"Charles Talleyrand" writes:

"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message ...
Scott Lowther writes:

High flight rates. No reason we couldn't achieve $100/lb using 1960's
tech. Just need to build in numbers and fly a lot.

...Kind of like the Russions do with their "Proton" booster...


You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.

And the Proton is no where near $100/pound to orbit. And there labor
is much cheaper than ours.

The Proton's $700/lb is closer to $100/lb than it is to the Space Scuttle's
$30,000/lb --- even on a logarithmic scale. The Russians acheived this
lower cost primarily by using a _SIMPLER DESIGN_ (the cost of a rocket
tends to be proportional to the number of components it has, not its size),
and by good old fashioned capitalistic _ECONOMIES OF SCALE_, amortizing
its design and tooling costs over a large number of manufactured units ---
=NOT= by "lower labor costs."


-- Gordon D. Pusch

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