CLM-0386 - Energy Aperture

In plain terms

Even after making the money-year, currency, investment-return rate and satellite lifespan identical across the UK, European and US flagship studies, the gap between the cheapest and most expensive stays at roughly twenty to thirty-five times. Most of the apparent disagreement between these institutions is real, not an artefact of how the numbers were prepared, and the single biggest identified reason is that they assume very different prices for getting hardware into orbit.

The claim as recorded

After restating the core FOAK institutional comparison (Frazer-Nash BEIS, Frazer-Nash ESA, NASA OTPS RD1/RD2) to an identical currency, basis year, discount rate and asset life, the gap between the cheapest and most expensive remains at 19.0-20.1x (against NASA's RD1) to 32.8-36.5x (against NASA's RD2) -- essentially unchanged from, and in the RD2 comparison larger than, the roughly 20x recorded without any restatement in CLM-0360; this residual is not further decomposable from the held evidence beyond attributing its largest identified component to the launch-cost-per-kilogram assumption (CLM-0382), with the remainder attributed to genuine, unquantified architecture and scope difference between CASSIOPeiA and NASA's RD1/RD2 reference designs.

T0 own calculation · medium confidence · as of 2026-09 · VER-216 CONFIRMED 2026-09-03 · XC02

Scope and limits

This residual could be reduced further only by either (a) obtaining Frazer-Nash's full underlying cost model (not just its headline LCOE outputs) to test whether its assumed launch cost, once put on a truly common per-kg-to-GEO basis, alone explains the remaining gap, or (b) treating the residual as genuinely irreducible architecture difference. Those two explanations cannot currently be distinguished.

What it assumes

NASA figures use the validated bottom-up rebuild at CALC-062, not raw published figures; Frazer-Nash figures use the CRF approximation (validated to within ~25-30% at this scale of change, CLM-0377), since no bottom-up CASSIOPeiA model exists in the register.

Where it comes from

This is the project's own working, shown in full:

CALC-062 NASA OTPS RD1 and RD2 rebuilt bottom-up at the common 20-year basis

CALC-063 Every other institutional estimate restated by the CRF shortcut

CALC-064 The two summary ranges, and why they are not the same measurement

CALC-065 Discount rate as a mechanical lever, and the direction it runs

CALC-067 Launch cost per kilogram to GEO, the largest real driver in the corpus

restate-lcoe.py trace, Sections 6(ii) and 7; write-up Sections 3(a)(ii) and 5.

Basis: dimensionless (residual spread, after restatement to GBP2024, 20yr, 3%/10% real)

Related records

Answers question: QST-004 not published in this release

Cite this

energyaperture.com/c/clm-0386

CLM-0386, Energy Aperture, as of 2026-09.