(Henry Spencer) wrote:

:In article ,
:Fred J. McCall wrote:
::Turning the general populace into space enthusiasts *will not happen*, and
:lans which assume that it will are pointless fantasies. The only way to
::get to (say) Mars is to lower the cost to the point that overwhelming
:ublic enthusiasm is not required.
:
:Which essentially says that it will never happen, Henry, since you
:have to start going there before there is an incentive to lower the
:cost of going there.
:
:Not at all. The single technical change that would contribute most to
:lowering the cost of a Mars expedition -- much cheaper launch to LEO -- is
:desirable for a number of more immediate reasons.

And yet that doesn't seem to be progressing with great rapidity,
either. It seems that EVERY new launch system I can remember promised
to reduce cost of getting a pound to LEO to the $100 range. Yet this
is still at least an order of magnitude away, even using 'old' Russian
technology which they are willing to 'under price in order to get hard
currency. Current costs for most launchers apparently are in the
$5,000-$10,000 per pound range. This is not significantly better than
what we were able to do 30 years ago.

In fact, the actual cost of getting a pound to LEO doesn't seem to
have moved even a single order of magnitude over the entire history of
real space launchers, much less the two orders of magnitude necessary
to make 'swamping the problems with mass' really feasible.

:Indeed, you can make a half-plausible argument that this is already true:
:that even at today's launch prices, it makes sense to accept mass growth
:to save engineering man-years.

But not much. When the vehicles still cost you hundreds of millions
of dollars, it simply doesn't make much sense to put 'cheap' payloads
on them. This is why satellites and probes tend to be so
'over-engineered'. When it costs that much to deploy it, it's worth
the money to try to make things absolutely bullet proof and gold plate
everything.

:Finally, the single change of any kind (not just technical) that would
:reduce the cost of a Mars expedition most is *better management*. The
roblems of doing such a mission today are utterly dominated by the
:difficulty of doing anything *efficiently* within the NASA/JSC/MSFC
:bureaucratic empire. There is plenty of incentive for fixing that, in
ne way or another.

There is plenty of incentive for fixing it from the point of view of
those of us who want the space program to actually be accomplishing
something. However, we have to face the fact that the overwhelming
majority of taxpayers simply don't care about space and consider it a
waste of money.

Karpoff's study of the various 19th-century arctic expeditions is
:notable: the single strongest predictor of success was private funding,
:mostly because it meant unified, consistent leadership throughout.)

But to attract a lot of private funding there needs to be some
significant economic advantage over current providers.

I recently tripped over this (the original of which apparently
appeared around the time I first started reading sci.space, way back
when, and which has been revised as of 2001). It's interesting what
even an 80% reduction in price to orbit does to the number of launches
that a new launcher can capture.

http://www.dunnspace.com/csts.htm

I need to find the time to look into some of this further.

[Yes, I'm trying to reawaken some of my old interests.]

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw