Cheap Realistic Space Flight

In sci.space.tech Charles Talleyrand wrote:

"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message ...
Scott Lowther writes:

High flight rates. No reason we couldn't achieve $100/lb using 1960's
tech. Just need to build in numbers and fly a lot.

...Kind of like the Russions do with their "Proton" booster...


You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.


And what calculations have you done to show that this is necessarily
impossible, given the advances in machining, logistics, and given
a a high volume?

And the Proton is no where near $100/pound to orbit. And there labor
is much cheaper than ours.


Which among other things means you should reconsider where you build your
next rocket factory and spaceport.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

"Charles Talleyrand" writes:


"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message ...
Scott Lowther writes:

High flight rates. No reason we couldn't achieve $100/lb using 1960's
tech. Just need to build in numbers and fly a lot.

...Kind of like the Russions do with their "Proton" booster...


You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.

No, it requires building something better than the Titan or Saturn using
1960s technology.

You seem to be assuming that the Titan and/or Saturn, because they were
built using 1960s technology, were the *best* that could be built using
1960s technology. They were not even close.

Titan and Saturn were close to the best that could be built, A: using
1960s technology, B: on a very aggressive development schedule, C: by
people with no practical experience in spaceflight, D: with a blank
check. Four constraints, of which the "using 1960s tech" on was not
the most restrictive.

1960s technology as applied by people with a tight budget but with all
the experience from the first time around, would lead to very different
results. I think you need more modern technology, particularly in
materials science (and no, that's not a codeword for "bucky-anything"),
to reach $100/lb, but you can sure get something cheaper than Titan
and Saturn. The people who built Titan and Saturn could have delivered
something cheaper than Titan and Saturn if you went back with a time
machine and stole half their budget but left them copies of the books
they wound up writing ca. 1970.


--
*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 *

Big guns are too expensive, at least in the short term.
I would rather mount a rifle size gun on a very high
altitude platform and use it as a cheap method of
transporting raw materials to low Earth orbit.

Stratospheric balloon is not the best platform because
it cannot go much higher than 40 km above sea level.

Air breathing airplanes fly only to 30 km, but
aircraft powered by electric motor can go much higher
than 30 km. (Leik Myrabo managed to fly a helicopter
powered by microwaves.)

Nobody knows how high a train of several kites can go.
Current record of 9740 m was established almost a century
ago with 8 kites attached to a piano wire. A train of
modern kites on a streamlined Zylon line can certainly
go much higher. Zylon has twice the strength of the
piano wire and only 1/7 of its weight.

Here is my favorite very high altitude platform:
-A large, air breathing airplane is at the bottom
of the platform. It flies at the altitude of 30 km
and carries a powerful electric generator.
-A small airplane powered by electric motor is
attached to the large, air breathing airplane with
a high-voltage electric cable. The small airplane
flies at the altitude of about 50 km (wild guess).
-A train of kites is attached to the small, electric
airplane. The top kite flies at the altitude of
70 km (another wild guess).

The gun is mounted on the top kite. Its projectiles
are rather slow (2 km/s), but very well aimed. The
projectiles hit targets which are extremely primitive,
low altitude satellites. Each satellite is a hollow
cube cobbled together from a sheet metal. The
projectile vaporizes when it hits the cube. The
vapors condense on the inside of the cube.
Electrodynamic tether replenishes orbital momentum
lost in the collisions with the projectiles.

The very high altitude platform can also be used
for telecommunications and surveillance.

http://www.columbiad.ca

??

"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message ...
You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.

And the Proton is no where near $100/pound to orbit. And there labor
is much cheaper than ours.

The Proton's $700/lb is closer to $100/lb than it is to the Space Scuttle's
$30,000/lb --- even on a logarithmic scale. The Russians acheived this
lower cost primarily by using a _SIMPLER DESIGN_ (the cost of a rocket
tends to be proportional to the number of components it has, not its size),
and by good old fashioned capitalistic _ECONOMIES OF SCALE_, amortizing
its design and tooling costs over a large number of manufactured units ---
=NOT= by "lower labor costs."


I think you're a bit off. In round numbers, a proton cost about $70 million, and
launches about 40,000 pounds to orbit. That's nearly $1,800/pound, and
not even close to $700/pound. Which makes the Proton about in the middle
between the $100 target and the shuttle, on a log scale.

And yes, the shuttles cost are a bit high-ish. :-)

Links showing Proton cost
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...da_000211.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/launcher-russia-01b.html

"John Schilling" wrote in message ...
"Charles Talleyrand" writes:
You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.

No, it requires building something better than the Titan or Saturn using
1960s technology.

You seem to be assuming that the Titan and/or Saturn, because they were
built using 1960s technology, were the *best* that could be built using
1960s technology. They were not even close.

Titan and Saturn were close to the best that could be built, A: using
1960s technology, B: on a very aggressive development schedule, C: by
people with no practical experience in spaceflight, D: with a blank
check. Four constraints, of which the "using 1960s tech" on was not
the most restrictive.

I completely agree with this.

1960s technology as applied by people with a tight budget but with all
the experience from the first time around, would lead to very different
results. I think you need more modern technology, particularly in
materials science (and no, that's not a codeword for "bucky-anything"),
to reach $100/lb, but you can sure get something cheaper than Titan
and Saturn. The people who built Titan and Saturn could have delivered
something cheaper than Titan and Saturn if you went back with a time
machine and stole half their budget but left them copies of the books
they wound up writing ca. 1970.

It's kind of interesting the language issues that just arose. I took 'using 1960's
technology' to mean 'using the knowledge from the 1960s'. You seem to
mean 'could by built in the 1960s'.

I am sure you could reduce the cost from the Saturn (Proton proves this) but
I don't believe you can get $100/pound. That means $4,000,000 for building
the Proton-like rocket, launching it, and controlling it. It would mean a 20x
reduction over the best price available so far.

As Henry Spencer pointed out, the Proton price has politics in it. But I
would need to see something to believe that a Proton build+launch
can be done for $4,000,000.

(John Schilling) wrote in message ...
"Charles Talleyrand" writes:


"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message ...
Scott Lowther writes:

High flight rates. No reason we couldn't achieve $100/lb using 1960's
tech. Just need to build in numbers and fly a lot.

...Kind of like the Russions do with their "Proton" booster...


You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.

No, it requires building something better than the Titan or Saturn using
1960s technology.

You seem to be assuming that the Titan and/or Saturn, because they were
built using 1960s technology, were the *best* that could be built using
1960s technology. They were not even close.

Titan and Saturn were close to the best that could be built, A: using
1960s technology, B: on a very aggressive development schedule, C: by
people with no practical experience in spaceflight, D: with a blank
check. Four constraints, of which the "using 1960s tech" on was not
the most restrictive.

1960s technology as applied by people with a tight budget but with all
the experience from the first time around, would lead to very different
results. I think you need more modern technology, particularly in
materials science (and no, that's not a codeword for "bucky-anything"),
to reach $100/lb, but you can sure get something cheaper than Titan
and Saturn. The people who built Titan and Saturn could have delivered
something cheaper than Titan and Saturn if you went back with a time
machine and stole half their budget but left them copies of the books
they wound up writing ca. 1970.

Well said, John.

Best regards,
Len (Cormier)
PanAero, Inc.
( http://www.tour2space.com )

Charles Talleyrand wrote:
I think you're a bit off. In round numbers, a proton cost about $70 million,
and launches about 40,000 pounds to orbit. That's nearly $1,800/pound, and
not even close to $700/pound.

Before there was really an open market in eastern block
launch vehicles, Protons were unofficially offered to
western customers for around $20 million. I received
a verbal quote on a delivered-to-orbit purchase of the
Salyut 7 flight spare unit (on a more or less as-is basis)
for $40 million, including the Proton launch.

This was, as I said, before they were fully legally
available to purchasers here. Due to protectionist trade
regulations, before they were allowed to offer them they
were required to price them comparably to the cheapest
western launcher, which brought the price up.

The price has subsequently escalated because Lockheed-Martin
now acts as the Krunichev sales agent in the US (the old
LKE joint venture).

A number of people have complained that the $20-ish million
cost is absurd and must have been an artifact of not knowing
how to do economics, a legacy of the soviet system. However,
what detailed studies of the Proton assembly and subcomponent
pricing have been done support that the $20-ish million
cost would be a profitable price for the factory to charge
for building and flying them, if they were doing it at the
rate of at least several a year.

The number John quoted, $700/lb, works out to about $30 million
for the flight. Including probably some inflation since the
initial offers and some integration costs, that's probably about
right for the actual soviet side costs for a Proton launch
plus a reasonable profit margin, at a moderate annual flight
rate of say 3-4. If someone with a half billion dollars in
their pocket walked up and asked to order 25 Protons, they could
probably end up actually purchasing 15-20 with that money.


-george william herbert

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message ...

I think you're a bit off. In round numbers, a proton cost about
$70 million. ...

Try $48.7 million. Here's a link.

"http://www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/y2k3/sep/sep58.htm"

- Ed Kyle

Sander Vesik wrote in message ...
In sci.space.tech Charles Talleyrand wrote:

"Gordon D. Pusch" wrote in message ...
Scott Lowther writes:

High flight rates. No reason we couldn't achieve $100/lb using 1960's
tech. Just need to build in numbers and fly a lot.

...Kind of like the Russions do with their "Proton" booster...

You people are either being sarcastic or silly. Getting $100/pound using
1960's technology requires building thinsg like the Titan and Saturn for
around $5,000,000 per copy, which seems wildly unlikely.

And what calculations have you done to show that this is necessarily
impossible, given the advances in machining, logistics, and given
a a high volume?


Flight rate makes all the difference. Proton has flown an average
of nine times per year since 1990 (with a maximum 14 launches in
one year), and has flown 300 times overall since its initial 1965
launch. Saturn I/IB, Proton's contemporary, only flew 19 times
total and never flew more than three times in a single year.

Saturn I/IB was tightly tied to the costly Apollo effort. The
IB design in particular was a less than optimum launcher, but it
was developed to get S-IVB and CSM into orbit ASAP. So excessive
was that program that NASA ended up developing four launch pads
for the rocket (LC 34, LC37A (never used), LC37B, and
LC39B/milkstool) - the same number of pads that were built for
Proton (only three of which are active today).

Take away the manned spaceflight overhead, give Saturn IB (with
an upper stage) and one of the leaner original launch pads to a
commercial outfit, and let it compete for dual (or triple) payload
commercial GTO launches during the 1980s-90s. I think a
massed-produced Saturn, which would have had the same capability
as Ariane 5G (but probably would have been more reliable), might
have competed under those circumstances. It also could have
continued to work for NASA - launching Voyager, Viking etc. If
it were still flying, it could have supported ISS with both cargo
and crewed flights.

I could understand abandoning Saturn V once Apollo was over, but
shutting down Saturn IB never made any sense to me.

- Ed Kyle