top ten reasons there'll be faster progress

Joe Strout wrote:

No, that's not the case. Improving suborbital flight could mean many
things, I suppose, including reducing cost and improving reliability (I
might argue, for example, that SS1 is already well beyond the X-15 in
terms of reliability, though there's certainly room for lively debate on
that one).

But when you consider what direction the market forces are likely to
push, it's almost certainly going to be for higher, faster, longer
microgravity flight profiles. And continued revision and improvement in
this direction leads directly (yet incrementally) to orbital flight. So
you can't "improve suborbital flight all you want" and be no further
than the X-15; at some point you've improved it well past the X-15 and
into the orbital realm.

Indeed, both the economics and the physics dictate this. The longer
the suborbital flight the longer the purchased experience, with very
little add-on cost for the provider; hence the greater the profit to
the provider because a longer experience can be sold for more than a
shorter one. But physically speaking, a suborbital flight can only be
lengthened so far until it is an orbital flight. And an orbital flight
can be sustained indefinitely.

This applies to passenger transportation at least as much as to
tourism. A short suborbital flight offers few if any advantages over
ordinary air travel; a long one can get passengers to their destination
faster than any atmospheric airliner. And as we construct more manned
facilities in space, a sufficiently fast flight can put passengers in
orbit. (There is already a potential market involved handling
personnel and cargo transfers with the ISS).

There's the direct incremental improvement noted above. In addition,
many of the problems faced by suborbital craft are similar or the same
as those faced by orbital craft: the need for a reaction control system,
for example. Also cabin pressurization, non-airbreathing engines, all
components being rated for use in space, TPS (though admittedly to a
much lesser degree, and somewhat depending on other craft parameters),
and so on. A high flight rate, with accompanying rapid progress on
these fronts, certainly makes the overall problem of building an orbiter
easier, don't you agree?

Almost all the technical problems are identical. The main difference
is the duration of the required life support systems.

My problem with this is that there has been lots of money to be made for
less costly launch capability for some time.

Yes, the market has been there, but it hasn't been recognized until
recently. Moreover, the very idea that private companies could run
their own space program was met with nothing but giggles until about 5
years ago. The giggle factor is gone, making investment more possible;
and then of course we have the modern angels (Munsk, Bezos, etc.)
serious about doing it themselves.

One cultural change has been that the generation of bright kids who
grew up reading science fiction and watching the early space program in
the 1950's and 1960's now has some members who are old enough to
occupy top positions in large corporations. This was something I long
expected, and am happy to have lived long enough to see realized.

Slots for comm satellites,
weather satellites, mapping satellites, and on and on.

Tosh. These are a small market, and don't demand a high flight rate,
and have been supplied mainly by government launchers. Sure, they would
have been better off with cheaper launches -- and this is an angle
SpaceX is taking even today -- but the existing expensive launches were
good enough; these customers were not price-sensitive, and the volume
was too low to drive much in the way of real competition.

Human passengers, in contrast, will (after the early adopters) be rather
price-sensitive, and will be flying in high enough volume to drive
competition. This is a completely different sort of market. Groping
for analogy here, consider the ocean liner industry as compared to the
auto industry. The latter advances much faster.

Very good point.

I'll add to this that, once one has private orbital flight, one can
have private space stations and there is then a market for satellite
_maintenance_. Once there is infrastructure in orbit, it becomes
cheaper to repair malfunctioning satellites than to launch
replacements.

Sincerely Yours,
Jordan