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#31
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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 |
#32
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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. |
#33
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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. |
#34
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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. |
#35
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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. |
#37
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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 |
#38
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
"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. |
#39
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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 |
#40
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Past Perfect, Future Misleading
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. |
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