On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:05:57 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Fred J.
McCall" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:


:Most new launch systems
at least the ones that get formally proposed to the government) only
ropose to reduce the costs by an order of magnitude or so, if that.

That's what generally happens after downselect.

And generally before.

: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
roviders of launch system development funds.

Largely because they don't believe it can be done and don't want to
fund yet more development of another system that doesn't hit the
target (again).

Do you truly believe that a system that cut price to LEO to the $1500
range wouldn't rapidly become the launch system of choice (assuming
payload capability similar to what is currently extant)?

Of course not. Do you truly believe that I wrote such a thing?

Why would commercial users (in particular) stick with a higher-cost
system, all other things being equal?

They wouldn't. Nice straw man, though. Chock full.

What I said was that there was no demand for it, or at least not
enough to justify the investment. I didn't say that they wouldn't
prefer a cheaper ride if they could get one. But they're obviously
satisfied with current prices.