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Old May 11th 17, 07:26 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Fred J. McCall[_3_]
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Default RD-180 relplacement

r"Scott M. Kozel" wrote:

On Thursday, May 11, 2017 at 8:42:25 AM UTC-4, Fred J. McCall wrote:

"Scott M. Kozel" wrote:

Three separate heavy lift vehicles in development that
would be capable of taking men to the Moon or Mars.


Actually only one 'program'. And two commercial efforts.

I don't really understand that. Last time one vehicle was
developed and they built 16 of them and had programs in
place to use them within a reasonable period of time, that
provided economies of scale and focus to do the program.
It was a national scale program and accomplished great
things.


Last time we had a single government program that spent money like
water, made the trip, and then had no follow-on, which is why we can't
get beyond LEO anymore.

The current approach doesn't make sense; too many vehicle
types in development and no real focus toward building
enough of them to have an actual program.


The 'government program' (how we did Apollo) is the high priced
spread. It's true that it makes no sense because it has no real goal
(it changes with every President) and is too expensive to fly. The
other two efforts are commercial efforts, make more sense, spend a lot
less money, and will be far cheaper to fly.

If we did it the old way, we would ONLY have SLS, Musk and Bezos would
keep their money, and we'd get another 'flags and footprints' mission
to somewhere at best.


What kind of commercial effort for such a vehicle and program
could provide the tens of billions of dollars in private capital
to fund it? What would be the business model?


A classic government engine development effort costs around $1.5
billion. Bezos is developing New Glenn, engines and all, for that
amount of money. He's funding it (and most of the rest of Blue
Origin) by selling a billion dollars of his Amazon stock every year.
Bezos is worth around $81 billion. Meanwhile, Musk is only worth
around $16 billion, so he's not funding it all with personal checks
like Bezos is. He's funding a lot of it now by undercutting the rest
of the world on launch costs.


The federal government could provide 60-80% of the funding, but
that would not be a private sector effort, that would be massive
subsidization by the government.


Bezos is funding BE-4 out of his own pocket. USAF is funding AR-1
development. BE-4 will be cheaper to buy (by a lot) and the
government isn't paying to develop it. Meanwhile Musk is getting
around $34 million from USAF to develop Raptor (while putting up $68
million of his own money). I wasn't kidding when I said that private
commercial development costs an order of magnitude less than
government funded development.


Sure Apollo was expensive, but I wonder how the private sector
could profitably fund a program like that.


It wouldn't. It would get the same results for a lot less money and
then sell missions to anyone who wanted them. Note that USAF has gone
down this road now. They don't generally develop rockets. They just
buy launch services. No reason NASA can't do the same. Or anyone
else, for that matter. The entire budget for New Glenn is what it
costs the government to develop an engine. I don't know what they'll
charge for a launch. Look at SpaceX launch costs compared to Atlas or
Delta. Estimates for SpaceX ITS is around $10 billion to develop with
a launch cost of around $63 million. SLS development is about twice
that to complete Phase I and costs almost a billion dollars per
launch.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw