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Will the investment flood happen?
As you probably know, in the aftermath of Charles Lindbergh's
trans-Atlantic flight, interest in aviation skyrocketed. According to the X-Prize website, "The Spirit of St. Louis aircraft was personally viewed by a quarter of all Americans within a year of Lindbergh's 1927 flight. The number of US Airline Passengers flown went from 5,782 in 1926 to 173,405 in 1929. Companies were known to change their names to include the words "airplane" or "aviation" in their corporate names much like the rush to establish the early dot.coms." In an interview with Clark Lindsey of HobbySpace, Dr. Diamandis (of the X-Prize) said, "Once the X PRIZE is won, I hope that there will be a major flow of cash from the investment community into private space-related ventures." Do you all think this is likely to happen? Or do you think most investors will wait until the X-Prize competitors actually start turning profits? -- Direct access to this group with http://web2news.com http://web2news.com/?sci.space.policy |
#2
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Will the investment flood happen?
Do you all think this is likely to happen? Or do you think most
investors will wait until the X-Prize competitors actually start turning profits? It won't happen either time, unless a clear, obvious, irrefutable profit potential can be shown. |
#3
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Will the investment flood happen?
Do you all think this is likely to happen? Or do you think most
investors will wait until the X-Prize competitors actually start turning profits? Sorry, hit send too soon. How many investors did the fly-by-peddle Condor get? |
#4
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Will the investment flood happen?
Or do you think most
investors will wait until the X-Prize competitors actually start turning profits? Investors won't be watching for profits, too many variables go into the profit equation. They'll be watching for proof of suborb systems reliability. Then they can apply their own expertise toward the profit scenario. FEDEX would love a suborb package deliverer, something quite different from suborb tourism. All it'll take is a reliable system and then the suborb investment dam will break. ^ //^\\ ~~~ near space elevator ~~~~ ~~~members.aol.com/beanstalkr/~~~ |
#5
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Will the investment flood happen?
FEDEX would love a suborb
package deliverer, I've heard this said over and over, but it's not true. The time it takes to go from one airport to another is the least part of the time it takes Fedex to deliver a package. You could reduce the travel time from CA to NYC to zero and not make a significant impact on the delivery time, which is depending on pick up, sorting, delivery to the airport, sorting at the destination and then physical delivery. That's even more true in places like Moscow, where on-the-ground delivery is more complicated. So you can forget Fed-Ex paying a lot of money to ship things suborbitally. |
#6
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Will the investment flood happen?
In article ,
John Ordover wrote: FEDEX would love a suborb package deliverer, I've heard this said over and over, but it's not true. Actually, it is... partly. It is not necessary to speculate about these things; people have actually talked to companies like FedEx about it. They *are* interested, but with certain reservations. The time it takes to go from one airport to another is the least part of the time it takes Fedex to deliver a package. FedEx and similar companies have made considerable efforts to minimize the ground overhead, with some success. That said, it remains significant, and suborbital package delivery would be interesting mostly for the real long-haul runs, mostly intercontinental. The advantage there is more than just the travel time, incidentally, because the short transit times can avoid timezone problems (e.g. airport-operations curfews) which constrain current subsonic-aircraft operations. For the intercontinental runs, suborbital flight does gain enough time to be really interesting. BUT... + Vehicle costs have to be low enough to afford a substantial fleet. You cannot build a package-delivery service on one or two vehicles. + They pretty much have to be cleared to operate out of major airports, and in several countries too, with airliner-class paperwork. + Their dispatch reliability -- readiness to fly when scheduled to -- must approach 100%. (Spare vehicles and rapid cargo handling can cope with some shortfall -- subsonic-aircraft dispatch reliability is usually below 99% -- but there are practical limits.) + They must be capable of flying through any weather except the rarest and most severe adverse conditions. + The vehicle/cargo loss rate must approach 0% very closely. (The last three are tied to a fundamental constraint of fast package delivery: the probability of getting a package there *when promised* has to be something like 99.999% for the business to be viable.) The chances that these constraints can be satisfied by a first-generation reusable rocket are nearly zero. A second-generation system... perhaps. -- MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! | |
#7
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Will the investment flood happen?
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#9
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Will the investment flood happen?
In article ,
Mary Shafer wrote: + Vehicle costs have to be low enough to afford a substantial fleet. You cannot build a package-delivery service on one or two vehicles. You will have to have a substantial fleet of ground vehicles, too, and an efficient ground operation. The assumption is that it's an established package-delivery operator -- e.g., FedEx -- buying these things, not a new startup. That makes all kinds of sense in many ways. + They must be capable of flying through any weather except the rarest and most severe adverse conditions. It might be easier to do this than it is with aircraft, because it won't be necessary to forecast the weather at the destination so far ahead, as is the case for slower aircraft. True, you can just hold the takeoff half an hour to wait for that thunderstorm to leave the airport at the other end. On the other hand, if if it's pouring down rain and shows no signs of stopping -- bearing in mind that in Northern Europe, one major terminus for intercontinental runs, this is far from rare :-) -- you have to be able to fly through it. + The vehicle/cargo loss rate must approach 0% very closely. Both in the air and on the ground. This means safety, security, and reliability. Right. Again, though, if it's an established operator buying the vehicles, he's already got the ground end of things. What he must have is a vehicle that, once launched, essentially always gets itself and its cargo to its destination on time in one piece. (The last three are tied to a fundamental constraint of fast package delivery: the probability of getting a package there *when promised* has to be something like 99.999% for the business to be viable.) Part of the promise is that the package must get there when promised in good condition. True, but I considered that part of getting it there. The key thing to note here is that not only the survival but the schedule is critical: a substantial fraction of the things people ship by fast-package service are things that *must* get there on schedule, on pain of dire consequences. This will be especially true of a premium-priced extra-fast service. Such a service cannot tolerate any significant number of non-trivial delays. The chances that these constraints can be satisfied by a first-generation reusable rocket are nearly zero. A second-generation system... perhaps. I agree, entirely. However, reusability probably isn't the primary issue in success or failure. The chances that the reliability requirements can be met by an expendable seem to me to be essentially zero. Thorough testability, and thus full reusability, are simply part of the ground rules to have any hope of qualifying a vehicle for this job. But the issues certainly go far beyond merely being able to label the thing "reusable". -- MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! | |
#10
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Will the investment flood happen?
Mary Shafer wrote:
It's not just dispatch reliability but post-takeoff, pre-landing reliability. It's rare that a FedEx or UPS airplane or truck has an accident in transit, and if it happened often customers wouldn't use their services. It doesn't take many "Destroyed in transit" notices before folks stop shipping irreplaceable objects. I received an item by FedEx once that was destroyed in transit. It was replaceable, though -- a computer from HP. It arrived in an anonymous brown cardboard box (clearly not the original), with the shipping sticker on a separate square of cardboard that was taped onto the box. The computer itself had a major dent -- the back of the case was bashed in, with the steel bottom pushed forward about an inch. Fragments of electronics rattled around inside. Something had clearly clobbered it at the bottom of a conveyor ramp somewhere in the bowels of FedEx. Needless to say they shipped me another one without question. Why they thought they should deliver the first carcass to me I don't understand. Paul |
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