In article , Wayne Throop wrote:
My problelm with this one is that you can revise and improve suborbital
flight all you want, and you're still no farther along than the X15 was,
in terms of basic capability. Is there some reason to think this will
spill over to orbtial capability?

No and yes.

Personally, I am skeptical of the argument that suborbital incrementally
grows to orbital, because I don't see enough market for the intermediate
steps. You don't gradually improve suborbital vehicles to make orbital
ones -- it's a substantial jump up in technology.

*However*, the main barriers here *ARE NOT TECHNICAL*. Suborbital *does*
spill over quite directly to orbital in areas like technical credibility
of the company, financial credibility of the industry, and regulatory
experience. And those are bigger problems than the technical issues.

Moreover, substantial suborbital operations will create the beginnings of
a supplier base for commercially-priced (as opposed to government-priced)
engines, guidance, materials, safety systems, etc. That will make it a
good deal easier to *build* an orbital vehicle, even if the design has to
be entirely new.

People who claim that suborbital isn't a useful stepping stone to orbital
are demonstrating that they don't understand where the real obstacles lie.
Typically this happens because they're thinking of commercial spaceflight
as a minor variation on cost-is-no-object government spaceflight, where
technical problems often do dominate, and don't realize that commercial
spaceflight is *different*.

My problem with this is that there has been lots of money to be made for
less costly launch capability for some time.

Not really. When you think about it, most current launch customers are
people who don't care very much about launch costs. Considering how high
launch costs are, how could it be otherwise?!?

Comsats are the only high-volume commercial launch users, and comsat
project costs are often dominated by things like network setup. (Only a
small fraction of Iridium's price tag, for example, was launches.) This
makes them intensely conservative customers, almost as risk-averse as
NASA. They're *not* interested in taking risks on new launchers -- launch
costs simply aren't important enough to them to take a chance on having
their plans massively disrupted by losing a satellite unnecessarily.

(The one borderline exception, for a while, was Teledesic, which was
simply going to be launching so *many* satellites that they might really
care about launch cost. But their network progressively evolved toward
fewer satellites... partly because they were trying to reduce the risks
involved in depending on hypothetical cheap launch suppliers!)

Almost all the other customers are government, where launcher choice is
dominated by politics, not cost... and where existing large competitors
already have a well-greased inside track.

Study after study has concluded that the market doesn't get a lot bigger
until costs are a *lot* lower. This is why the Big Boys aren't much
interested in lowering launch costs -- all it would do is reduce their
revenue from their existing launch activities. More subtly, it means that
if your launch costs are only mildly lower, the only way you get lots of
customers is to take most of them away from the Big Boys... which for a
startup is living dangerously, to put it politely.

...It is possible that
governments block progress, such as insisting that the Shuttle program
can and should do everything. But even so, if somebody else could launch
for a lower price, I don't think they'd have problems getting customers
away from the Shuttle.

Uh, the shuttle hasn't been in the commercial launch business for 20 years
now. Most of its customers (all of them, now) are NASA's own payloads,
which would not get moved onto a commercial vehicle even if it was coated
with antigravity paint.
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