(Henry Spencer) wrote:

:In article ,
:Fred J. McCall wrote:
::...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.
:
:Yes, because almost nobody has tried.

I remember original Shuttle promises of prices in the range of $100/lb
to orbit. Then they started compromising.

:The only great progress seen in
:that department so far was the introduction of Russian launchers.

And this is a fluke.

:It seems that EVERY new launch system I can remember promised
:to reduce cost of getting a pound to LEO to the $100 range.
:
:Uh, no, practically none of the new launch systems which were actually
:*carried through to operational status* made any such promise. (The
:EELVs made far less ambitious promises of very modest cost reductions.)
:"You can't win if you don't play."

Well, not by the time they actually built operational hardware they
didn't. However, one of the big reasons why Shuttle got built was the
original contention that it would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
That was before the compromises started and we got the current system,
of course. There were originally plans to build a small fixed number
(5, I think, but I'm not sure) of Shuttles for NASA and then to
license their manufacture for private purposes.

Never happened, of course, since the cost to orbit was just like every
other launcher of the time and there was no comparative advantage at
all (and the Shuttle as built required FAR too much 'refurbishment'
after each flight to operate economically).

: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...
:
:Whether Russian launchers are actually underpriced is not clear. They
:*are* inherently cheaper than Western designs, due to more automation on
roduction lines and much less manpower-intensive operations, even if you
:disregard the small matter of lower wages.

Is the 'more automation' claim really true? I find that rather hard
to believe, given the general state of Russian manufacturing. I would
think the price advantage was due to some small economies of scale
(they do build more of them), lower wage costs, and a huge currency
advantage when selling for hard currency.

:Current costs for most launchers apparently are in the
:$5,000-$10,000 per pound range.
:
:Russian launchers are already well below that range, possibly a long way
:below it if you have a sharp negotiator and are doing something unusual
that is, something where they can't be accused of undercutting Western
:competitors if they offer you a big price break).

That seems to depend on where you're going (and I misread a table when
I got my figure above - it was for GSO vice LEO).

: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...
:
:Hardly surprising, given how little real innovation there has been in
:launcher design, and how few truly new launch systems have been developed,
:for most of that history.

Yes, but one is left wondering why there hasn't been such innovation
and push to lower costs.

It seems to me that this is a 'chicken and egg' sort of problem.
Payloads are expensive because launchers are expensive and if you're
going to spend that kind of money to get your payload up, that payload
better be engineered to death to maximize life span and such.
Launchers stay expensive because nobody wants to put their expensive
payload up on a cheap rocket for fear that the rocket will fail. So
the rockets don't get changed much, either.

::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.
:
:When the payloads cost billions or even tens of billions to develop, it
:can and does make sense to buy more hundred-million launches to reduce
:development costs (even disregarding the possibility of launch-cost
:reductions via bulk discounts). Except in a few vaguely-mature areas
:like comsats, the payloads cost *much* more than the launches now.

In other words, when taxpayer pockets are available price of the
payload is no object? This philosophy is what has hurt planetary
science so badly, just by the way. The era of the 'giant probes'
meant that there couldn't be very many of them in the pipeline because
the budget for billion dollar probe programs just wasn't large enough
to sustain that.

:...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.
:
:The overwhelming majority of taxpayers like space exploration (hint: ISS
:is not doing exploration) and think modest funding for it is a good idea.
:What they don't support is the sort of funding that would be needed to do
:manned exploration the JSC way.

The overwhelming majority of taxpayers like space exploration. What
they don't like is PAYING for space exploration at the expense of
something else. When it comes to ranking the budget, where does space
exploration fall in the list?

:The logical conclusion from that is that we can't do it the JSC way, not
:that we can't do it at all.

Unless you propose funding it privately, I'm not sure what you're
saying here.

: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.
:
:Very few of the arctic expeditions promised any sort of economic return
:at all. Private funding doesn't have to mean profit-making ventures
although it does help -- profitable projects can easily get up into
:the billions, while non-profit private funding tends to top out in the
:low hundreds of millions, last I heard).

And that sort of private funding simply isn't available for
'speculative' things like space exploration.

--
"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