Comparison of life cycle cost for Mach 8 and Mach 5 hypersonic passengers aircraft

Hypersonic aircraft concepts have been studied cyclically over the last decades and are recently emerging again as hot topic of high-speed aviation. The main difference between past and recent studies is that nowadays the interest of private companies and startups in the field of hypersonic aviation for commercial purposes has gain momentum and the sector is no longer a monopoly of military and governmental institutions. However, for commercial institutions, hegemony and technological dominance are less important, while economic profitability and competitiveness is crucial, especially as far as operational concept is concerned. For this reason, a careful cost assessment of the vehicle under study is required already from the initial stages of the design, in order to analyze development, production and subsequent operating/disposal costs. This paper aims at applying existing as well as ad hoc developed cost estimation models for the analysis of these cost categories for two hypersonic long-haul passengers aircraft, characterized by a Mach number in cruise of about 8 and 5 respectively. The idea is to promote a comparison between different architectures and mission concepts in order to understand the impact of vehicle size and operating conditions on final cost breakdown and ticket price for the reference payload.