On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 04:38:43 -0600, in a place far, far away, "Fred J.
McCall" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

(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.

You must be living in some alternate reality. Most new launch systems
(at least the ones that get formally proposed to the government) only
propose to reduce the costs by an order of magnitude or so, if that.

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.

Only because there's little demand for it from the traditional
providers of launch system development funds.