Sander Vesik writes:
Couldn't one build "containerised" HLLV? You know, figure out how many
launches you are going to do (max) in the next 15-20 years, design a HLLV
that has a storage life of 25 years, build a launch facilitythat lets you
simply drop the conatiner off the transport, install an upper stage with
satellite and launch. This will let you just build a large patch of them
and not maintain any kind of standing army or production facilities at all.

You mean like we did with the Saturn V? The problem with this
approach is that it is absolutely not sustainable. Once your HLLV
supply is gone, you're done, unless you're willing to pay for the huge
startup costs to build more (you've got to re-hire and re-train your
standing army of HLLV production workers, even if you have paid keep
the tooling in storage).

The only way to make access to space sustainable, is to look at it as
a process that is continuous, not a series of events. If you take
this approach, you want your highly trained workers to be productive,
with little down time, as well as minimizing the size of that "standing
army" of workers. Note that this is very hard to do with any sort of
low flight rate vehicle.

Jeff
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