How much did the astronaut cost?

A reliable figure only emerges from analyzing entire programs: comparing a transport system's operating cost with the number of astronauts carried. The Planetary Society did that calculation and converted the values to 2019 dollars using NASA's New Start index. According to that calculation, a seat on the Space Shuttle was around $170 million. A seat on a Russian Soyuz, like the ones NASA bought in 2020, cost $90 million, clearly less, but for years it was the only way to reach the station.

For the ISS's two current taxis, the same study cites between $91 and $99 million per seat on Boeing's Starliner, and between $60 and $67 million on SpaceX's Crew Dragon. Those ranges exist because development costs, number of flights and number of seats filled per mission can be counted in different ways. That's precisely why so many different figures circulate on this topic: they don't answer the same question.

The price of a seat isn't the price of an astronaut. Years of training, salary, medical care, suits, simulators, training facilities and the operation of the station itself appear under other budget lines and aren't included in transport costs. So anyone who wants to know how much a person in space costs should specify which line item they mean: transport, training or stay. Transport figures are, in any case, the only ones that allow reasonably consistent comparisons between systems.