" wrote in
message oups.com...

Jim Davis wrote:
And you know and I know and everyone knows
there will be no such products from an SDHLV.

But you could not care less about that, I suspect.

No, I don't, because that's *ENTIRELY*
*IRRELEVANT.* The question is whether ESAS
can work, not whether it will be profitable.

Usually your statements can at least be justified in one dubious context
or another, but for this one, it is hard to go past stupid. Just because
the returns of some projects can be very long term and very distributed
does not mean that they do not have to be profitable. Such a dead end
technical object achieved purely by throwing excessive amounts of money
at the problem will again put space settlement back many years.

What I find particularly offensive is that the $100 billion wasted by
this government affiliated monopolistic power group - preaching that
they are doing this for everyone else's own good, will in effect have to
be recouped by those commercial ventures that eventually follow. There
is only a fixed amount of up front funding for space activities which is
acceptable to the people at large, NASA is again abusing its
monopolistic position to take near all of it. People make little
distinction between government and start up space spending. NASA is
again mortgaging the future of space and the public will expect the
start ups to eventually pay it back.

ESAS adds nothing to the later commercial ventures which will hopefully
still come. Existence proof that it is doable was provided by Apollo and
no commercial follow on will use HLVs or any of the other order of
magnitude too expensive hardware that will be designed for them. By the
time the commercial ventures work their way up to HLV, any ESAS
technology will long be irrelevant. ESAS is a dead end mortgage on the
future.

Pete.