/ducting/cooling pipes/etc of a serious lifter engine), and it's 1800 for the RCS thrusters alone in a single ring of 4, plus another 400-800 for the tank(s).

Also from a game balance perspective, the reaction wheels (600-1200-2100 space bucks) provide unlimited (and very powerful) turning endurance once solar power is attained, for significantly less mass. Assuming you even need them, as all manned pods come with immensely powerful reaction wheels for absolutely free.

Ion engines are touted as a great source of propulsion for high deltaV missions that can afford an ample power supply and need low thrust maneuvers; and they are great. But I'd like to know how much they cost.

I can't seem to find any pricing details or indication on how much it costs to fill a spacecraft with Xenon, or even the pricing Xenon itself. A vague reference that doesn't seem right turns up \$120 for 100g of the rare noble gas. Alibaba is filled with prices for high purity quantities ranging from $15-300 per litre (and at STP, 5.98g/L makes that quite pricey!).

Dawn famously used 425kg of Xenon for its Asteroid belt exploration mission (Source), do we know how much it cost to fill her up? Other possible missions to check are Deep Space 1 and GOCE. But I cannot even find out how much Xenon they had on-board.

A June 2005 paper Energetics of Propellant Options for High-Power Hall Thrusters (PDF) by Alex Kieckhafer and Lyon B. King, Michigan Technological University, published for the proceedings of the Space Nuclear Conference, San Diego, CA gives a cost of Xenon gas of \$US 850 / kg. That puts 16 metric tonnes of it at \$US 13.6 Million.

From Capturing and Recycling of Xenon From A Cryopumped Vacuum Chamber (PDF) paper by Michael W. Swiatek, Sierra Lobo, Inc., published for the 46th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference in July 2010 in Nashville, TN (executive summary of it as it pertains to your question):

There have been previous attempts made at the NASA Glenn Research Center to capture and recycle Xenon gas. The typical commercially available process utilizes a cylinder cooled in a liquid nitrogen bath that acts as a cryopumping surface to capture the Xenon by having it solidify on the tank wall. This process was installed and tested but found to be ineffective due to conductance losses.

So NASA could find substantial savings in price of Xenon if they extracted it from cyopumped surfaces on their own, and the paper claims that's what NASA Glenn is already doing. I wasn't able to find any figure, precise or otherwise, on how much saving NASA does make with it and how much Xenon gas costs them, but it could go as low as roughly \$US 250 / kg (high estimate, bluntly amortizing initial investment costs et al., quoted as \$25,000 of hardware purchases to install [one of] the recovery system at GRC).

Or, in short, it could cost NASA as little as \$US 4 Million per 16 metric tonnes of Xenon gas because they have plenty of cryo-pumped surfaces on other systems where they could extract it from air on their own.

Xenon, as a rare gas, has high fluctuations in price over time. Factors including who sources it, what purity is required, and how much is being purchased at once will all impact the cost. For something like fueling an ion propulsion engine, my guess is there would be a large bulk purchase with specially negotiated rates directly from the air separation units. The general population can buy xenon by the liter in gaseous form from most compressed gas companies. Over the last 15 years that I have worked in the compressed gas and cryogenic liquid field, I have seen 1 liter of xenon sell at US\$5.50/L for industrial grade up to US\$19.50/L for grade 5.5 (99.9995% pure). I do not know what grade of material is required for these engines.

NE postdoctoral research scientist Terry Price, along with Research Assistant Professor Ondrej Chvala, an international expert on Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), and University of Ontario Institute of Technology Professor George Bereznai, a fifty-year nuclear industry veteran, have developed a dynamic model of xenon gas behavior in MSRs, which was published in the Annals of Nuclear Energy. This publication is the ninth in a series by Price and Chvala about xenon gas in MSRs.

What separates xenon analysis in MSRs from xenon analysis in solid fuel reactors are the migrational processes. Xenon behavior is very complex because it takes many pathways, forms bubbles, and can migrate into graphite.

According to Price there had been some prior work done back in the 1960s and 1970s, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but their success in fitting their model to the experimental data was very limited.

While there requires still more study of the effect of these xenon gas bubbles, the model the team developed provides reasonably accurate account of the poison fraction of the xenon compared with the experimental data.

The team believes that its model is the first one capable of fitting both startup and shutdown xenon behavior of MSR experiments using a single set of parameters, giving critical insight into their functionality.

The relative speed of ACUVEX compared to Xenon-Arc weathering will vary, depending upon the material, the time of year, and the lamps and filters chosen for the xenon-arc test. In general, ACUVEX typically provides an acceleration similar to xenon-arc operated with daylight filters (borosilicate inner and outer filters). For this comparison, $0.32 per specimen per hour was used for the cost of partial machine xenon-arc testing, and $11.00 per hour was used for the cost of renting a full xenon-arc machine. Costs were computed based on using a large xenon-arc machine with a capacity of 110 specimens measuring 7 cm x 15 cm (2.75" x 5.75").

These costs are shown on the following graph:

ACUVEX may also be less expensive than xenon-arc testing, even if you have already purchased xenon-arc equipment for your own laboratory. This is because of the high cost of electricity, xenon-arc lamps and maintenance.

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Xenon gas or Xe is an extremely rare chemical element that is finding increasing use in various industries. The gas is being used in photographic flash lamps, bactericidal lamps, lasers, moderate nuclear reactions, and motion picture projectors. The noble gas is relatively expensive, primarily owing to its small-scale production through fractional distillation of liquid air.

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