[mkn]

In U.S. dollars in the year 2000, it came to about $16 of fuel per pound of payload launched. We had a homework assignment to figure out that number in our propulsion class at the University of Washington.

Shocking. The rest of that $10k per pound is amortized launcher costs and operations. (If you include the initial R&D, it goes up to something like $50k per pound.)

The shuttle was a truly immoral launch vehicle.

[tocomment]

That's incredible. You should do a blog post about that. It's really fascinating and I don't think is been published anywhere.