The answer depends on how you get there, who is paying and which costs you consider. There have been different ways to get to and from the International Space Station (ISS) over the years: the now-retired American Space Shuttle, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and now Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. The costs vary, but the cost per seat is in the region of about £50 to 69 million ($64 to 88 million).
Once you are in space, though, you need somewhere to stay, and that’s the International Space Station, so you need to factor those costs in too. The ISS has cost over £78 billion ($100 billion) since the first plans were drawn up around 30 years ago. This money isn’t being spent in space. It’s buying the time and expertise of the many tens of thousands of people needed to design, build and operate the ISS, which hosts hundreds of scientific experiments every year. For the ISS, these costs are shared between all the international partners that make up the program, and the UK contributes through the European Space Agency (ESA). The ESA doesn’t buy a flight ticket with money, but instead exchanges contributions to the ISS, and in return NASA flies ESA astronauts. The money that the UK contributes to the ESA comes back to the UK in the form of business for UK companies, which in turn helps grow those companies and the UK economy.
There are a variety of costs that go into an astronaut’s journey to space
© NASA/JPL-Caltech, Gerald Eichstädt and Sean Doran (CC BY-NC-SA) based on images provided Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS