Cheap Access to Space

Ian Parker wrote:
:
:Basically the viability of SPS depends on transportation.
:

It depends on much more than that. It depends on all sorts of
resource costs, development costs, etc.

:
:If you are saying that it will be enormously easier with asteroid
:material, you are of course right. What I was trying to work out was
:the establishment of a market of some description.
:

You can't work out the establishment of a market until you can talk
about costs and prices.

:
:I do not believe there will be enough tourists for a killer market.
:"Killer" here refers to the market that justifies the costs and drives
:it.
:

I don't believe we'll get to space at all if we're waiting for the
proverbial 'killer app'. Think 'small bites'.

:
:You will have to be rich and you will have to be a space
:enthusiast. Are there enough people with both those qualifications?
:

Several folks who have studied the situation intensely seem to think
so. I used to have my doubts, but when you look at the money that
people have put in up front to reserve tickets, there may be enough of
a market to get that first 'small bite'.

Virgin Galactic has several hundred tickets sold (some $26 million in
deposits, I think). With 5 spacecraft, each of which can carry 5
passengers, he's probably got enough tickets sold to cover a year or
more of operations. After that, some of the people who have put down
deposits will have to come through with the rest of the purchase
price.

Airline tickets used to be quite expensive, too, as such things went,
and only the well to do flew. Now millions of people do it. Tourism
of the type people are currently aiming at is the first 'small bite'.
Whether it takes off or not depends on whether or not places to go
develop.

In any case, as flight rates for the 'joyride' tourism go up, prices
should be able to come down, which expands the market. Technology
gets driven by trying to keep a 'tourist service' that the well off
will pay for. There has to be a differentiator there.

Another approach is the one Len is talking about, where a vertically
integrated market is sold 'as a block'. This is a somewhat bigger
bite and a harder sale (as Len's decades of experience trying to get
it off the ground would seem to attest). This one also leads to
further 'bites', though, since once the hardware is developed for one
vertically integrated application, prices will start to fall when it
comes to bringing new applications on stream, since every new
application leads to a higher flight rate.

Eventually you get to horizontal market progress this way, where you
get flight providers who just sell flights and don't have to sell the
'whole solution'.

Eventually you get to the point where you've got people living and
working in space, which bootstraps industry and helps with things like
SPS.

I'm not sure you can drive it the other way, because then the 'killer
app' has to justify way too much up front development and expense.
Spreadsheets and word processing and such didn't drive the creation of
the personal computer. Instead, that was driven in large part by
'computer fanbois' and techno-geeks. Once they were out there,
though, a lot of improvements and market enlargement happened due to
'killer apps'.

Think about it.

What is THE biggest driver in improving the performance and capability
of PCs? Gaming.

Where do a lot of the innovations in the auto industry come from? High
performance racing.

And so it will probably be with space. However, because capital
prices there are so much higher (as they are with aircraft), there is
a decent government role to be played. It would be good if there was
an independent piece of NASA to play that part - a NACA for space
vehicle development, if you will.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw

In sci.space.policy message
, Sun, 16 Dec 2007 13:46:00, Jim Relsh posted:

If we can make a anti-gravitic drive which is relatively cheap to build,
small and uses a safe nuclear power source will mass-transportation into
space be possible. But this first requires full-understanding of the laws of
physics which we, at the moment, don't have and could be decades or hundreds
of years away.

We have as yet no reliable cause to believe that the laws of physics
permit such a drive. The energy actually imparted to, say, the STS
orbiter is substantially less than that which is pumped into the tanks /
poured into the SRBs before launch; a nuclear source as at present
understood would not necessarily be needed.

Another possibillity would be the construction of a space-elevator. The
chances of this succeeding are much higher, but this will only get us into
orbit.

An elevator consisting of a large compact mass in GSO and a
comparatively light cable can lift no higher than to GSO.

But an elevator of minimum mass for its capacity would IIRC consist of a
cable getting more-or-less exponentially bigger as height initially
increases, with the rate of enlargement falling off to none at GSO and a
similar dwindling to a thin cable high above GSO. It would resemble a
Gaussian curve asymmetrically stretched. In principle, it would stretch
to infinity (neglecting relativity, the Moon, etc.).

If one slides along the outer portion of the cable, impelled both by the
movement of the cable and by centrifugal pseudo-effects, one can at the
end be thrown off with in excess of Earth escape velocity; one only
needs the cable to extend to GSO * 1.225, it seems (if the projectile's
mass is not enough to deflect the cable much).

URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/gravity3.htm#TB & above refers,
currently.

--
(c) John Stockton, Surrey, UK. Turnpike v6.05 MIME.
Web URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/ - FAQqish topics, acronyms & links;
Astro stuff via astron-1.htm, gravity0.htm ; quotings.htm, pascal.htm, etc.
No Encoding. Quotes before replies. Snip well. Write clearly. Don't Mail News.

Jim Relsh wrote:
wrote in message
...
There has been lots of interest in Scramjets because of their
potential to lower the cost of access to space, or Single Stage to
Orbit as a means of lowering cost of access to space.


I personally believe we won't see cheap (as in: every ordinary Joe can go
into space for the price of an expensive airplane ticket) access to space
for hundreds of years. Why? Because no matter how you view it we're still
using good-old fashioned momentum-transfer technology where we spit out
something in one direction and we and the rocket move in the other. Rocket
technology is and will most likely continue to be the easiest and best way
to get into space but due to the size and explosiveness of these vehicles it
will remain something of a hazardous experience making it impossible to
launch millions of people into space.

If we can make a anti-gravitic drive which is relatively cheap to build,
small and uses a safe nuclear power source will mass-transportation into
space be possible. But this first requires full-understanding of the laws of
physics which we, at the moment, don't have and could be decades or hundreds
of years away.

I'd say that we have a very good hold on the laws of physics in so far
as they impact on space travel. The anti-gravitic drive is just science
fiction, and there's absolutely no reason to think that such a thing is
possible.

Sylvia.

On Dec 15, 5:07 pm, rhw007 wrote:
CATS

http://commonsensecentral.net/how_to_achieve_cats.htm

Bob...

I do believe that large scale or sufficient volumes of ion thrusting
is technically doable.

Radon gas and especially LRn222 makes for an ideal cash of highly
active ions as is.
- Brad Guth

"Sylvia Else" wrote in message
...
Jim Relsh wrote:
wrote in message
...
There has been lots of interest in Scramjets because of their
potential to lower the cost of access to space, or Single Stage to
Orbit as a means of lowering cost of access to space.


I personally believe we won't see cheap (as in: every ordinary Joe can go
into space for the price of an expensive airplane ticket) access to space
for hundreds of years. Why? Because no matter how you view it we're still
using good-old fashioned momentum-transfer technology where we spit out
something in one direction and we and the rocket move in the other.
Rocket technology is and will most likely continue to be the easiest and
best way to get into space but due to the size and explosiveness of these
vehicles it will remain something of a hazardous experience making it
impossible to launch millions of people into space.

If we can make a anti-gravitic drive which is relatively cheap to build,
small and uses a safe nuclear power source will mass-transportation into
space be possible. But this first requires full-understanding of the laws
of physics which we, at the moment, don't have and could be decades or
hundreds of years away.

I'd say that we have a very good hold on the laws of physics in so far as
they impact on space travel. The anti-gravitic drive is just science
fiction, and there's absolutely no reason to think that such a thing is
possible.

Our understanding of the laws of physics only allows for non-FTL drive kind
of propulsion. For us to really become a space-faring race we need to be
able to understand the laws of physics completely so we can determine if FTL
travel is possible, and if so, how.

Momentum transfer drives are simply to cumbersome to allow for cost
effective mass transport of people into space. My example of a anti-gravitic
drive is just a possible example, it may be something completely different.






--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On 16 Dec, 21:04, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:

:
:Basically the viability of SPS depends on transportation.
:

It depends on much more than that. It depends on all sorts of
resource costs, development costs, etc.

:
:If you are saying that it will be enormously easier with asteroid
:material, you are of course right. What I was trying to work out was
:the establishment of a market of some description.
:

You can't work out the establishment of a market until you can talk
about costs and prices.

:
:I do not believe there will be enough tourists for a killer market.
:"Killer" here refers to the market that justifies the costs and drives
:it.
:

I don't believe we'll get to space at all if we're waiting for the
proverbial 'killer app'. Think 'small bites'.

SSP can in fact be split into small bytes. In SSP you need 2 things.
You need

1) A method of transmitting power to earth. An attenna which has a
500m radius circle.

2) The guts of the power generation system.

"1" can provide a communication satellite with a large number of
circuits. In fact one 500m radius circle on Earth represents a circuit
of 10GHz bandwidth.

Now as you have rightly said there are communication satellites in
existence, but they do not have this sort of level of performance. I
have talked about WiFi going to satellites. You claim, also rightly,
that at the moment WiFi is confined to short ranges.. In fact in terms
of power requirements the communications satellite acts as a
telescope. In fact the power required is equivalent to that of a
dipole at 500m.

I am inclined to think that perhaps one effect of cheaper access, and
this is really cheaper access to MEO and GEO will be to have
communication satellites which are clusters of smart pebbles phase
locked to one and other and capable of WiFi. I believe that WiFi is
necessary for SSP BUT it could be provided as a service in its own
right.

For GEO/MEO you need to think about ion drive tugs as well as access
to LEO. The driver is total M/GEO cost.

:
:You will have to be rich and you will have to be a space
:enthusiast. Are there enough people with both those qualifications?
:

Several folks who have studied the situation intensely seem to think
so. I used to have my doubts, but when you look at the money that
people have put in up front to reserve tickets, there may be enough of
a market to get that first 'small bite'.

Virgin Galactic has several hundred tickets sold (some $26 million in
deposits, I think). With 5 spacecraft, each of which can carry 5
passengers, he's probably got enough tickets sold to cover a year or
more of operations. After that, some of the people who have put down
deposits will have to come through with the rest of the purchase
price.

Airline tickets used to be quite expensive, too, as such things went,
and only the well to do flew. Now millions of people do it. Tourism
of the type people are currently aiming at is the first 'small bite'.
Whether it takes off or not depends on whether or not places to go
develop.

In any case, as flight rates for the 'joyride' tourism go up, prices
should be able to come down, which expands the market. Technology
gets driven by trying to keep a 'tourist service' that the well off
will pay for. There has to be a differentiator there.

Another approach is the one Len is talking about, where a vertically
integrated market is sold 'as a block'. This is a somewhat bigger
bite and a harder sale (as Len's decades of experience trying to get
it off the ground would seem to attest). This one also leads to
further 'bites', though, since once the hardware is developed for one
vertically integrated application, prices will start to fall when it
comes to bringing new applications on stream, since every new
application leads to a higher flight rate.

This may be the case, but I would like to see some sort of market
survey. There is one point about tourism which I think everyone
forgets and that is that space is dangerous. Quite apart from accident
risks there is the risk of radiation.

On Earth we see risks that are quite small in comparison influencing
tourist behaviour. How, to take a simple example, can you say Syria is
dangerous and yet willy nilly talk about tourism in space? It does not
make any sort of reasonable sense.

Weigtlessness is not pleasant and most people rapidly get motion
sickness. You can train, maybe drugs can help but it is quite a
consideratrion.

In any case the only way to proceed is to attempt to do some sort of
market survey.

It is true that every reduction in cost leads to new applications (see
above)

Eventually you get to horizontal market progress this way, where you
get flight providers who just sell flights and don't have to sell the
'whole solution'.

Eventually you get to the point where you've got people living and
working in space, which bootstraps industry and helps with things like
SPS.

I'm not sure you can drive it the other way, because then the 'killer
app' has to justify way too much up front development and expense.
Spreadsheets and word processing and such didn't drive the creation of
the personal computer. Instead, that was driven in large part by
'computer fanbois' and techno-geeks. Once they were out there,
though, a lot of improvements and market enlargement happened due to
'killer apps'.

Think about it.

What is THE biggest driver in improving the performance and capability
of PCs? Gaming.

Where do a lot of the innovations in the auto industry come from? High
performance racing.

And so it will probably be with space. However, because capital
prices there are so much higher (as they are with aircraft), there is
a decent government role to be played. It would be good if there was
an independent piece of NASA to play that part - a NACA for space
vehicle development, if you will.

If you are engaging in long term research there is a government role.
Most mixed economies accept this. We look to government to provide
economic stability. The key question for subsizing a reusable space
vehicle, or even space in general is not the cost per bird whatever
that might be, but the development time required. I and most other
believers in the Market would give a time limit of 5 years. If X can
be built in 5 years it should be done by private finance, or not done
at all.

This effectively means that a 2STO if built must be private. There is
a public role in hypersonic aviation and magnetic aerodynamics.
--
- Ian Parker

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:36:17 -0800 (PST), in a place far, far away,
Ian Parker made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:


Another approach is the one Len is talking about, where a vertically
integrated market is sold 'as a block'. This is a somewhat bigger
bite and a harder sale (as Len's decades of experience trying to get
it off the ground would seem to attest). This one also leads to
further 'bites', though, since once the hardware is developed for one
vertically integrated application, prices will start to fall when it
comes to bringing new applications on stream, since every new
application leads to a higher flight rate.

This may be the case, but I would like to see some sort of market
survey.

Do you really think that no one has done a market survey, you ignorant
fool?

http://www.google.com/search?q=space...+market+survey

There is one point about tourism which I think everyone
forgets and that is that space is dangerous.

No one has "forgotten" that, let alone "everyone," you loon.

Quite apart from accident risks there is the risk of radiation.

Radiation is competely irrelevant to space tourism in the near term,
because the trips are so short.

On Earth we see risks that are quite small in comparison influencing
tourist behaviour. How, to take a simple example, can you say Syria is
dangerous and yet willy nilly talk about tourism in space?

They're two completely different and unrelated subjects, you idiot.

It does not make any sort of reasonable sense.

Nothing you write makes any sort of reasonable sense.

On Dec 16, 4:04 pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:

:
:Basically the viability of SPS depends on transportation.
:

It depends on much more than that. It depends on all sorts of
resource costs, development costs, etc.

:
:If you are saying that it will be enormously easier with asteroid
:material, you are of course right. What I was trying to work out was
:the establishment of a market of some description.
:

You can't work out the establishment of a market until you can talk
about costs and prices.

:
:I do not believe there will be enough tourists for a killer market.
:"Killer" here refers to the market that justifies the costs and drives
:it.
:

I don't believe we'll get to space at all if we're waiting for the
proverbial 'killer app'. Think 'small bites'.

:
:You will have to be rich and you will have to be a space
:enthusiast. Are there enough people with both those qualifications?
:

Several folks who have studied the situation intensely seem to think
so. I used to have my doubts, but when you look at the money that
people have put in up front to reserve tickets, there may be enough of
a market to get that first 'small bite'.

Virgin Galactic has several hundred tickets sold (some $26 million in
deposits, I think). With 5 spacecraft, each of which can carry 5
passengers, he's probably got enough tickets sold to cover a year or
more of operations. After that, some of the people who have put down
deposits will have to come through with the rest of the purchase
price.

Airline tickets used to be quite expensive, too, as such things went,
and only the well to do flew. Now millions of people do it. Tourism
of the type people are currently aiming at is the first 'small bite'.
Whether it takes off or not depends on whether or not places to go
develop.

In any case, as flight rates for the 'joyride' tourism go up, prices
should be able to come down, which expands the market. Technology
gets driven by trying to keep a 'tourist service' that the well off
will pay for. There has to be a differentiator there.

Another approach is the one Len is talking about, where a vertically
integrated market is sold 'as a block'. This is a somewhat bigger
bite and a harder sale (as Len's decades of experience trying to get
it off the ground would seem to attest). This one also leads to
further 'bites', though, since once the hardware is developed for one
vertically integrated application, prices will start to fall when it
comes to bringing new applications on stream, since every new
application leads to a higher flight rate.

Eventually you get to horizontal market progress this way, where you
get flight providers who just sell flights and don't have to sell the
'whole solution'.

Eventually you get to the point where you've got people living and
working in space, which bootstraps industry and helps with things like
SPS.

I'm not sure you can drive it the other way, because then the 'killer
app' has to justify way too much up front development and expense.
Spreadsheets and word processing and such didn't drive the creation of
the personal computer. Instead, that was driven in large part by
'computer fanbois' and techno-geeks. Once they were out there,
though, a lot of improvements and market enlargement happened due to
'killer apps'.

Think about it.

What is THE biggest driver in improving the performance and capability
of PCs? Gaming.

Where do a lot of the innovations in the auto industry come from? High
performance racing.

And so it will probably be with space. However, because capital
prices there are so much higher (as they are with aircraft), there is
a decent government role to be played. It would be good if there was
an independent piece of NASA to play that part - a NACA for space
vehicle development, if you will.

Good post, Fred.

Len

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw

On Dec 16, 4:46 am, "Jim Relsh" wrote:
wrote in message

...

There has been lots of interest in Scramjets because of their
potential to lower the cost of access to space, or Single Stage to
Orbit as a means of lowering cost of access to space.

I personally believe we won't see cheap (as in: every ordinary Joe can go
into space for the price of an expensive airplane ticket) access to space
for hundreds of years. Why? Because no matter how you view it we're still
using good-old fashioned momentum-transfer technology where we spit out
something in one direction and we and the rocket move in the other. Rocket
technology is and will most likely continue to be the easiest and best way
to get into space but due to the size and explosiveness of these vehicles it
will remain something of a hazardous experience making it impossible to
launch millions of people into space.

If we can make a anti-gravitic drive which is relatively cheap to build,
small and uses a safe nuclear power source will mass-transportation into
space be possible. But this first requires full-understanding of the laws of
physics which we, at the moment, don't have and could be decades or hundreds
of years away.

Another possibillity would be the construction of a space-elevator. The
chances of this succeeding are much higher, but this will only get us into
orbit. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a reality in the next
decades or that it keeps eluding us.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com


China already represents CATS.
- Brad Guth

On Dec 16, 3:33 pm, (Rand Simberg)
wrote:
On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:38:28 -0800 (PST), in a place far, far away,
Ian Parker made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

I do not believe there will be enough tourists for a killer market.

As has been previously noted, few, if any, care what you believe.

"Killer" here refers to the market that justifies the costs and drives
it. You will have to be rich and you will have to be a space
enthusiast. Are there enough people with both those qualifications?

One does not have to be a space enthusiast to want to take a ride into
space, any more than one must be a "canyon enthusiast" to want to see
the Grand Canyon.

There are two kinds of people that visit the canyon. Those that peer
at it over the rim and those that actually go down into the canyon be
it on the back of a mule, hiking or by boat. The people peeking over
the rim are much more in the majority than those that actually go into
the canyon (less than 1%).

If you consider the rim people as non-enthusiasts and those that go
into the canyon as enthusiasts, then the only ones paying for their GC
experience are the enthusiasts. Therefore, using your analogy, all
those people that are interested in space but are NOT enthusiasts are
unwilling to pay for the experience. So you may have people that claim
interest but unless you make the sale you have nothing.

I have worked in sales. You may think you have an idea that sells
itself; but based upon what we have regarding the few paying customers
that have gone to the ISS you really do not have an "industry" in
manned commercial spaceflight. Three dots on a chart over nearly a
decade is not a trend.

Eric