"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...
Jeff Findley ) wrote:
: Exactly. $200k is starting to come down to a price that someone in the
: upper middle class could afford for a "once in a lifetime experience".
Note
: that this is essentially what Virgin Galactic is planning on initially
: charging for suborbital flights. If Virgin can make money in the
suborbital
: market at this price, the orbital market will be even larger at the same
: price.

: I think that Virgin Galactic will need to show investors that there is
money
: in suborbital tourism before they'll start pouring "real money" into
: companies working on orbital vehicles.

No doubt. But wouldn't an existing infrastructure make space tourism more
viable? For example, I have no desire to go into space per se, but I sure
as heck would love to visit Tranquility Base on the Moon and see the
remains of the LEM, Armstrong and Aldrin's footsteps preserved under
plexiglass and the US flag sticking out of the lunar surface. Now THAT
would be cool!

We've got a classic "chicken and egg" problem here. You keep saying that if
you build a vehicle with lower launch costs that the customers will switch
to your vehicle because it's cheaper. Unfortunately, ignoring other
potential roadblocks to investors, investors are very hesitant to pour
billions of dollars to develop CATS without a large existing market for the
product.

We have to show investors through many baby steps that as launch costs drop,
the demand goes up. We also have to show investors that the US goverment
won't hamper efforts of the manned, reusable launch vehicle industry. Given
the history of the changing regulations over the years, this issue still
isn't completely resolved.

: I'm sure NASA and other agencies would love to reduce lauch costs.
Hell
: launches as a COTS product is definitely a goal.

: Parts of NASA may want this, but other parts would like to see a shuttle
: derived vehicle replace the shuttle, so that they can keep as many jobs
at
: KSC as possible.

Space as an industry isn't going to shrink. NASA may want to keep
employees at KSC but they can't expect it.

NASA doesn't set its own budget. If launch costs drop, who's to say that
Congress and teh administration won't decide that NASA can "do more with
less"? Shrinking launch costs *are* a threat to the infrastructure and jobs
at KSC. If you think that buracracies don't fight change when that change
will reduce the size of the buracracy, you're the one that's crazy.

Take a look at NASA Watch sometime. Many of the NASA centers are afraid
that NASA jobs will disappear and that perhaps a NASA center may eventually
close as its role diminishes due to funding cuts. Some of the objections to
these cuts may be legitamate, but a lot of it is just a knee jerk reaction
to the threats of the funding cuts themselves.

: A truly reusable vehicle that lowers lauch costs by two
: orders of magnitude simply won't need a standing army the size the
shuttle
: does (it can't, or it won't be that cheap). So a really cheap launch
: vehicle will "hurt" NASA by forcing the layoffs of much of the shuttle
: workforce (i.e the standing army).

Not necessarily. NASA is going to get their $15-$16 billion a year.

This is *not* a given. In this day and age of growing defecits, problems
with social security, and US involvement in wars overseas, something's got
to give. Note that one of the reasons that NASA's funding dropped quite a
bit in the late 60's (even before the first moon landing) was our
involvement in Vietnam and the high cost of that war. History is completely
against your assertion.

: Yes, just like IBM lost billions due to the small computer market.
Hurt um
: so bad that they don't even exist anymore. Opps...

: They still exist, but they don't make money on mainframes anymore, do
they?

False! Initially, IBM made a bundle on the PC and eventually the clone
market drove them out of the PC market. IBM came BACK to mainframes and
other computers (midsize and large servers) too expensive for the average
user and as a result sales and revenue are back up.

It's arguable that today's servers bear little resemblance to yesterday's
inflexible mainframes, but I'll concede the point. IBM moved away from big
computers in favor of smaller ones in the 80's and 90's. But they evolved
again and moved back to bigger computers.

The key point is that they changed with the times. How succesful you are at
changing with the times has a lot to do with whether you're leading the
change or following it. The big aerospace companies are following the
change when it comes to lower launch costs. In terms of launch costs, SS1
shows that you can create a manned suborbital vehicle with far lower launch
costs than one would think. This didn't come from one of the "usual
suspects". It was Scaled Composites first entry into the manned space
arena.

: They had to evolve or die. They chose to evolve. The big aerospace
: companies getting billions in revenue through their expendable launch
: vehicles will have to do the same.

But it will take small companies in the space industry to make the
PC-version of a launch vehicle to get anyone's attention. Who is the Apple
Computer company in the space industry? Where are the Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniaks of the cheap access to space? You?

Scaled Composites and the other startups have as their leaders the
industry's equivalents of the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. These
companies (and the people who lead them) have the potential to revolutionize
the industry.

Well whoever it is they stand to make a bundle. And whining about NASA,
L-Mart, Boeing, etc. ain't going to do squat! Like the message in the
movie "Field of Dreams", 'build it and they will come', makes a helova lot
of sense WRT to CATS.

Ignoring the issue is a recipe for failure. There have been many, many
launch vehicle startups over the decades that have failed. It may interest
you to find out why they failed and how those failures relate to the anove
mentioned organizations.

: Do you honestly think that NASA and other governemnt agencies wouldn't
: want to use your cheaper access to space? That they somehow like
paying
: more for launches?

: As I said earlier, parts of NASA doesn't want costs to go down. You
can't
: reduce costs without reducing the size of the standing army and that
means
: job custs. Government agencies are notorious for fighing cuts that
reduce
: their workforce.

And like I said before, YOU'RE WRONG! You're providing an excuse. Excuses
don't cut it! You make a true CATS vehicle and it will get noticed!

It's not an excuse. NASA has, in the past, hampered the efforts of the
startups.

: This is one reason that seemingly crazy ideas like an SRB derived launch
: vehicle are seen coming out of NASA. Keeping the SRB alive means not
only
: keeping the jobs of the people who work on the SRB, but it also means
: keeping the VAB open, the crawlers operational, and the shuttle pads
: operational. This means that an SRB launch vehicle *can't* be much
cheaper
: than the shuttle, because you're keeping much of the shuttle's
: infrastructure and standing army around to make it happen.

Right now the shuttle is the only game in town other than the Russians and
Chinese, and they only once. The gap between SS1 and the shuttle needs to
be closed to some degree in order for your standing army to disapear.

The "only game in town" is too expensive to truly open up space to anyone
but government sponsored astronauts. If that's the kind of future you want,
then your point is valid. If you'd like to see civilians in LEO, then NASA
vehicles won't get you there.

: This standing army and infrastructure is one big reason that the shuttle
: isn't really cheaper to operate than the Saturn V. Note that it uses
much
: of the same (albeit modified) infrastructure. Even worse, much of the
: office space in the VAB had to be vacated due to the solids (and
: hypergolics?) of the shuttle. Entire new buildings had to be built to
: replace this essentially lost office space.

I can't help thinking about comparing a row boat to an aircraft carrier.
THAT is the same as SS1 and the shuttle.

I'm not talking about SS1 here. With a better vehicle design, you shouldn't
need VAB's, crawlers, and huge launch pads. Reducing the size and cost of
the ground infrastructure will reduce launch costs. Your "old school"
launch vehicle designer is so interested in reducing the wet mass of the
vehicle itself to the barest minimum that the ground infrastructure costs
are ignored.

A vehicle proposal like the Delta Clipper didn't need all this ground
infrastructure. DC-X proved that this concept ought to work. Certinaly
DC-X was small, but even for its size, the infrastructure and ground crews
needed to launch it were absolutely *tiny* by traditional aerospace
standards. That's the way you reduce launch costs, by looking at all your
costs and not worrying so much about the wet mass of your vehicle.

What exactly do you want?

CATS.

: Geez, I'm the one accused of being a conspiracy monger and here you
are
: convinced that the current group of government contractors in space
are
: keeping small companies out just to keep the price of launches high.
Is
: that what you believe?

: Actually this has happened. When investors go to ask NASA people if a
: startup's ideas are any good, what do you think they say? Certainly it
: depends on who in NASA they ask, but the conventional wisdom at NASA is
that
: spaceflight is necessarily expensive. The startups are going against
this
: wisdom and are in many ways trying to compete with NASA.

Yep and at one time the conventional wisdom about computers was that all
that were needed was 5! And that was from Thomas Watson of IBM!!

So you agree that conventional wisdom in the launch vehicle market is wrong.
Unfortunately, it's hard to convince investors of this "fact" when investors
are told that this goes against conventional wisdom. It's even harder when
they hear this from the "experts" at spaceflight at NASA, who believe the
only way to get people into space is with the (expensive) infrastructure at
KSC.

: I have news for you, if you had something then they'd use it. Further,
if
: you had something, you'd be showing it. Since nothing exists, all you
: have is shaking fists and whines.

: Many startups do not seek or accept government funding. You should find
out
: why this is true before you start saying I'm making up conspiracies.

Well I'm sure that Jobs and Wozniak were happy to sell their Apple IIs to
anyone that was willing to buy them.

And at the time, the "usual suspects" in the computer industry would say
that "that isn't a real computer" because it could never do as much as a
mainframe computer. This is *exactly* like SS1 is today. The "usual
suspects" in the aerospace industry think SS1 is a toy and say it's "not a
real spaceship", because it can't get into orbit.

The really important thing to note is that the customers for these "toys"
won't necessarily be the existing customers who buy the older "real"
products. The customers for these "toys" will largely come from completely
new markets. In the case of personal computers (like the IBM PCs, Apples,
Commodores, Ataris, and etc.), it was small businesses and individuals who
could never afford a mainframe computer. In the case of manned launch
vehicles (like the follow-on to SS1) the customers will be individuals
looking for "the ultimate thrill", not big companies interested in launching
comsats. Completely different market for a completely different vehicle.

Eventually though, personal computers became so powerful (in numbers) that
they began to replace mainframes for many tasks. As these small,
inexpensive, manned space vehicles grow in capabilities (i.e. when they can
get into orbit), they too will begin to replace ELV's for many tasks (i.e.
small LEO satellite launches).

I'm old enough to remember the change from mainframes to peronal computers.
I played text games on terminals attached to a minframe as a kid in the
early 80's. As a teenager, I bought a C-64 and learned basic programming.
At college in the late 80's, I was again using terminals to write my
engineering programs (Fortran 77 and C) that ran on huge Unix mainframes
(with hundreds of students sharing the same mainframe at the same time).
But by the time I neared graduation in the early 90's, I was working on my
senior design project on an 80386 class PC, Macintosh computers, and little
Sun "pizza boxes" (which ran Unix).

Today, I'm working on a Pentium III computer that's at least 10 times more
powerful and costs less than 1/10 the money of my first computer cost at
work (it was a "high end" SGI workstation that cost the company over $20k).

We'll eventually see the same changes happen with manned launch vehicles,
but it will take time since the existing markets are very small, so the
amount of money which will be invested in the startups is also very small
(by big aerospace company standards).

: I think that keeping SpaceShip One secret until it was almost completely
: developed was a very smart move. The only way they were able to do this
was
: because they had an investor with deep pockets. Once you start seeking
out
: funding from many sources, your plans start to become very public and
open
: to scrutiny from those that have a vested interest in the failure of
those
: plans.

That tends to be the way of many a lot of things. The more that is
publicly known the more likely of failure.

Exactly. Real change is coming about due to very small groups of investors
with deep pockets.

: People will do a lot to protect their phoney baloney jobs, just watch
: Blazing Saddles. ;-)

I might agree with you regarding the oil industry. Could you imagine free
energy and what that would do to the oil indsutrialists? Hell they
wouldn't be rich anymore as their source of income would literally
disappear.

In what way do you think that this attitude would be different in the
aerospace industry? The attitude we're talking about is part of human
nature. Last time I checked, humans were involved in both the oil industry
and the aerospace industry.

Jeff
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