Past Perfect, Future Misleading

"Hop David" wrote in message
...
Wouldn't delta V expense make even a solid gold asteroid unprofitable?

Delta V does not cost money. It costs energy. Which in turn cost close to
nothing in dollars.
The issue lies designing a space vehicle with maximum deltaV per buck.
Nobody has tried that yet. All sorts of rockets have been optimized for
maximum ISP, minimum GLOW and what not. Nobody has tried to optimize for
deltaV per dollar.

-kert

Manned spaceflight should
be an national industry not a government program.

Craig Fink

Where's the revenue stream that would interest industry?

The technology for establishing, say, a Moon base, has existed for
-decades- and is well within the technological capacity of industry.
That it hasn't been done is entirely because no one can think of a way
to make a buck at it.

If your best idea is to send people on joyrides, you're not going to
motivate industry.

You just can not go from Kitty Hawk to passenger flights crossing the
Atlantic with the added bonuses of needing to go to Moscow in one leap. I
say lets get mail service going first.

There is no demand or need for suborbital mail service. The major
limiting factor on mail delivery is getting it from the airport to the
recipient, not the flight time.

the big challenge for any investors or company in developing a
non-government funded vehicle is: where are you going to get the money
to design, build, and support a new type of space vehicle?

It's not hard to get the money if you can show a bird-in-the-hand
revenue stream - the problem is that no one has thought of one.

Joann Evans wrote in message ...
Dholmes wrote:

[snip]

One thing that might get the industry going is to sell the shuttles instead
of retiring them. Then the risk falls to the people willing to fly them and
they could with modifications carry a lot of people.

I seiously doubt that anyone would privately operate the shuttles on
an economic basis. Concorde barely cut it, in known markets. (albeit
limited by sonic boom restrictions to mostly over-water routes) The
orbiters just cost too much to operate.

Concorde -never- cut it. It's a perfect example of creating a service
without looking into the market for it.

In article ,
says...

snip

If an accessible, volatile rich asteroid is found, delta V might become
much cheaper. The asteroid's water and fuel could be exported to a depot
in earth orbit. Then it would be much cheaper to excape LEO. It would
also become much less expensive to export stuff to earth from various
locations.

I happen to believe "The Killer App" will be an extinct comet (Nereus or
1979 VA? Maybe even Deimos - it possibly has interior volatiles and is
easier to export from than Mars). Then when delta v is much cheaper,
metal rich asteroids will also become Killer Apps.

I *so* agree with this. While Mars beckons, I truly think that the next
important wave in manned space exploration is to the asteroids. We need
to learn how to mine asteroids safely, and there's going to be one
hellacious learning curve to it, I think.

--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for | Doug Van Dorn
thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup |

John Ordover wrote:
Manned spaceflight should

be an national industry not a government program.

Craig Fink


Where's the revenue stream that would interest industry?

The technology for establishing, say, a Moon base, has existed for
-decades- and is well within the technological capacity of industry.
That it hasn't been done is entirely because no one can think of a way
to make a buck at it.

If your best idea is to send people on joyrides, you're not going to
motivate industry.

There have been a multitude of reports on the huge store of energy
in the deep sea methane hydrate deposits, with returns as large as the
biggest oil fields, but it's too hard to get to and nobody with any
money will bother to exploit it.
What makes space any different?
IMHO: I'm afraid that space is useless as a source of product or
services.
Jim Davis

"John Ordover" wrote in message
om...
You just can not go from Kitty Hawk to passenger flights crossing the
Atlantic with the added bonuses of needing to go to Moscow in one leap.
I
say lets get mail service going first.

There is no demand or need for suborbital mail service. The major
limiting factor on mail delivery is getting it from the airport to the
recipient, not the flight time.


How could you misread that so completely?
Mail service as written was clearly not literal.
Probably the closest thing today are the cargo runs to ISS.
Weekly deliveries of less then a ton or monthly deliveries of 3 to 4 tonsof
supplies to ISS would start a whole new market by starting volume production
and launch of rockets driving down costs.

In article ,
says...
Concorde -never- cut it. It's a perfect example of creating a service
without looking into the market for it.

Concorde *did* show an operational profit for many years. People were
willing to pay for speed, service, and snob-appeal.

R&D expenses had to be written-off. It was expensive to design and
build. That's not uncommon in systems that advance the state of the art.

It took a while to learn how to operate and market Concorde effectively.
Changing times ended her career. But in between, she flew profitably.
--
Kevin Willoughby oSpam

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

John Ordover wrote:

Joann Evans wrote in message ...
Dholmes wrote:

[snip]

One thing that might get the industry going is to sell the shuttles instead
of retiring them. Then the risk falls to the people willing to fly them and
they could with modifications carry a lot of people.

I seiously doubt that anyone would privately operate the shuttles on
an economic basis. Concorde barely cut it, in known markets. (albeit
limited by sonic boom restrictions to mostly over-water routes) The
orbiters just cost too much to operate.

Concorde -never- cut it. It's a perfect example of creating a service
without looking into the market for it.

It was limited by matters outside of market forces:

The unacceptability of sonic booms over inhabited areas.

Fuel efficency/consumption that was acceptable when designed, but
suffering, post 1973.

Engine noise that was acceptable when designed, but suffering under
new rules.

It's a bit like nuclear pulse. Performance isn't the main reason we
don't do it, side effects are.

Now, it's entirely possible that Concorde *still* might have been an
economic failure, but more than economics were involved. We know people
want to fly the routes it did (and could have) flown, but it wasn't just
a matter of how much more they would pay for more speed.