(Derek Lyons) wrote:

:"Fred J. McCall" wrote:
:
::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.
:
:Reading Jenkins, I'm not convinced that an 'uncompromised' design
:would have resulted in launch costs being any cheaper. The
:'uncompromised' designs involved building something larger than a 747
:that could perform in the subsonic, transonic, and hypersonic regimes,
:a tall order indeed.

I'm not convinced it would have, either, but that was certainly the
marketing claim to sell the original program.

: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.
:
:That's utter bull****.

Well, THAT is certainly a convincing argument, logically and factually
supported.

: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.
:
:Launchers are expensive because there is virtually zero economic
:incentive to make them less expensive. The mammals are staking their
:future on the speculative belief that if they build it, payloads will
:come.

This seems to fly directly in the face of economics. Your position is
apparently that competition and market forces don't apply to the
market for space launch.

Tell me, if you had a payload to put up and, of two equal launchers,
one launcher was 25% cheaper than the other, is your claim that the
price difference would not enter into your decision as to which
launcher you would place your business with?

: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 very little of the billion dollars was the result of high
:launch prices. Even if the launch were free, the probe still has to
:endure extreme environments for years or decades and still function
:with extreme reliability.

Please post what you think the launch cost of such a probe is. I
think use of the phrase 'very little' grossly understates the case.

: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?
:
:99% percent of the taxpayers, and the same percentage of s.s.* posters
:wouldn't recognize space exploration if it bit them on the butt. They
:confuse the stunts NASA has contrived to date with exploring. (Hint:
:NASA has done very, very little exploring.)

Hint: Only YOU can see the truth?

::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 real question - why was it available for Artic and African
:exploration, but not space exploration?

What Arctic or African exploration team cost in the "low hundreds of
millions"? Given current launch costs, that amount of money won't
even get you to LEO. Given that, why would some 'non-profit' dump all
their money into a project that can't go anywhere?

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn