High Launch Costs - Result of Physics?

You can't heat something like green beans on a stove
without using extra water.

Mary Shafer wrote:
You're kidding, aren't you? I can heat sauteed green beans in a
skillet with no added water. Ditto stir-frying.

Okay, extra *liquid* then. I chose to speak of water because it
doesn't change the nutritional characteristics -- or, generally, the
taste -- of the food.

I suppose, technically, one *could* fry vegetables on a dry skillet
over a wood fire, or roast them, but they'd totally lose their "fresh"
flavor in the process.

And I apologize for the extra-strength tangent. I will try to
exercise restraint and no longer respond to Mr. Ordover.

On 2 Jul 2003 08:18:48 -0700, in a place far, far away,
(Alan Anderson) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

I suppose, technically, one *could* fry vegetables on a dry skillet
over a wood fire, or roast them, but they'd totally lose their "fresh"
flavor in the process.

Actually, roasting peppers is the most flavorful way to cook them, in
my opinion...

And I apologize for the extra-strength tangent. I will try to
exercise restraint and no longer respond to Mr. Ordover.

Just killfile him, as I have. Then you'll only see his idiocy when
someone *else* responds to him.

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Swap the first . and @ and throw out the ".trash" to email me.
Here's my email address for autospammers:

"George William Herbert" wrote in message
...

It's been a long time since they were as simple as a coke can...

Hell, coke cans aren't all that simple when one looks at the pressures
involved.

SciAm had an article on this about a year or two ago.




-george william herbert

(John Ordover) wrote in message . com...
(Alex Terrell) wrote in message . com...
"Christopher M. Jones" wrote in message ...

That's just plain idiotic. There are cars from 2003 which can
out-perform the average car today. Sheesh. Get a dictionary,
look up the word "tautology". Or do you want to compare Thrust
SST to one of those cars from 1969? Looking to the thread topic,
I see the subject is *cost*, not speed. Shouldn't you be
comparing the "amount of car" you get for a dollar (inflation
adjusted, of course) now vs. in the 1800s? I would bet that
it's quite a bit more now than then.

Oh, and I suppose they had gas-electric hybrids for sale in
1899 right? With airbags. And air conditioning. And power
steering. And anti-lock brakes. And 50 mpg gas mileage.

I've seen some of the NCAP crash tests. Two years ago the Citroen C5
was the first car to get 5 stars. Now a dozen cars have five stars,
and if your car is over 5 years old, it's probably a deathtrap
compared to today's cars. The improvement, as you point out, is
amazing.

Does it run by something other than an Internal combustion engine?

Do you want Floo Powder?

Our computers still use silicon, and run on electricity, just as they
have for the last 30 years or more. According to your argument, they
can't have progressed either.

All the points below seem to indicate that high launch costs are a
result of economics, not physics.

With a high enough volume, unit costs tend to come down to the point
where raw materials are a significant, if not the dominating factor. I
think a car costs about 10 - 20 times the cost of the basic raw
materials.

I also think (I am prepared to be corrected) that a modern car is
actually more complex than a modern rocket, in terms of number of
components and assembley. A modern car costs about $2 billion to
develop, which is more than an expendable rocket.

Let's suppose there were no economic limitations, and production of
rockets was in the millions. What orbital launch cost would result
from a rocket cost of 20 times the material cost? Cheap!

So the key question is not whether economics or physics is cause of
high cost, it's can:
1. The economics be overcome
2. Can some physics / engineering advance be used to change the
economics



(John Ordover) wrote in message . com...
"Christopher M. Jones" wrote in message ...
"jeff findley" wrote:
You're asking all of us to give up and wait for a miracle.

The first automobiles were hidiously expensive. The first airline
flights were also. So were the first microprocessors.

What made all of the products that use these various technologies more
affordable wasn't some magic technology. The technology is largely
the same for most of these.

Interestingly, microprocessors now would be much more
expensive than most computers were in the 50s and 60s
if each fabrication plant only produced one cpu.
Those plants cost billions of dollars for state of the
art chips, but they produce so many that the cost is
amortized down to a pittance per chip.


That's because there is a huge volume of customers, so they can sell a
heck of a lot of chips.



Similarly, if the cost of a launch vehicle were even many
billions of dollars to build but was highly reusible with
very low incremental costs (i.e. fuel and minimal labor)
the per flight cost would be rediculously cheap as well.


Only if there were as many customers for launches as for chips. But
there aren't, and won't be, because there's nothing valuable in space
go to and bring back...


Jumbo jets cost tens and hundreds of millions of dollars,
but fly so often that the ticket price is mostly due to
fuel and labor costs.


....and no one to visit or do business with.


As I've pointed out more than once
on these newsgroups, the technological capability to do
RLV SSTO launch vehicles using LOX/Kerosene (a propellant
mixture that the current generation of aerospace blue-
noses don't much care for, despite its obvious advantages)
is very nearly on the shelf. Existing and historical
rocket stages should be capable of SSTO operation with
only minor upgrades. With only *slightly* improved
engine, design, construction, and materials it should be
abundantly possible to build an RLV SSTO capable of
routine operations with low incremental cost (e.g. using
composite structures, slightly upgraded engines, advanced
alloys, and low-maintenance thermal protection systems).

To sell rides to whom? To do what?


We have the technology, what we lack is the right people
with enough funding and the right designs.

No, you lack customers and a profit motive. Scatter a trillion
dollars in gold bullion on the Moon, private industry will get us
there. As long as the Moon is only a dirty beach - well, we have
dirty beaches right here.

John Ordover wrote:

But I guess the important point is that we don't
need to prove anything to the Ordovers of the world.

I am exactly the kind of person you have to convince if you want
investors who would just as soon invest in cheese as space. You have
to show the short-term profit return.

You throw out terms like "infrastructure will be developed" that seem
to assume that infrastruture will appear from nowhere, at no cost, by
magic. The reality is that the infrastructure you describe is wildly
expensive, and no one wants to pay to put it in place.

I don't believe that there is a short-term profit potential in space
that would justify any substantial private sector investment. It will
require billions of dollars to develop an RLV large enough to handle
existing markets, and with low enough recurring costs to develop new
markets. The only potential market large enough to make that kind of
investment pay off is LEO tourism, and with exactly 2 customers through
the gate so far I don't blame anyone for being sceptical about the size
of the potential market. I personally own several thousand shares of
Boeing stock, but I have not invested a single red cent in any start-up
launch vehicle or X-Prize company, and don't intend to.

I think the government is going to have to take the first step by
developing a true RLV, and by making it as simple and reliable as
possible to keep support costs to a minimum. After that, I think you
will be shocked at how quickly things develop. Unfortunately, I see
little evidence that NASA is interested in doing any such thing in the
forseeable future. NASA, for the last 30+ years, has been fixated on
pushing the technology envelope and on doing things the hard way in
order to "justify" a lot of technology development to make more work for
their research centers. That approach virtually guarantees high costs
and low reliability. In the case of NASP and X-33, it guaranteed
outright failure.

Where you are going wrong, IMHO, is in assuming that it will require
technology breakthroughs to develop a reliable, fully-reusable launch
vehicle. You seem to think that the Shuttle has done the best that can
possibly be done with existing technology, which is an incorrect
assumption. The politicians and bureaucrats FUBAR'd the Shuttle design
right from the start and it never had any chance of reducing costs. You
appear to lack the engineering experience to understand how much better
we could have done even at the state of the art in 1970. A 2-stage,
VTOL RLV has been within the state-of-the-art for 30 years, but NASA is
uninterested in such an unglamorous approach. Instead, we got stuck
with a complex, partly-expendable design like the Shuttle, and to
replace it NASA chose aerodynamically complex horizontal landing SSTO
designs, which are beyond the state-of-the-art even now.

The bottom line is that we don't have low cost space transportation now
because most of the politicians and bureaucrats have never been able to
find their a******* with both hands in order pull their heads out of
same. God only knows when this situation will change substantially for
the better, so, in the meantime, I would recommend you put your money
into cheese futures.

I also think (I am prepared to be corrected) that a modern car is
actually more complex than a modern rocket,

AIUI, a rocket is more like a jumbo jet than a car, in the sense of the sheer
*amount* of work that must be done to build it, and the number of systems
required. Both rockets and jets require years of lead time to build.
Automobiles come off the line one per day.

John Ordover wrote:

Sigh. The market is all but dead. Satellite service expansion into
Asia is plummetting as the cell towers make headway.

Just a few weeks ago Arianespace Flight 161 placed a few stud hoss
geostationery communications satellites for Australia and Japan.

Hop
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Such a King could not have wanted to build a
Montgolfiere without knowing what a Montgolfiere actually is,

And such knowledge was not to be had in 1500 at any price. That is why a
flight as earlier described would have needed 'pixie dust' in 1500; not for any
lack of physical wherewithal. Hell, the Romans probably had the physical means
for balloon building. They just didn't know how, just as the present USA
probably possesses the industrial means to build a starship but for many years
will not know how.

Len wrote:

Michael Walsh wrote in message ...
Len wrote:

Michael Walsh wrote in message ...
Len wrote:


...snip...



So far what I consider "baseline knowledge" is the Space Shuttle.

...snip....

Mike Walsh

Aha. At last I realize why we disagree on cost estimates
for development of a space transport. You believe the
Space Shuttle is a good data point; I believe it is an
incredibly lousy data point from the economics point of
view.

In the context of what I was discussing when I made this particular comparison
I believe the "baseline knowledge" I was referring to was the aerothermodynamic
environment on re-entry of a winged body vehicle.

I maintain that integrating the propellant tank results in
a much more benign reentry environment as a result of much
lower planform loading. The effects, IMO, tend to compound:
lower temperatures yield lighter TPS and that leads to lower
planform loading that leads to lower temperatures, etc.

I understand that, although I don't have a sufficient background in that
particlular area to quantify it. My concern was that you are working in
a region that is still not well defined.


And as far as economics goes, it is a real data point. Got any others?


No. But I'd rather consider the set of data to be empty
--rather than a set containing only bad data points.

I don't disagree with your outlook. However, one point of view is
that the high cost of Shuttle operations provides more of an opportunity
to demonstrate a market for something like crew transfer to a
space station.

The only other ones that can be used are capsules such as Mercury, Gemini,
Apollo and Soyuz.

Which we probably both agree aren't appropriate.

Yes, although a capsule design could be a reasonable choice for an ISS
escape system. I understand that the OSP program is looking at that
possibility.

The basic problem is that the only real data points are
incredibly lousy from an economics point of view.

However, if you re-read my post you should realize that wasn't
what I was describing.

OK. When it comes to Shuttle, my fuse is probably too short.

My main observation is that our relative orientation with
respect to acceptable data may explain the gap between us
on cost estimates for what may be possible. That doesn't meen
that you may not be right; moreover, you are entitled
to your opinion with respect to what are reasonable cost estimates
--the range of which are probably very unpredictable at
this time. I just hope to be somewhat convincing that the
low end of the range should not be dismissed as completely
impossible.

We have discussed this before. I agree that the Shuttle is a bad
example for cost comparisons.

I have mentioned in the past that whenever I see costs given for
any kind of government program whether NASA or DOD the
costs seem to be $500 million + for almost any significant program.
The DOD is now trying to do some low end tests to deliver small
satellite payloads and it will be interesting to see how they progress.

One very basic problem is when I read the proposals by
private entrepeneurs it reads as if the problem they are resolving
would be of more interest to the military than a private investor
trying to make money by putting satellites into orbit. A tourist
trade could well be a paying business, but there seem to be a
lot of "iffy" items that fall in the regulatory and political area that
would cause concern to an investor.

Mike Walsh