From Jon Goff. Sometimes it’s necessary to point out the obvious — for a one-way delivery, reusability can be a bug, but for round trips, it’s a feature.
6 thoughts on “Space Transport Market Thoughts”
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From Jon Goff. Sometimes it’s necessary to point out the obvious — for a one-way delivery, reusability can be a bug, but for round trips, it’s a feature.
Comments are closed.
If the mission is to fly people up and bringing them back down, a highly reliable RLV would be the obvious vehicle of preference as a robust and redundant the human life support package is itself of high value and reuse of those systems makes sense.
Fuel tanks? Fuel tanks are cheap and easily replaced.
The magnitude of any potential RLV advantage is far less if used as a fuel tanker rather than as crew transport, making it more difficult to recoup the development and deployment costs.
That is why I believe that a genuine God space hotel (which rotated guests weekly) or an orbital sports venue (which rotated teams weekly) would provide far more stimulus to RLV development than a fuel depot.
Rotate seven or ten or more people PER WEEK into LEO and back down and the advantages of an RLV crew transport becomes blindingly obvious.
MirCorp was on the right track, and NASA knew it which is why it was killed off.
Anyway, to schlep hydrogen or RP-1 or LOX? The advantages of RLVs are far less obvious and could be non-existent, especially if we are talking small payload RLVs.
I
Heh@
I tried to replace “honest-to-God space hotel” with “genuine space hotel” but left an extraneous word in.
Anyway, lots of people in LEO is the necessary market development that will facilitate RLV deployment and that means people going to LEO for various forms of recreation and/or entertainment.
Something I am 100% supportive of provided the taxpayers provide only modest subsidies.
Bill,
I’m actually going to be discussing propellant as an RLV market down the road. You are right in that propellant cares a lot more about $/lb than passengers do, but that doesn’t mean that RLVs aren’t a good match for it. There are actually many good reasons why propellants are a good match for RLVs. Not as good as people, but probably quite a bit better than satellites. If RLVs fly enough due to having demand for flying people, their prices will come down enough that they’ll be competitive for other markets that only care about the price per pound.
~Jon
Jon –
If the numbers work for RLV fuel tankers, terrific. But in the meantime, why not focus on those markets where the numbers work better and the advantages are obvious?
I follow these discussions about higher flight rates bringing costs down.
What I see frequently, and which may confuse some readers, is that the word cost and price per flight are used interchangeably. May I suggest that the word cost be used exclusively with reference to the provider of flight services and price be used exclusively with reference to the consumer of flight services.
I think that is important, because, while it is true that a higher flight rate may reduce the cost of each flight for the provider; it doesn’t necessarily follow that the price to the consumer will be less. If demand for flight exceeds supply then providers can charge more. If supply exceeds demand then providers will have to charge less regardless of their internal costs. At least, that’s the standard micro-economic model of supply, demand and prices.
Bill,
There’s a reason why I started discussing people transportation as a market. I think it has the strongest case. I’m not saying “Pick Market A, B, or C, and only pick one!” I’m saying here’ are the ones most likely to make sense, and I think propellant deliveries fit in that category as well. They very well might be able to beat even the manned market depending on outside factors. But anyway, as I said, I’m starting with discussing people, we can discuss propellants when I get there.
~Jon