CEV to be made commercially available

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
...since a gallon of LOX weighs 9.527 pounds:
http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html we end up with a 2001 price of around 7
cents per pound, or 15 cents per kilogram.

I agree with the conversion, but those numbers are still rather too high;
I wonder if the original NASA quotation contains a conversion error. LOX
for DC-X cost under half that, according to the guy who did the buying,
and that was one-time purchases of much smaller quantities. (That was a
few years earlier, but I have trouble believing that the price rose that
much.) The USAF was paying 4c/lb in 2003.

Kerosene runs about 6 1/2 pounds per gallon, so assuming that oil prices
drop some day (yeah, and monkeys are going to...) to where kerosene runs
about $1.50 per gallon...

Ten years ago, aviation kerosene cost less than half that, again if I'm
doing conversions correctly. (Don't price kerosene based on RP-1, which
is an expensive specialty product. There is no inherent reason why
rockets must burn RP-1, although using jet fuel does constrain the design
in some ways.)
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

Henry Spencer wrote:


As I said: fully-reusable highly-developed hardware, greatly streamlined
operations, a high flight rate,


And that means a lot of payloads to carry, and that's where the big
question mark always is.
The concept is always based on "if you build it, they will come".
But we don't know if that's the case- you may build it, and find out
that the market only slightly increases over what's presently there.
For starters, this thing would go to LEO, and that means whatever you
are carrying will still need a extra system to get it to GEO, where the
majority of the commercial market is, and the slots in GEO are rapidly
filling up.
Non-commercial use is basically goverment-funded use. And at that point
the system becomes partially a public-works program like the Shuttle is.
If it's a public-works program, then there's no real drive to cut the
costs, because all you've done is transferred less money into the
private sector of the economy. You figure out a way to cut the number of
people needed for its operations, and you've just put people out of work.



and somebody other than NASA in charge.
Quite a challenge; probably wouldn't happen with first-generation hardware
even if the designer was allowed to give operating costs priority over
development costs. You'd need a couple of generations of evolution before
fuel costs started to really show up in the operating costs. But not
fundamentally impossible -- just takes a lot of work, in an area where
very little effort has been expended to date.


That would be very expensive; and like Concorde, it could be a very long
time before the later generations showed up.





Ideally it would be SSTO and take of and land horizontally like an
airliner does to avoid the costs of elevating it on a pad for launch.



You can also avoid the handling hassles by going with vertical takeoff and
vertical landing. The bad choice is to take off in one orientation and
land in the other.


The problem with VT/VL is that you have to get the vehicle to and from
the launching and landing sites and back to its storage and servicing area.
The launch and landing site needs to be able to take the heat of the
engines, and the hangering facilities quite tall, and that makes it
fairly unique and limited in number, like the giant airship hangers were.
In the best of all possible worlds the vehicle could land after its
mission and take off again for a atmospheric ferry flight back home at
any good-sized airport, like a 747 or C-5 can.
Takeoff on a mission would be from any airfield that could service it,
refuel it, and load it's payload on board.
These would greatly expand the possibly orbital paths it could take, and
markedly reduce the number of weather-related landing delays. Instead of
building infrastructure to support the vehicle, build the vehicle to use
existing infrastructure.
Coming at the problem from that direction might let one decide what its
size and capabilities should be.
It would be nice if loading its payload onboard was as simple as loading
cargo onto a transport plane, rather than requiring a lot of complex
cranes and hoists.


As Jeff Greason said a couple of years ago (roughly):
"There are very few technical approaches that are uniformly bad, so there
*must* be a good application for VTHL, but I tried and tried and I can't
think what it would be..."



...you might end up
with something the size of the Star-Raker to get a Shuttle-sized payload
into orbit: http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld047.htm



This we could live with. What matters is cost, not size.



That still looks quite expensive to develop, particularly the
turboramjet engines for it.

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 19:13:39 GMT, in a place far, far away,
lid (John Savard) made the phosphor on
my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 19:55:27 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote, in part:

There are many companies with rational reasons to have personnel flown
to the moon. What's lacking are companies that would be willing to do
it as expensively as the use of a CEV would require.

That's quite correct. It is absolutely true, every word of it.

However: just as Shenzou VI would not be out of the Earth's gravity if
it had a slightly higher orbit...

are you claiming that there are ways, absent the development of
far-future technologies such as a space elevator (or non-Newtonian
propulsion!), to send personnel to the moon at prices that would be
rational for even a *few* private companies to take advantage of?

Of course there are.

Don't throw the hardware away, and fly a lot.

oh yeah...and don't hold your breath. you'll pass out well before the
private sector launches anything to the moon, unless you've got a cool
billion in your pocket--and/or a congressman, as even some alt.spacers
are starting to go for.

tom

Jeff Findley wrote:

wrote in message
roups.com...


And beyond that, what specific things can you do, things that are


actually worth doing, with Stick/CEV?


Building a space-based civilization. If somebody else can come up with
somethign else to do it with, great.



The stick/CEV will be too expensive for that.


Then build somethimg cheaper. Nobody is stopping you.

If your goal is truly to
build a space based civilization, then you'd better start by lowering the
cost of launching anything into LEO. In other words, invest in the start-up
companies who are attempting to do just that.


Gee whiz, you mean like the tens of thousands of shares I own of
Rocketplane, XCOR, SpaceDev?


Maybe you should ask about these things before making inaccurate
assumptions.


--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

Jeff Findley wrote:

wrote in message
roups.com...


However, those spent stages will still be property of the US government,


so they really will need permission to do anything with them.


There's your first chance to do something. Get title transferred once
the stage is abandoned.



NASA doesn't officially abandon anything in space, so it's still government
property.


Then quit yer bitchin' and talk to your Congresscritters.

Just ask Gus Grissom's
family.



No thanks. I try to limit my exposure to utter insanity.

I'm just being realistic.


No, you're being defeatist.



History backs me up. The glory days of Apollo funding will not return to
NASA.


And nobody is saying it needs to. Would be nice, though.



--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

snidely wrote:


And why build a spacefaring civilization on the Stick as opposed to
other options?



It's not an either/or situation. Stick is what's coming, at least as
currently projected; if somebody wants to build something better, that's
great.


--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

Henry Spencer wrote:

In article . com,
wrote:


Returned how? The CEV isn't big enough to return an SSME.


And whoever said use the CEV for that role? Again, *think.* Try to come
up with an approach. Think about it from the standpoint of the
entepreneur.



An entrepreneur? Where is there any place for entrepreneurs in the
glorious new Vision of Socialist Exploration?


Dead stages just floating around in orbit. If you aren;t entepreneur
enough to figure outa use for 'em, then maybe you shoudl be somewhere
Socialist like, say, Canada.

Oh. Wait....

NASA refused to even buy
its launches commercially -- something it is *required by law* to do
whenever possible -- so what makes you think unqualified scum like
entrepreneurs will be allowed anywhere near this precious hardware?



Who's to stop 'em? The NASA Space Forces?



There are, say, a dozen SSME's on orbit...



No, there are, say, a dozen SSME's in fragments on the Pacific floor.
NASA isn't going to leave them in orbit until there is definitely
something that can be done with them.


It's easier to leave them in orbit than to deorbit them, once they're
already in orbit..

...How would *you* go about getting 'em?



Not possible. (Technologically, yes. Politically, no.) It has to be
a billion-dollar BoeLock project or it won't happen. No reason for me to
bother even considering it.



Then you're on the wrong newsgroup.




--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

Henry Spencer wrote:

In article .com,
wrote:


Which is why they should be buying launches, not developing new launch


vehicles.

Yeah. Great. So... who has a commercially available heavy lift launch
vehicle?



Boeing and LockMart, to name two, have proposals for them that are every
bit as ready and available as NASA's White Elephant.


So, you admit that there are no commercially available HLLVs.




NASA ought to work on enabling technologies and techniques to open up space


They did that in the '60's. Job accomplished.



Which job was that, exactly? Not long-lived, low-maintenance rocket
engines.


H-1.

Not effective altitude compensation.


Plug clusters.

Not in-space assembly, at
least not to hear the NASA cheerleaders tell it.


Secondary.

Not robust, fully
reusable, low-maintenance reentry TPS.


Not needed. What's the point of returning things? With the exception of
people, who can be returned easily using sixties tech, there's nothing
manmade in space that is more valuable back on the ground.

Not long-lived high-Isp in-space
propulsion.

Secondary.

NASA did some useful stuff, in the early 60s in particular, but nowhere
near what's needed to open up space.


They did the bulk of what's needed. They produced effective launch
vehicles with good paylaod capabilities and good potentials. Everythign
beyodn that is rather secondary. What you seem to be wanting is to have
the Europeans perfect the steam locomotive before attempting
colonization of North America. Not needed. Just get a foothold.

--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

Scott Lowther wrote:
snidely wrote:


And why build a spacefaring civilization on the Stick as opposed to
other options?



It's not an either/or situation. Stick is what's coming, at least as
currently projected; if somebody wants to build something better, that's
great.


Jeff is pointing out that they have: A5 and DivH.

/dps

Scott Lowther wrote:
[...]
Not robust, fully
reusable, low-maintenance reentry TPS.


Not needed. What's the point of returning things? With the exception of
people, who can be returned easily using sixties tech, there's nothing
manmade in space that is more valuable back on the ground.


And in the same thread you're telling us to return SSMEs from spent
stages and reuse them.

/dps