CALC-077

CAST's two transport rates, which do not reconcile with each other

Feeds CLM-0698. Answers QST-004. Basis: USD per kilogram delivered; USD basis year NOT STATED by the source; masses in tonnes.

Why it was needed. CALC-067 established that assumed launch cost per kilogram is the largest real driver of the institutional spread. CAST is the corpus's cheapest study, so its assumed rate is the most consequential single input in it. Reading that input off the source's own table found two different rates.

Inputs.

Working, transcribed.

-- The two rates --
printed in the column header                       1,000 USD/kg
implied by the column's own total
     4,417 M USD / 9,160 t                    =      482 USD/kg

-- Is it a rounding artefact? Per-subsystem check --
     solar    850 M / 1,800 t   =  472 USD/kg
     PTM      600 M / 1,360 t   =  441 USD/kg
     MPT    2,000 M / 4,200 t   =  476 USD/kg
     total  4,417 M / 9,160 t   =  482 USD/kg
   => every row independently reproduces the same low ratio.
      SYSTEMATIC, not rounding.

-- What the printed rate would have given --
     9,160 t at 1,000 USD/kg    =  9,160 M USD   against 4,417 M printed

-- Against NASA, on both readings --
     11,050 /   482  =  22.9 x
     11,050 / 1,000  =  11.1 x

-- Share of life-cycle cost --
     transportation 25.6 per cent for CAST
     launch         71-77 per cent for NASA

Result: a factor of about 2.1 between CAST's printed rate and its own arithmetic, systematic across every subsystem row.

Conclusion. Which rate CAST intends cannot be determined from the pages read, and no reading is picked. The claim lists the plausible readings and declines to choose: the printed 1,000 USD/kg may be a present-day reference rate against a lower assumed future one; the transported mass may differ from final on-orbit mass; or the parenthetical may be a misplaced unit annotation. None is distinguishable from the pages read.

The headline survives on either reading, which is what makes the refusal to choose affordable. 11.1x and 22.9x both leave NASA as the outlier, and CAST's implied 482 USD/kg sits at the bottom of Frazer-Nash's restated 478-3,478 range on either reading. So CLM-0691's finding that the 19-37x spread is not a UK-versus-US artefact is unaffected.

Where this fails. - These are comparisons of ASSUMPTIONS, not of demonstrated prices. Nobody has delivered a kilogram to GEO at 482, 1,000 or 11,050 USD/kg. - CAST's basis year is unstated, so both ratios mix an unknown-year USD against NASA's FY2022. - The scope assumption on Table II's transportation line is unverified. - VER-563 CONFIRMED 2026-09-04.

THE PER-KG COLUMN HEADER IN SRC-169 READS $1000/kg, AND IT IS LEGIBLE AT 9x ZOOM. An earlier reading recorded it as not legible in the render and derived 482 USD/kg without it. With the header read, the 482 figure and the stated $1000/kg cannot both hold: that is a demonstrable internal inconsistency in SRC-169, and a reportable defect in the source rather than a limitation of how it was read.

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