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Old December 15th 07, 06:14 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Rand Simberg[_1_]
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Default Cheap Access to Space

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 09:00:37 -0800, in a place far, far away, John
Schilling made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 23:23:55 -0800 (PST), wrote:

There has been lots of interest in Scramjets because of their
potential to lower the cost of access to space, or Single Stage to
Orbit as a means of lowering cost of access to space.


"Has been", past tense. That interest went away when everyone
realized that the hypersonics people didn't have a clue how to
build a scramjet that would be useful for space launch. As John
Hare put it, there's an extra "r" in scramjet.


Anyone care to comment or check my numbers? Your feedback is
appreciated!


I didn't see anything wrong with them on a quick look, but your
numbers are based on the assumption that someone comes up with a
useful scramjet.


Actually, it looked to me like he was proposing an all-rocket system.