the drive to explore

On 15 Jun 2005 17:50:52 -0700, in a place far, far away, "horseshoe7"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

Who is the customer for your proposed "all-purpose" reusable
spacecraft?

I have never proposed an "all-purpose" reusable vehicle. You just
made that up, like most of the things that you write about me.

You're telling me the ship found at the following link DOESN'T
represent the ship design you've been describing?:

http://flashgordon.ws/images/snap002.jpg

Having never been to that link, and having never had a specific design
in mind, I can confidently say that, yes, that's what I'm telling you.

You just make yourself look more foolish with every baseless fantasy
you come up with about me.

John Thingstad wrote:

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:49:52 +0200, Rand Simberg
wrote:

On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:36:20 -0400, in a place far, far away, Alain
Fournier made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:


Transportation is transportation, but there is transportation and then
there is transportation. Most people throw away their car after using
it for 200 Mm or so. That is the distance of about 5 orbits.


Because there is little difference in wear between five and fifty
orbits? Because you're making an absurd analogy?

That is obvious, and I wrote it at just the next line where you snipped.
My point is that your analogy is also absurd. Throwing a rocket away
after
one use isn't like throwing a car away after going to the store. If you
don't want to throw away the rocket after each use it has to be built
to survive re-entry, that isn't trivial.

Nor is it inconceivable, or uneconomical, assuming that you are going
to actually reuse it.

Again as I said in the part
that you snipped, I think that it will eventually become cheaper to use
a
reusable system to go to orbit, but it isn't self evident.

It is if you want to be serious about space transportation.

Seems to me you save a lot more by cutting the time it takes to
assemble and manufacture the rocket.
A space shuttle needs a crew of 3000 technicians for 6 months
before each launch. Because a shuttle has to be as efficient and
light as possible many materials have to be driven to the edge
of their tolerances. This means careful checking of thousands of parts.
It might be simpler and cheaper to make a new one each time.
Well not a shuttle.. But a launch veicle.

Inspecting and testing are a lot cheaper than fabricating and
assembling. And if you build a new launcher, it has to be inspected, at
every step of the assembly process, and then have a *complete*
functional test anyway. You don't save any money on inspecting and
testing by building a new launch vehicle for each flight.

And an *RLV* does not have to be "as efficient and light as possible".
Because there is no expended hardware (at a cost of $50-100 million per
launch), testing and inspecting will be a major remaining cost driver,
and there will be a strong incentive to build in more redundancy and
safety margins and greatly reduce testing, inspecting, and refurbishing
costs. That will increase structural weight, and, for a given payload,
will make the vehicle larger and require more propellants to launch.
But propellants are cheap. It will pay to burn up a lot of propellant
to save on hardware costs.
--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

wrote:

Richard Morris wrote:
wrote:

Richard Morris wrote:
wrote:

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 26 May 2005 22:43:44 -0700, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

I read your article comparing the voyage of Hueng He to the Apollo
landings and characterizing them both as failures because there was no
follow up or commertial return.
What steps should be taken so that the 'urge' to see large numbers
of people live off the planet can be realized?

Costs of access have to be reduced to the point at which it becomes
affordable to them.

This is probably the nth time you have been asked, but any
suggestions of how to reduce the cost of access?
Would a side by side configuration of boosters that course correct
by altering thrust thus eliminating the need for gimbled engines on
those boosters be a possibility? It might double the launch weight due
to aerodynamic inefficiency, but the cost of propellant is marginal
relative to the cost of the complexity and reliability of engine thrust
that must be directed. Think of how much more a jetliner would cost if
its engines had to be vectored.

Jet engines have thrust *reversers*, which are at least as complicated
as thrust vectoring of rocket engines. (Jet engines are also
orders-of-magnitude more reliable than rocket engines like the SSME.)
Rockets use thrust vectoring for attitude control, which, on airliners
like the 747 or 767 is accomplished with redundant sets of ailerons,
rudders, and elevators, each of which is controled by triple redundant
actuators powered by triple, or quadruple redundant hydraulic systems.
The hydraulic systems also have three or four independent backup
systems. Except for the TPS, a 747 is much more complicated than a
Shuttle orbiter. Complexity isn't the problem.

Ailerons, rudders and elevators require only a relatively small amount
of force to operate. The gimble system of a booster must support the g
force times the mass, it must be more than an order of magnitude more
powerful. That's why I asked the question.

All of that force is transmitted through the attachment between the top
of the combustion chamber and the thrust structure. It's essentially
just a universal joint. The gimbal actuators see none of that force.
They just swing the engine back and forth in two perpendicular axes:
pitch and yaw. About all they need to do is apply enough force to
overcome the rotational inertia of the engine. The amount of force
required depends on the kind of frequency response you need, which is
not that great for rocket engines, IIRC. The control surfaces on
airliners don't weigh nearly as much as a large rocket engine, but they
need a fairly high frequency response, and the moment arm is much
shorter than for gimbal actuators, so the control surface actuators need
to deliver a lot of force. I've watched them run flight control system
tests out in (767) Final Assembly, and it's really surprising how fast
those control surfaces can flap.

Suppose the boosters were
arranged like the corner cans of a six pack, would controling the
relative thrust to each be a workable way to control attitude, perhaps
fine tuning the thrust by varying the amount of oxygen in the
combustion chambers?

Differential throttling for attitude control has been done. For the
typical booster there isn't enough of a moment arm to generate enough
torque to counteract disturbances from wind-shear, etc. Gimballing is
simply a device to increase the moment arm. For designs that are
shorter and fatter it might work.

The issue isn't just one of complexity but of weight and cost.
The technology of the rocket engine hasn't changed much since Goddard
and Von Braun, how come they are so damn expensive today? Why, if a
747 can be profitable at four times the cost of fuel does a rocket cost
several hundred times the cost of propellant?

A 747 will set you back upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars, but
they are operated profitably because: 1. They are totally reusable -
they don't have to go into a hangar after every flight to replace a
multi-million dollar fuel tank, etc.; 2. They are highly reliable -
they have ample safety margins, and enough redundancy to eliminate
critical, single-point failure modes, so they can be flown again without
going through a complete functional test before every flight - the best
test was the last flight; and 3. They fly a LOT. From the time a 747
is delivered until it is removed from service, it spends about half of
it's life in the air generating revenue. 747's have flown literally
millions of flights. The learning curve has had a lot of time to
operate, and economies of scale have further reduced recurring costs.
Fixed costs are spread over a large number of airplanes, and a very
large number of flights.

Launch vehicles are virtually the exact opposite in every respect. They
throw away something on the order of $100 million on every flight - even
the Shuttle throws away a $60 million dollar fuel tank on every flight.
Launch vehicles - including the Shuttle - were designed for absolute
maximum performance, so dry mass was shaved to the bone in order to
increase payload, which resulted in very fragile and unreliable
vehicles. For the Shuttle, that means that things like the SSME's and
TPS require a lot of inspections and maintenance between flights. The
Shuttle also uses solid rocket boosters which are very expensive to
reprocess. Because the Shuttle does not have continuous abort modes,
and because each flight costs so damn much, there is a high incentive to
make sure that everything is working before launch, which drives up the
testing requirement even further.

The Shuttle has a recurring cost somewhere between $100 and $150 million
per flight. ELV's are in the same neighborhood. Such high cost per
flight has severely limited the market, so that launch vehicles fly
somewhere in the dozens of flights per year (versus millions of flights
per year for the airlines). The Shuttle flies (when it flies) a handful
of flights per year, so the billions of dollars required to maintain the
"standing army", must be divided into a very small number of flights,
adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost per flight.

High recurring cost drives down the market, which drives up the total
cost per flight still further due to fixed costs, which drives the
market down still further. It's a classic vicious cycle. The only way
to get out of it is to develop a fully-reusable vehicle which is
designed from the start for high reliability, simplicity, and
maintainability to minimize recurring costs. If we can get the
recurring cost down enough, then we can start to build up the markets,
which will increase the flight rate and spread the fixed costs over a
larger number of flights, thus reducing the total cost per flight, which
will further increase the markets.

I wrote a reply last night only to lose it when I tried to send. Thank
you for your knowledgeable post. It would be interesting to find out
what the cost and weight of the SSME gimble system is. Seeing the
engines being vectored in the seconds before launch it looks like they
have a 'high frequency response'.
Shorter and fatter is certainly less efficient but if it could simplify
the launch vehicle it would be worth looking into. While the SRBs are
very expensive to service, the cost of liquid tanks could probably be
reduced by a factor of ten if made heavier and more robust, that $60M
cost is magnitudes greater than the cost of thirtyfive tons of aluminum
and insulation. Perhaps there is a way to create a crush zone that
would allow tanks to crash into the ocean and need only minimal
refurbishment.

Better to recover the tanks, engines, etc. as a unit, IMO. For the
orbiter stage that will increase the TPS area and increase the
refurbishment cost somewhat, but not enough to offset the cost of
building new tanks, and integrating them with the rest of the vehicle.
(Most of the cost of refurbishing the Shuttle TPS is due to insulation
coming off of the (expendable) ET and hitting the underside of the
Orbiter. An RLV would obviously not have that problem.)

Redundancy and generous safety margins, along with heavier turbopumps
and other systems for the same thrust, might bring up the launch weight
to fifty or sixty times the payload. The launch weight of the shuttle
and Saturn 5 run a little more than twenty times the payload, the titan
about forty five times. As has been pointed out, the fuel cost is only
about a percent of the launch cost.
It is that absolute maximum performance that makes the shuttle so
expensive. The billion dollar advanced launch system study determined
that tripling the weight of the turbopumps per unit of thrust would
drop the cost by 90% and be more reliable.
I read somewhere that the cost of a shuttle launch was about $400M, but
I suppose it depends what accounting system is used.

Most of that is due to some rather large fixed costs spread over a very
small number of flights. The recurring costs are said to be about $100
million per flight.

The shuttle system puts about a hundred tons into low earth orbit,
excludeing the ET. Two thirds of that is the shuttle itself and it has
proved itself to be a lethal transport both going up and coming down.
Putting wings in space is as impressive as it is foolish.

It was a big mistake. We could have developed a 2-stage, VTOL RLV for
about what we spent on the Shuttle.

wrote:

Richard Morris wrote:
wrote:

Richard Morris wrote:
wrote:

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 26 May 2005 22:43:44 -0700, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

I read your article comparing the voyage of Hueng He to the Apollo
landings and characterizing them both as failures because there was no
follow up or commertial return.
What steps should be taken so that the 'urge' to see large numbers
of people live off the planet can be realized?

Costs of access have to be reduced to the point at which it becomes
affordable to them.

This is probably the nth time you have been asked, but any
suggestions of how to reduce the cost of access?
Would a side by side configuration of boosters that course correct
by altering thrust thus eliminating the need for gimbled engines on
those boosters be a possibility? It might double the launch weight due
to aerodynamic inefficiency, but the cost of propellant is marginal
relative to the cost of the complexity and reliability of engine thrust
that must be directed. Think of how much more a jetliner would cost if
its engines had to be vectored.

Jet engines have thrust *reversers*, which are at least as complicated
as thrust vectoring of rocket engines. (Jet engines are also
orders-of-magnitude more reliable than rocket engines like the SSME.)
Rockets use thrust vectoring for attitude control, which, on airliners
like the 747 or 767 is accomplished with redundant sets of ailerons,
rudders, and elevators, each of which is controled by triple redundant
actuators powered by triple, or quadruple redundant hydraulic systems.
The hydraulic systems also have three or four independent backup
systems. Except for the TPS, a 747 is much more complicated than a
Shuttle orbiter. Complexity isn't the problem.

Ailerons, rudders and elevators require only a relatively small amount
of force to operate. The gimble system of a booster must support the g
force times the mass, it must be more than an order of magnitude more
powerful. That's why I asked the question.

All of that force is transmitted through the attachment between the top
of the combustion chamber and the thrust structure. It's essentially
just a universal joint. The gimbal actuators see none of that force.
They just swing the engine back and forth in two perpendicular axes:
pitch and yaw. About all they need to do is apply enough force to
overcome the rotational inertia of the engine. The amount of force
required depends on the kind of frequency response you need, which is
not that great for rocket engines, IIRC. The control surfaces on
airliners don't weigh nearly as much as a large rocket engine, but they
need a fairly high frequency response, and the moment arm is much
shorter than for gimbal actuators, so the control surface actuators need
to deliver a lot of force. I've watched them run flight control system
tests out in (767) Final Assembly, and it's really surprising how fast
those control surfaces can flap.

Suppose the boosters were
arranged like the corner cans of a six pack, would controling the
relative thrust to each be a workable way to control attitude, perhaps
fine tuning the thrust by varying the amount of oxygen in the
combustion chambers?

Differential throttling for attitude control has been done. For the
typical booster there isn't enough of a moment arm to generate enough
torque to counteract disturbances from wind-shear, etc. Gimballing is
simply a device to increase the moment arm. For designs that are
shorter and fatter it might work.

The issue isn't just one of complexity but of weight and cost.
The technology of the rocket engine hasn't changed much since Goddard
and Von Braun, how come they are so damn expensive today? Why, if a
747 can be profitable at four times the cost of fuel does a rocket cost
several hundred times the cost of propellant?

A 747 will set you back upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars, but
they are operated profitably because: 1. They are totally reusable -
they don't have to go into a hangar after every flight to replace a
multi-million dollar fuel tank, etc.; 2. They are highly reliable -
they have ample safety margins, and enough redundancy to eliminate
critical, single-point failure modes, so they can be flown again without
going through a complete functional test before every flight - the best
test was the last flight; and 3. They fly a LOT. From the time a 747
is delivered until it is removed from service, it spends about half of
it's life in the air generating revenue. 747's have flown literally
millions of flights. The learning curve has had a lot of time to
operate, and economies of scale have further reduced recurring costs.
Fixed costs are spread over a large number of airplanes, and a very
large number of flights.

Launch vehicles are virtually the exact opposite in every respect. They
throw away something on the order of $100 million on every flight - even
the Shuttle throws away a $60 million dollar fuel tank on every flight.
Launch vehicles - including the Shuttle - were designed for absolute
maximum performance, so dry mass was shaved to the bone in order to
increase payload, which resulted in very fragile and unreliable
vehicles. For the Shuttle, that means that things like the SSME's and
TPS require a lot of inspections and maintenance between flights. The
Shuttle also uses solid rocket boosters which are very expensive to
reprocess. Because the Shuttle does not have continuous abort modes,
and because each flight costs so damn much, there is a high incentive to
make sure that everything is working before launch, which drives up the
testing requirement even further.

The Shuttle has a recurring cost somewhere between $100 and $150 million
per flight. ELV's are in the same neighborhood. Such high cost per
flight has severely limited the market, so that launch vehicles fly
somewhere in the dozens of flights per year (versus millions of flights
per year for the airlines). The Shuttle flies (when it flies) a handful
of flights per year, so the billions of dollars required to maintain the
"standing army", must be divided into a very small number of flights,
adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost per flight.

High recurring cost drives down the market, which drives up the total
cost per flight still further due to fixed costs, which drives the
market down still further. It's a classic vicious cycle. The only way
to get out of it is to develop a fully-reusable vehicle which is
designed from the start for high reliability, simplicity, and
maintainability to minimize recurring costs. If we can get the
recurring cost down enough, then we can start to build up the markets,
which will increase the flight rate and spread the fixed costs over a
larger number of flights, thus reducing the total cost per flight, which
will further increase the markets.

Realisticly, what do you see on the horizon? If it were up to you,
what kind of launch vehicle would you persue? What markets do you see
developeing if access to space were only a few hundred dollars per
pound?

If it were up to me, I would build a fully-reusable, 2-stage, VTOL
launch vehicle. I would make it at least big enough to capture the
lion's share of the comsat market. That, plus science missions and ISS
crew rotation and resupply would at least get us started with some
existing markets. Trying to build a new vehicle for a market that
doesn't yet exist is too big a step, IMO. In the longer term, tourism
is going to be the big one. It's the only forseeable market that is big
enough to make an RLV investment pay off.

Doing all that is technologically realistic, but politics is another
matter. Your guess is as good as mine as far as what NASA and the
Congress are going to do.

horseshoe7 wrote:

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 7 Jun 2005 09:25:49 -0700, in a place far, far away, "horseshoe7"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a

[deleted]

Think about it - it is sometimes cheaper to throw something away, than
try to re-cycle/re-use it... I think you are too hung up on this
recycling business - just throw the electronics away! Computers are
cheap! Why would you want to expend the NRE and operating costs to
build some huge man-rated/re-entryable thing to haul back JUNK?!

JUNK? That "junk" costs tens of millions of dollars! It's built to
standards that put a Ferarri or Rolls Royce to shame It only *becomes*
junk if you're foolish enough to throw it away (after using it once!).
Refurbishing the TPS of a reusable orbiter stage will cost far less than
junking a $50-100 million propulsion stage.

Do you throw away your computer after you use it once and buy a new
one? I doubt it, and your computer cost a trivial amount compared to
space or airline qualified avionics. Your computer only has to operate
in a very benign environment, and nobody gets hurt if it fails.
Aerospace
computers are orders-of-magnitude more expensive. Ditto for
communications systems, navigation systems, engines, structures, etc.


[deleted]

horseshoe7 wrote:

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 7 Jun 2005 10:32:54 -0700, in a place far, far away, "horseshoe7"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

The STS is just like all those old 60's/70's multi-purpose stadiums
that we are now tearing down to replace with two stadiums... we tried
to make things re-usable, and FAILED big-time.

Gee, I went to more than a few football and baseball games in the
Kingdome, and it seemed to work each time. And you didn't have to sit
out in the cold if the weather was bad, as it sometimes is in Seattle.

Once again, your statement is entirely logic free. Once cannot
conclude that reusable vehicles don't make sense just because we
screwed it up the one time we tried it.

So, like the fools in the 60's/70's who continued to try to build
better multi-purpose stadiums, you would keep trying to build
multi-purpose STSs, until you got it right?

Your "multi-purpose requirements" are the root of your problem. Mixing
requirements for putting Hardware and Humans in space is just plain
dumb.

A launch vehicle doesn't care what it puts into orbit. The Saturn-V
launched manned flights to the Moon, and the unmammed Skylab. A
2-stage, VTOL RLV could launch either a manned spacecraft, or an
unmanned payload with a fairing, with minimal impact to the launch
vehicle itself. Comsat operators won't mind if the launch vehicle is an
order-of-magnitude, or two, more reliable than ELV's. Insurance
companies won't mind either.

Lockheed/Martin and Northrup/Grumman's proposed solutions to the manned
space transport system problem look decent enough:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Exploration_Vehicle

And, glory be, the Northrup solution looks just like the Soyuz solution
I was describing... and the Lockheed/Martin solution looks similar to
the scaled-down STS solution I described.

This isn't rocket science... well actually it is but, in any event,
this isn't that hard to see. I'm just a casual observer (albiet an
Aerospace Systems Engineer working in an unrelated field), but I was
able to quickly come up independently with the right set of
requirements and the two most obvious solutions to the problem.

What's your angle, anyway (monetarily speaking)?

- Stewart

horseshoe7 wrote:

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 7 Jun 2005 11:12:52 -0700, in a place far, far away, "horseshoe7"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

Mixing
requirements for putting Hardware and Humans in space is just plain
dumb.

Right, just like mixing requirements for carrying computers and
passengers in airplanes is just plain dumb. That stupid Boeing
company. How do they even stay in business?

That's a little bit better than your "going to the store" analogy -
but, I've got a much better one... it is more like Boeing trying to
build and sell a multi-purpose airplane that would allow commercial air
passenger carriers like American Airlines to try to outcompete
commercial cargo carriers like Federal Express and UPS. I'm sure it
made some sense during the initial development period of airplanes, but
was eventually rejected as a crackpot idea, once it become clear that
these were two fairly separate requirements - just like the manned and
unmanned requirements should be basically treated separately.

I happen to know something about airline passenger and cargo aircraft,
since I work on both (engineering). They're the same basic airframe and
engines. Cargo airplanes don't have windows along the sides, and
passenger airplanes don't have main deck cargo doors. Those are the
biggest differences in the airframes. The other main differences are
the main deck floor structures and the interiors. Many airlines operate
both passenger and cargo versions of the same models. (We used to build
a "Combi" version of the 747 that carried passengers in the forward
fuselage *and* cargo in the aft fuselage). Airlines like the idea that
they don't have to train their flight crews and maintenance personel for
two separate airplanes rather than one - not to mention the cost of
maintaining separate spares inventories and ground support equipment.
Right now, the air cargo market is keeping the 747 and 767 programs
afloat, but Boeing would never even imagine building a purely cargo
airplane. There isn't nearly enough of a market to pay back the
development and tooling costs. We even use the same cockpit on several
different models to maximize commonality (and minimize crew training
requirements). PS: All of our passenger airplanes can also carry cargo
in the fwd. and aft. cargo compartments in the lower lobe of the
fuselage.

What's your angle, anyway (monetarily speaking)?

I have no "angle" (monetarily speaking). In fact, I probably lose
consulting business due to my politically incorrect (but technically
and economically correct) views.

I think you are trying to push a product for which there is no demand
(requirement).

NASA needs to pretty much stay out of the space hardware-hauling
business, and concentrate on building systems designed specifically to
support manned space exploration. Whenever possible, they should
customize their unmanned space exploration requirements to fit what
launch vehicle providers are providing the majority of their paying
customers - let USAF, GPS, Satellite TV companies, etc. drive the
unmanned requirements, and those products will naturally evolve to be
more efficient... In other words, trust the free-market system where it
makes sense.

NASA should also start stepping aside and let the free market start to
drive the fledgling near-earth space passenger market.

The egg is barely even fertilized. It won't hatch and become a
"fledgling" until we have fully-reusable launchers.

However, manned space exploration requirements are a different area,
and they don't fit that well into a free-market model. This is where
NASA should drive the reqirements.

So, really, we currently have four separate requirements areas, only
two of which NASA should be involved with long-term, and only one of
which NASA should be driving the requirements for.

- Stewart

Richard Morris wrote:
horseshoe7 wrote:

The STS is just like all those old 60's/70's multi-purpose stadiums
that we are now tearing down to replace with two stadiums... we tried
to make things re-usable, and FAILED big-time.

Gee, I went to more than a few football and baseball games in the
Kingdome, and it seemed to work each time.

HA! The Kingdome is one of the WORST CASE EXAMPLES of the failure of
multi-purpose stadium design! It didn't even survive 25 years!

Ever notice how your neck hurts after going to a baseball game in
Multi-Purpose stadiums? In a baseball-specific stadium, you are always
MUCH closer to the action, AND the seats are angled towards the main
action, you don't have to constantly be straining your neck to watch
the game.

Same thing for football-specific stadiums... you are always much closer
to the action, and the seats are oriented better than in the case of
the multi-purpose compromise.

And you didn't have to sit
out in the cold if the weather was bad, as it sometimes is in Seattle.

That has NOTHING to do with the issue of multi-purpose design... you
can have domed baseball and football specific stadiums for those
locations with ****ty climates... I live in San Diego - if you are
within about 10 miles of the coast, you don't need to waste your money
on domes, nor on heating and/or air conditioning.

- Stewart

In article .com, Jordan
says...

John Schilling said:

Jordan Bassior said:

We went from orbital capsule flight to the first Lunar landing in just
eight years, and America's technology in 1961 was _lower_ than China's
is today. So, why do you assume that China won't beat us to the Lunar
return?

Because China isn't in a race,

I'm not sure about that. A return to manned planetary exploration is
an explicit goal of the Bush Administration. It's been sidetracked by
the war, but wars don't last forever, and with the increasingly
positive space discoveries I think that future US Administrations will
share this goal.

You seem to be assuming that if the United States is trying to land men
on the Moon[1] and China is trying to land men on the moon[2], that China
is thus in a race with the United States. This is faulty logic; two
parties can be seeking the same goal without being engaged in a race,
and you have presented no evidence or argument for the claim that China
is engaged in a race with the United States.


[1] Which is a pretty big "if"

[2] See above.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 15 Jun 2005 15:27:21 -0700, in a place far, far away, "Jordan"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:

I hope you're right, because I would like to see our nascent private
space enterprise reach the point of Moonbases, asteroid mining etc.
That, I understand, is Rutan's explicit dream.

I don't know about the Chinese not being able to afford it, though.
For a variety of reasons a Lunar landing would cost a lot less now than
it did in the late 1960's - early 1970's, and the Chinese would
certainly be willing to cut corners to achieve a success, even at some
cost in failures.

But they remain at heart a communist nation, and there will be a
collision between their fundamental ruling ideology and economic
growth long before they can afford to waste their money on such a
project.

This argument would have stronger basis if it weren't for the fact that
America's main rival in space from 1957 through 1989 _was_ a Communist
nation, to a far greater extent than is modern China. Communism
weakens a nation, I won't deny that. But the evidence is that
totalitarian Communism can last many, many decades before it exhausts a
nation's vitality to the point of destroying its ability to undertake
large-scale projects.

I would also not term Lunar colonization a "waste of money" when viewed
from the long term -- Lunar colonization can support asteroid mining
which can return immense profits -- over a decades-long timescale to
establish the infrastructure (it is then far more rapidly profitable
for follow-on ventures). Now, does China realize this, and will China
be able to survive long enough to reach the point of profitable
asteroid mining?

Those are questions I don't know the answer to.

Sincerely Yours,
Jordan