Cost of Orbiting Poo Around the Earth

According to the Technology Review and NASA, the cost of putting one kilogram into low orbit (on the Space Shuttle) around the earth is, on average $10 400 US Dollars.

Now I can see from this website that The Space Shuttle Columbia has a crew of 7 and from here that the median weight of human poo is 320 grams and is passed on average 1.52 times per day. If you multiply that by 7 crew you get a little over 2.2kg of poo that gets launched into orbit at an average cost of $23296 to get into space. That's a lot of money to put poo into space.

If you were particularly good at Enterprise Bargaining, you could save NASA a fair amount of money by leaving the kids by the pool before launch and maybe something for them to drink too. If you were smart enough (I'm sure all astronauts are) you could arrange for a lavish party with all the money you saved prior to departure as long as you visited the bathroom at the end. Then of course you couldn't consume beer or bran flakes at all...


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