Armstrong lauds another spaceman

In article ,
Fred J. McCall wrote:
:...The single technical change that would contribute most to
:lowering the cost of a Mars expedition -- much cheaper launch to LEO -- is
:desirable for a number of more immediate reasons.

And yet that doesn't seem to be progressing with great rapidity, either.

Yes, because almost nobody has tried. The only great progress seen in
that department so far was the introduction of Russian launchers.

We'll see how SpaceX does.

It seems that EVERY new launch system I can remember promised
to reduce cost of getting a pound to LEO to the $100 range.

Uh, no, practically none of the new launch systems which were actually
*carried through to operational status* made any such promise. (The
EELVs made far less ambitious promises of very modest cost reductions.)
"You can't win if you don't play."

is still at least an order of magnitude away, even using 'old' Russian
technology which they are willing to 'under price in order to get hard
currency...

Whether Russian launchers are actually underpriced is not clear. They
*are* inherently cheaper than Western designs, due to more automation on
production lines and much less manpower-intensive operations, even if you
disregard the small matter of lower wages.

Current costs for most launchers apparently are in the
$5,000-$10,000 per pound range.

Russian launchers are already well below that range, possibly a long way
below it if you have a sharp negotiator and are doing something unusual
(that is, something where they can't be accused of undercutting Western
competitors if they offer you a big price break).

In fact, the actual cost of getting a pound to LEO doesn't seem to
have moved even a single order of magnitude over the entire history of
real space launchers...

Hardly surprising, given how little real innovation there has been in
launcher design, and how few truly new launch systems have been developed,
for most of that history.

The stunning cost reductions in electronics in the same period were not
achieved by refining production methods for vacuum tubes. Nor did they
come from pioneering initiatives by vacuum-tube manufacturers.

:Indeed, you can make a half-plausible argument that this is already true:
:that even at today's launch prices, it makes sense to accept mass growth
:to save engineering man-years.

But not much. When the vehicles still cost you hundreds of millions
of dollars, it simply doesn't make much sense to put 'cheap' payloads
on them.

When the payloads cost billions or even tens of billions to develop, it
can and does make sense to buy more hundred-million launches to reduce
development costs (even disregarding the possibility of launch-cost
reductions via bulk discounts). Except in a few vaguely-mature areas
like comsats, the payloads cost *much* more than the launches now.

...However, we have to face the fact that the overwhelming
majority of taxpayers simply don't care about space and consider it a
waste of money.

The overwhelming majority of taxpayers like space exploration (hint: ISS
is not doing exploration) and think modest funding for it is a good idea.
What they don't support is the sort of funding that would be needed to do
manned exploration the JSC way.

The logical conclusion from that is that we can't do it the JSC way, not
that we can't do it at all.

Karpoff's study of the various 19th-century arctic expeditions is
:notable: the single strongest predictor of success was private funding,
:mostly because it meant unified, consistent leadership throughout.)

But to attract a lot of private funding there needs to be some
significant economic advantage over current providers.

Very few of the arctic expeditions promised any sort of economic return
at all. Private funding doesn't have to mean profit-making ventures
(although it does help -- profitable projects can easily get up into
the billions, while non-profit private funding tends to top out in the
low hundreds of millions, last I heard).
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |