The Wrong Lessons From Apollo

It’s not news to anyone who has been reading him (and me, among others) for years, but Henry Spencer explains once again why NASA’s architecture choice is the wrong one (and no, I’m not talking about Ares):

There is also a longer-term advantage: if you decide to launch everything on one big rocket, what happens when you outgrow that rocket? Even if your early expeditions stay within the rocket’s capacity, presumably you’ll want to do bigger and more complex ones later. What then? Develop a still-larger rocket?

Even people who don’t want to depend on orbital assembly for the first expeditions to the Moon (or Mars, or wherever) often will concede that it will be necessary eventually. But then, where’s the gain in delaying it?

If you’re going to want to do orbital assembly anyway, you’re better off starting it right away, so even early expeditions can benefit from it. The only reason to delay it is if you think there won’t be any later expeditions – if you’re planning a dead-end programme.

I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to refute this logic.

[Update on Tuesday afternoon]

Well, here’s an attempt, but it uses ludicrous analogies:

One can only imagine someone talking to Prince Henry the Navigator circi 1410 and trying to convince him that adapting steam power (then known since Heron of Alexandria) to ships would be desirable to why not start now and stop messing with those quaint, wind powered caravels. Or someone else trying to sell jet engines to Lindbergh before crossing the Atlantic. Forever delaying doing things until the technology is “just right” doesn’t work very well.

No one is proposing the equivalent of steam power in the fifteenth century or jets in the nineteen twenties (though in the latter case, they weren’t far off). That would be akin to demanding a space elevator, or anti-matter rockets.

Nor is anyone, including me or Henry, proposing “forever delaying doing things until the technology is ‘just right.'” The technology for propellant depots could have been well in hand years ago had NASA stayed in the technology business, instead of cutting off all funding to it to redo what was done forty years ago. An assembly-based architecture could still easily be in place just as fast as NASA’s Constellation plans, and much cheaper, particularly given appropriate incentives to private industry. We are proposing that NASA plan for the future, with an affordable and sustainable plan, instead of looking to the past.

[Bumped]

[Mid-afternoon update]

It strikes me that this paragraph from my extended version of The Path Not Taken is relevant:

While the report of the Aldridge Commission on the new vision, released in June, had some good recommendations in it, it also had a few potentially disastrous ones. Perhaps the most damaging statement in it was to declare heavy-lift launch systems to be an “enabling technology” for carrying out the vision. This is a phrase of art in the engineering world meaning that, absent such a technology, the goal is unachievable. The commission is claiming that we cannot send humans beyond low earth orbit without a much larger launch vehicle than anything existing. If they had used the phrase “enhancing technology,” meaning that it’s not an absolute necessity, but that it makes things easier to do, I’d have less complaint, but as they’ve stated it, it commits us to an expensive development of a new launch system, that shows no promise of actually reducing costs. Moreover, it commits us to an approach to exploration that, like Apollo, is not affordable or sustainable.

I hope that this is a recommendation that can be revisited.

92 thoughts on “The Wrong Lessons From Apollo”

  1. > cuddihy Says:
    > December 16th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
    >
    > Come on, guys. Deal in the here and now, not in a
    > theoretical fantasy world of Heinlein’s fashioning.
    > There is a context to the current space environment, and
    > that, unfortunately, is one that still is within the scale of
    >DOD space and NASA’s budgets.

    Yeah, there just is no launch market, so talking about little launchers flying a lot, vrs a few bigger flights, etc. Its a moot point when your talking Launching a couple dozen tons per year globally.

    Its like developing a helicopter that really only services Air rescue services on Everest, so the market is 2 reusable helos that fly a couple times a year – after a billion or two in dev costs. Cost per flight would be hundreds of millions of dollars a flight.

    >==
    > There really is a minimum practicable size for components
    > in space, just as there is a minimum practicable size for
    > seagoing vessels. Yes, technically you can ship computers
    > one at a time on a series sanpans from Xianjing to Oakland
    > (in fact Cocaine is shipped into Oakland from remote
    > Columbian villages in just this manner) but the reality is
    > that the smallest size of anything really shipped from
    > Xianjing to Oakland is a freight container.

    😉

    Yeah. Given virtually everything on the planets fitting in 18 wheeler trailer sized cargo containers — its really a big suggestion that breaking products down smaller would be a problem. And as a practical mater, the shuttle bay seems a pretty good size for the vast builk of cargo. Some oversized and bigger load (100 ton) capacity is desirable if you can do that without badly warping the RLVs 25 ton normal capacity, which is doable.

    >=
    > There is good reason to suspect that the minimum
    > practicable size for discrete launch of space exploration
    > components to LEO at current technology levels is somewhat
    > larger than the capacity of space shuttle. (I know, this is heresy, right?)

    Yes, Rand and Ed are onrouteto you to burn you at the stake — RUN RUN!!!!

    😉

    I agree with your list. I’ld add the Orion program, finding a 6 person capsule and SM weigh in over 30 tons, with no cargo or EVA capacity and fully expendable. Compare that to projections from NASA HQ that a new shuttle orbiter with modern materials would weigh under 60 tons with all shuttles current capacities. And the cost projections for Ares/Orion and a fully reusable RlV with shuttle cargo and on orbit capacities are converging, even though Ares/Orion is built to lower quality and safety standards.

    Table stakes for life support, nav, thermal control, power, etc pretty drive you into about the same cost area.

    ==
    >==
    > What matters for the NASA budget is not taxpayer
    > return on investment (taxpayer ROI), but Politician
    > Return on Political Capital Expended. (RPCE). Since
    > RPCE for space projects will always follow years
    > after appropriations, RPCE for Space will always be
    > lower than RPCE for wealth redistribution.

    Ah, but your not counting the RPCE for jobs to district. This makes it compartive with other infastructure and dev programs, as long as you maximize the pork per mission/program.

    :/

  2. 1) That anything built in space must be built by NASA.
    It wouldn’t serve any purpose otherwise.

    I’m not sure what “it” means, in this context. But if it doesn’t serve any purpose except to give NASA something to build, then it ought to be cancelled.

    And helping to develop a low cost, or even high cost, commercial launch space astronaut core would be NASA founding its own competitors.

    That’s nonsense. The NACA helped developed low-cost commercial aviation. NASA shouldn’t be in the airline business in the first place.

    Again, like with CATS, you’re offering NASA the chance to hire hit men to kill the agency – they are not going to do it, nor will congress pay for it.

    There’s no evidence to support that belief. The development of commercial aviation did not kill the NACA, nor did Congress refuse to pay for it.

    > 2) That we should never have more astronauts we do at present.
    > 3) That construction work should be done by NASA’s
    > PhD astronauts instead of actual construction workers.
    Hell, they get so many resumes they throw out the non PhD candidates just to cut down the stack. They have a limited # of job slots, and have no reason to expand it. So they hire the most over qualified and insanely desperate to get the job at any cost candidates.

    A PhD does not qualify a person to work construction. Visit any construction site and ask how many PhDs they have working there.

    As for the “limited number of job slots,” that’s the result of the high cost of space transportation, not a law of nature.

    It really does get to be a cost reliability nightmare – and in some cases you just can’t build it.

    Yet other industries do it all the time — without the cost and reliability nightmares NASA has. You really ought to stop looking at NASA as the only example for how to do things.

    Hell they don’t even plan to ever replace Hubble when it dies in a few years.

    Yes, they do. The next-generation space telescope is called Webb, and it’s already under construction. Its mirror is built in 18-segments, by the way, and folded for launch.

    So, it obviously *is* possible to disassemble a mirror into segments.

    > As for rocket engines, a modern engine typically
    > has a thrust-to-weight ratio of 100-200 to one. So,
    > even a large engine does not weigh all that much.
    With The Altair/Orion stack weighing ni at close to 200 tons on orbit., and engines usually should be integrated in with their support electronics etc, you still likely talking a couple tons.

    Why should I care about the Altair/Orion stack?

    I don’t deny that it’s possible to create a bad design that requires a heavy lifter. Obviously, it is. So what? I see no reason to prefer that over a good design (which would be much cheaper, to boot).

    The point of the Shuttle was everything went up in major assemblies – even full LEO to lunar LEMs – and it was all landed together for sevicnig.

    Just because the Shuttle did something one way does not mean that’s the only way it can be done.

    Also, while NASA once considered a plan to launch a lunar on the Shuttle, the plan was to integrate them with the transtage, Earth return vehicle, and crew module at ISS.

    http://www.nss.org/settlement/moon/HLR.html

    Really, you can’t service a big ship, by taking it apart peace by peace and shiping it down.

    I hope you never fly on a 747, then. Because they do take them apart piece by piece to do annual maintenance.

    Once you’ve assembled a big ship in space, why would you ever want to bring it down again? That makes no sense.

    > You’re arguing that we should never change
    > the way we work in space or redesign anything
    > to take advantage of cheap access to space or reduce costs.
    No I’m saying doing things the way your suggesting raises costs, and makes even less sense if you have a CATS system. Rather then training huge numbers of astrounants to do dangerous no orbit repairs and assembly, put it back in the space truck, fly it down and send it back to the manufacturer, then fly it back up and re dock it.

    That would be fine if “space trucks” were free. They aren’t.

    All you’re doing is repeating the same arguments that were used to justify the Shuttle. If those arguments were valid, the Shuttle would have been an economic success.

    The Shuttle wasn’t a success — and neither were the last 50 attempts to build Shuttle II. How many times do we need to repeat the experiment before you accept the results?

    breaking it down unnecessarily into hundreds of parts to unnecessarily increase flight rates, just increases your costs unnecessarily.

    No, increasing flight rate reduces costs. Look up “learning curve effect.”

    No, I’m saying do something ambitious in space THAT’S USEFULL. Building a city in space so you can avoid building a 25 ton lift craft as apose to a 2 ton lift craft is nuts

    That’s your opinion, Kelly. I *want* to see cities in space. And given cheap access to space, we can build those cities for less than what we’re spending right now. (Read “The High Frontier” by Gerard K. O’Neill.)

    The point isn’t to build a factory in space for its own sake damn the crippling costs (ISS uselessness raised to levels even the feds would blush at)

    Again, the costs don’t have to be crippling. You need to stop believing that Shuttle and ISS are the only possible models.

    What you seemed to be arguing was building up ISS or bigger platforms out of hundreds of 1 ton parts assembled in orbit – which would be VERY expensive, and unsafe.

    No, it would not be “VERY expensive.” Read some of the work that’s been done on vehicles that are *not* the Shuttle or ISS.

    http://tour2space.com/archives/economic/20013962.htm
    http://tour2space.com/archives/spactour.htm

    >>Actually you missed it Ed. Things often
    >>do fail missing one part. Your car, certainly space craft, etc..
    > My car has enough redundancy and sufficient margin
    > that it seldom fails because of one part. ===
    Really? Try flattening a tire,

    My car can run just fine with a flat tire, Kelly. It carries a spare tire for that purpose. I’m rather surprised to hear that yours doesn’t. 🙂

    I was refernig to ISS, before, but Apollo on steroids is worse since you can’t park either of the 2 launched craft ni orbit.

    If either stays in orbit for more then a couple days in orbit without the other the missions a scrub and you dispose or the launched part.

    That’s because it is a lousy design, not because it’s impossible to park two craft on orbit. You keep making the same mistake over and over. You look at a single system — Shuttle, ISS, Orion — see a flaw, then generalize it to assume everything we might build will have the same flaw. That isn’t true. It’s possible to learn from mistakes.

    But theres nothing else for your high-flight rate launcher (big or little really) to do. I agree that a fast turn around craft would allow you – MAYBE – to swap out the cargo into a new LV and boost it up the next day (assuming you can unload/reload it quickly), but then if your NASA such a craft doesn’t support the thousands of ground support workers, which eliminates the reason and political support for the return to the moon program.

    There’s everything for it to do. Space tourism. Satellite refueling, inspection, upgrade, and repair. Astronomy. Earth observation. Crew rotation. Rescue missions. Military reconnaissance. Counterspace missions. Cislunar and NEO missions.

    And it isn’t “my” NASA, Kelly, even if my uncle founded the agency. 🙂

    When did I say I thought NASA should build anything? You appear to have NASA on the brain.

  3. The entire tons discussion and potential launcher development is entirely pointless WRT the original article. RLV, HLV, Sea Dragon, 100 tons, 20 tons, ISS, MIR..blah blah..

    You dont plan to build your house using materials that might become available next year or the year after, you use whats there, on the market.
    If you cant afford the house you designed using current materials, then simply design and build a house you can afford.

    Again, i cite the example of long sought after Mars Sample Return. Its currently baselined for Atlas + Ariane dual launch by ESA, previous JPL designs used multiple Delta IV Mediums i believe. In both designs, launcher costs are around 10% of the total mission costs.
    The science budgets of the agencies still cannot afford the mission, and not because of the launcher costs. Heavier lift vehicles would not help them in any way.
    What would perhaps help in NASAs case, if operating a certain unrelated launcher and designing another unrelated one wouldnt suck all the other budgets dry.

  4. Yeah, there just is no launch market, so talking about little launchers flying a lot, vrs a few bigger flights, etc. Its a moot point when your talking Launching a couple dozen tons per year globally.

    Right. No launch market. All those thousands of people who say they want to go into space don’t exist. No one would ever want to launch anything but a few sputniks, would they?

    Really, Kelly, working for NASA seems to have addled your brain. Surely you must know *someone* who wants to go into space, even at JSC? 🙂

    Its like developing a helicopter that really only services Air rescue services on Everest, so the market is 2 reusable helos that fly a couple times a year – after a billion or two in dev costs. Cost per flight would be hundreds of millions of dollars a flight.

    There’s no reason why a spacecraft has to cost $1-2 billion to develop or hundreds of millions. Once you start looking at real costs and get over your fantasies about big airplanes costing the same as little airplanes, you’ll see that.

    To take one example, Len Cormier designed Bear Cub to be developed for less than $100,000,000 and operate for less than $250,000 per flight.

    So, you’re off by three orders of magnitude.

    http://www.tour2space.com/archives/bearcubx/slide2.htm

  5. I’ld add the Orion program, finding a 6 person capsule and SM weigh in over 30 tons, with no cargo or EVA capacity and fully expendable.

    Once again, a single data point does not prove a theory. You need to do a little more research.

    Big Gemini was only 17 tons. That was with a crew of 9 *and* a cargo module capable of carrying 2,500 pounds. Far below Cuddihy’s “minimum practical weight.”

    The British Aerospace Multi-Role Recovery Capsule was less than 8 tons, with a crew of 4 and an 1,100-pound cargo capability.

    The GE Advanced Manned System was just 7,248 pounds with a crew of 6.

  6. Big Gemini was only 17 tons. That was with a crew of 9 *and* a cargo module capable of carrying 2,500 pounds. Far below Cuddihy’s “minimum practical weight.”
    not built.

    The British Aerospace Multi-Role Recovery Capsule was less than 8 tons, with a crew of 4 and an 1,100-pound cargo capability.

    not built

    The GE Advanced Manned System was just 7,248 pounds with a crew of 6.

    not built.

    As you know Ed it’s common with NASA contractors to overstate capability and understate final cost for internal products that you know will never see the light of day.

    There’s a lot of assumptions that go into any blanket generalizations of what’s required to accomplish but my numbers are pretty fair compared to historical figures for spacecraft and the hard math of the rocket equation.

  7. Yes, I agree no one has ever refuted Spencer’s thesis. However, until a low cost small payload LEO RLV actually flies, no one will have proven or demonstrated Spencer’s thesis either.

    As for SpaceShipOne, how long has it been since a sub-orbital player actually reached space (62 miles or 100 km) with a human payload?

    If folks desire to spend federal tax dollars testing Spencer’s thesis, those folks need to play by Washington rules. If folks aren’t interested in Uncle Sugar’s money, emigrate to Singapore (for example) or Australia and build as many RLVs as desired.

    Therefore I ask, how many Congress-critters have expressed support for doing NASA Spencer’s way?

    As a practical matter, how might that be changed, going forward?

    Whether Spencer is right, or not, the only opinions that matter belong to those with access to a large enough checkbook balance to give his thesis a whirl. Either in Congress or through private check writers willing to risk their fortunes.

    Again, it sure looks to me like the propellant depot advocates lost a window of opportunity when Sean O’Keefe resigned. If he hadn’t resigned, Admiral Steidle might still be running the CEV show, today and maybe a genuine test of Spencer’s theories would be happening right now.

    Why wasn’t there a propellant depot advocate waiting in the wings to take over for O’Keefe?

  8. > # Edward Wright Says:
    > December 16th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
    >
    > >>1) That anything built in space must be built by NASA.
    >
    >> It wouldn’t serve any purpose otherwise.
    >
    > I’m not sure what “it” means, in this context. But if it
    > doesn’t serve any purpose except to give NASA
    > something to build, then it ought to be cancelled.

    Thats the only purpose the space projects (ISS, AOS, etc) have. NASA is seen bythe public as really serving2 purposes.
    #1 – national pride in having a went to the moon agency.
    #2 – jobs in districts.

    Space projects are therefore judged on their ability to deliver on those two mesures. The first just requires NASA to exist, and not get bad press. Since nothing proposed for NASA to do has really interested the public much, its the safest and most cost effective option to do nothing challenging, but spend a lot of money on what you do. And critically not to allow someone else to do anything bigger and more spectacular then NASA is doing.

    >
    > > And helping to develop a low cost, or even high cost, commercial
    >> launch space astronaut core would be NASA founding its own competitors.
    >
    > That’s nonsense. The NACA helped developed low-cost commercial
    > aviation. NASA shouldn’t be in the airline business in the first place.

    Agreed, but that doesn’t mater. I wish we had a NACA, a research and dev organization developed to foster and support the growth of a space industry. But NASA is not, and never was, such a agency. NASA is a space spectacular agency. It lives by glory and pork on a large scale. It DWARFS the scale of a NACA or DARPA, so it can not justify itself on supportive research. So such research is usually cut out to fund more important to the agency mega spectaculars. Congress makes some complaint sounds about that, but the “little a” isue never changes much.

    If say NASA fielded a CATS system, commercials could open up space on a very large scale, making everything NASA is doing, dull and small. That eliminates the political justification and value for NASA. Some hope that after that eliminated say 70+% of NASA, maybe 80%, the result would reform into a super sized NACA or DARPA. But its like hoping GM would come out of a Bankruptcy as nothing but Delphis research program.

    >
    > > Again, like with CATS, you’re offering NASA the chance to hire
    >>hit men to kill the agency – they are not going to do it, nor will congress pay for it.
    >
    > There’s no evidence to support that belief. The development of
    > commercial aviation did not kill the NACA, nor did Congress refuse to pay for it.

    NACA was ever even a fraction of the size of NASA. NASA is pretty huge compared to every agency except DOD and the welfare programs (and debt repayment). So you can’t defend its budget for research and industrial support.

    >
    > >> 2) That we should never have more astronauts we do at present.
    > >> 3) That construction work should be done by NASA’s
    > >> PhD astronauts instead of actual construction workers.
    >>
    >> Hell, they get so many resumes they throw out the non PhD
    >> candidates just to cut down the stack. They have a limited #
    >> of job slots, and have no reason to expand it. So they hire
    >> the most over qualified and insanely desperate to get the
    >> job at any cost candidates.
    >
    > A PhD does not qualify a person to work construction. ==

    Who cares? They sound much better in PR, and if you have a pair of PhDs and ran a research center – you can likely learn to assemble complex systems in a space suit, and even more important – PhDs will likely conform to the public image the agency demands.

    >
    > As for the “limited number of job slots,” that’s the result of the high
    > cost of space transportation, not a law of nature.

    Yes and no. Its far more then NASA really needs for its misions, and NASA has a strong disincentive to expand the numbers and make it less prestigious. Another incentive to hire high end researchers, not blue colars.

    >
    >> It (buiding things out of lots of small parts assembled on site, rather
    >> then big components (assemblies) really does get to be a cost
    >> reliability nightmare – and in some cases you just can’t build it.
    >
    > Yet other industries do it all the time — without the cost and
    > reliability nightmares NASA has. ==

    Really? NAMER THEM. When you’re talking about building something like a space station, big sat, etc, thats high end aerospace level engineering. They are not built on site, or out of lots of tine assemble in pace parts. Not by anyone I ever heardof.

    >> Hell they don’t even plan to ever replace Hubble when it dies in a few years.
    >
    > Yes, they do. The next-generation space telescope is called Webb, ==

    Its not a Hubble replacement. Its designed for a completly different mission, with differn’t (non visible) spectrum. It can’t do any of the Hubble like images.

    ==
    >
    >> > As for rocket engines, a modern engine typically
    >> > has a thrust-to-weight ratio of 100-200 to one. So,
    > >> even a large engine does not weigh all that much.
    >
    >> With The Altair/Orion stack weighing ni at close to 200
    >> tons on orbit., and engines usually should be integrated
    >> in with their support electronics etc, you still likely talking a couple tons.
    >
    > Why should I care about the Altair/Orion stack?

    Because your point was you can build something like the Altair Orion stack in LEO (or something far larger) out of small little (tonish) peaces. Specifically you mentioned engines which would be x sized.

    >
    > > The point of the Shuttle was everything went up in major assemblies –
    >> even full LEO to lunar LEMs – and it was all landed together for sevicnig.
    >
    ==
    >
    > Also, while NASA once considered a plan to launch a lunar on the
    > Shuttle, the plan was to integrate them with the transtage, Earth
    > return vehicle, and crew module at ISS.

    No that was never aNASA concept. ISS is in the wrong orbit for NASA to field deep space craft from it. There was so concept of using it from the SSFP, but it was canceled about ‘96ish and the ISS program – eventually negotiated to move to the current orbit –

    >
    > http://www.nss.org/settlement/moon/HLR.html
    >
    >> Really, you can’t service a big ship, by taking it apart peace by
    >>peace and shiping it down.
    >
    > I hope you never fly on a 747, then. Because they do take them apart
    > piece by piece to do annual maintenance.

    Not on a runway in the middle of nowhere, and many of their peaces are huge compard to anything your talking about.

    >
    > Once you’ve assembled a big ship in space, why would you ever want
    > to bring it down again? That makes no sense.

    Because the servicing infastructure and personel are down here. Its far far cheaper to service it down here then in space. So really its looking like you land it, or throw it away.

    You don’t service ships at sea, don’t do aircraft in the air or remote fields, you don’t even really do shuttles at KSC (though shuttles are so highly dismanteled per flight it gets complicated), you bring them back to major servicing centers.

    >
    >> > You’re arguing that we should never change
    > >> the way we work in space or redesign anything
    > >> to take advantage of cheap access to space or reduce costs.
    >
    >> No I’m saying doing things the way your suggesting
    >>raises costs, and makes even less sense if you have a
    >> CATS system. Rather then training huge numbers of
    >> astrounants to do dangerous no orbit repairs and assembly,
    >> put it back in the space truck, fly it down and send it
    >> back to the manufacturer, then fly it back up and re dock it.
    >
    > That would be fine if “space trucks” were free. They aren’t.

    As opposed to? NASA spend more to service the Hubble each time in trainnig then the flight. So recovery and landing and reflight would be cheaper. You need a space truck of some kind either way to do big projects. So what’s the advantage of not recovery? Throwaway and use nothing but ELVs like Ares? Build a smaller shuttle that really doesn’t save you much in total costs?

    Shuttle cost the gov (adjusting for inflation) about $30b-$35b to develop. It costs about $6 B a year to operate, and the per flight direct cost is about $150M for the ET and SRBs. $300M for the labor – but that could be designed or refit out of them. So out of the Adjusted for inflation …$220 billion dollar shuttle program (not including NASA budget for facilities that really only exist to support shuttle flights now), you spent $20 billion for ETs and SRBs. $40b for labor per launch (theres some overlap between these, but I don’t want to look it up.) So flights really don’t cost you.

    Do it commercial. $8B to develop a commercial shuttle, buy a pair and launch facilities. MAYBE a $1b a year to service facilities and craft. Margin cost per flight is a few hundred thousand per flight in labor, similar in fuel, couple million in parts, etc. So the flights, really are a trivial part of the costs.

    >
    > All you’re doing is repeating the same arguments that were used
    > to justify the Shuttle. If those arguments were valid, the Shuttle
    > would have been an economic success.

    That was the problem with Shuttle, it was to easy to make economical — so congress refused to fund the upgrades since that was unacceptable.

    >
    > The Shuttle wasn’t a success — and neither were the last 50 attempts to build Shuttle II. How many times do we need to repeat the experiment before you accept the results?
    >
    > > breaking it down unnecessarily into hundreds of parts to
    >> unnecessarily increase flight rates, just increases your costs unnecessarily.
    >
    > No, increasing flight rate reduces costs. Look up “learning curve effect.”

    Look up program costs. Its more expensive to do EVA’s, design craft down to to smaller parts, etc. And given the flight costs are not a major fraction of launch costs. How do you”learn” the costs down?

    >
    >> No, I’m saying do something ambitious in space THAT’S
    >> USEFULL. Building a city in space so you can avoid building
    >> a 25 ton lift craft as apose to a 2 ton lift craft is nuts
    >
    > That’s your opinion, Kelly. I *want* to see cities in space. ==

    Me to, but cities that don’t pay there way become ghost towns. They have to be economically productive. So upping costs as a excuse for the city – dooms the city and tends to invalidate the concept in the public and investors minds. (I’m assuming you don’t think NASA or the gov could build a self supporting city in space?)

    >===
    >> The point isn’t to build a factory in space for its own sake damn
    >> the crippling costs (ISS uselessness raised to levels even the feds would blush at)
    >
    > Again, the costs don’t have to be crippling. You need to stop believing that Shuttle and ISS are the only possible models.
    >
    > What you seemed to be arguing was building up ISS or bigger platforms out of hundreds of 1 ton parts assembled in orbit – which would be VERY expensive, and unsafe.
    >
    > No, it would not be “VERY expensive.” Read some of the work that’s
    > been done on vehicles that are *not* the Shuttle or ISS.
    >
    > http://tour2space.com/archives/economic/20013962.htm

    This proposal is suggesting the shuttle craft can be built for a “pre-operational investment to $200,000,000” – which is less then the dev costs for Falcon 1, half the costs to dev White Knight2 and SS2 — or any similar weight biz jet. About an order of magnitude less cost then commercial projections and anything similar I can think of? Its even a fraction of the cost for the BlackSwiftxplane drone!

    I’m also wondering how you get 18 people in a ship with a 2400kg cargo capacity? Are you not including life support, suits, seats?

    > http://tour2space.com/archives/spactour.htm
    >
    > >>Actually you missed it Ed. Things often
    > >>do fail missing one part. Your car, certainly space craft, etc..
    > > My car has enough redundancy and sufficient margin
    > > that it seldom fails because of one part. ===
    >
    > Really? Try flattening a tire,
    >
    > My car can run just fine with a flat tire, Kelly. It carries a spare tire
    > for that purpose. I’m rather surprised to hear that yours doesn’t. 🙂

    We wern’t talking about after spare parts were launched and installed. You were stating the systemad redundancy and could function with the loss of any of its parts.

    😉

    >
    >> I was refernig to ISS, before, but Apollo on steroids is worse
    >>since you can’t park either of the 2 launched craft ni orbit.
    >
    >> If either stays in orbit for more then a couple days in orbit
    >>without the other the missions a scrub and you dispose or the launched part.
    >
    > That’s because it is a lousy design, not because it’s impossible to
    > park two craft on orbit. ===

    Its not that bad a design. Life support has consumables, crews consume waiting around. Boosters fuel boils off in orbit. Other systems use up power, leak etc.

    Similarly systems don’t function dismanteled. So when you are trying to assemble them out of lots of parts, you eiather need a on orbit asembly support environment to suply power, nav, some environmental suport, etc (which justmoves the assembly issue to how do you assemble the asembly facility) – or floating dead in space will trash it. Alternatly you need to do what the ISS did, and design each asembled step as a autonomously functional design. At the least it needed to be able to support itself adequatly until the next part was flown, whichin turn could support that total collection.

    ==
    >
    >> But theres nothing else for your high-flight rate launcher (big
    >> or little really) to do. I agree that a fast turn around craft would
    >> allow you – MAYBE – to swap out the cargo into a new LV and
    >> boost it up the next day (assuming you can unload/reload it quickly),
    >> but then if your NASA such a craft doesn’t support the thousands of
    >> ground support workers, which eliminates the reason and political
    >> support for the return to the moon program.
    >
    > There’s everything for it to do. Space tourism. Satellite refueling,
    > inspection, upgrade, and repair. Astronomy. Earth observation.
    > Crew rotation. Rescue missions. Military reconnaissance.
    > Counterspace missions. Cislunar and NEO missions.

    Sorry, all those together -excluding tourism which is a whole other argument – require anything like the flight rate your talking about. All that’s currently supported by only a couple dozen flights a year. So you either have to assume whole new markets are fielded ( which again deals with the why have lots of little flights costing more, rather then few biger flights to accomplish given missions more cheaply and safer), or you again

    >
    > And it isn’t “my” NASA, Kelly, even if my uncle founded the agency. 🙂

    We’re all sympathetic for your families shame.

    😉

    >
    > When did I say I thought NASA should build anything? You appear
    > to have NASA on the brain.

    If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get paid.

    We could alternatly just focus on all commercial programs, but obviously that excludes anything NASA would or could really fund.

    >
    >
    > # Edward Wright Says:
    > December 16th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
    >
    >> Yeah, there just is no launch market, so talking about little
    >> launchers flying a lot, vrs a few bigger flights, etc. Its a moot
    >> point when your talking Launching a couple dozen tons per year globally.
    >
    > Right. No launch market. All those thousands of people who
    > say they want to go into space don’t exist. ==

    Really even thousands a pretty tiny market, and it doesn’t currently exist. Certainly no ones ben able to convince investors to fund anything to tap that market — hell folks are still dubious about the suborbital markets viability.

    We could debate new markets, but currently with global launch demand now, you realy can’t close a biz case spending a couple billion to 10 for those markets – much less the current ones..

    ==
    >> Its like developing a helicopter that really only services Air
    >> rescue services on Everest, so the market is 2 reusable helos
    >> that fly a couple times a year – after a billion or two in dev
    >> costs. Cost per flight would be hundreds of millions of dollars a flight.
    >
    > There’s no reason why a spacecraft has to cost $1-2 billion to
    > develop or hundreds of millions. Once you start looking at real
    > costs and get over your fantasies about big airplanes costing the
    > same as little airplanes, you’ll see that.

    Look at the costs of real craft. Bizjets, Falcon 1/9, SS2& WK2. A billion or two for a orbit capable, safe RLV is pretty concervative. Hell you can eat a half billion just geting it certified for passengers and FAA blessing to fly in normal airspace.

    >
    > To take one example, Len Cormier designed Bear Cub to be developed
    > for less than $100,000,000 and operate for less than $250,000 per flight.
    >
    > So, you’re off by three orders of magnitude.

    Again, hes assuming he can field a RLV for one fifth the costs Branson’s spending on the SS2WK2 craft, A fractino of SpaceX’s cost to field the Falcon 1 ELV. A tiny fraction of the cost to field Cirisus 6 person cheap biz jet.

    I don’t find those numbers very credable.

  9. > >
    >
    > Bill White Says:
    > December 16th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
    > ==
    > If folks desire to spend federal tax dollars testing Spencer’s
    > thesis, those folks need to play by Washington rules. If folks
    > aren’t interested in Uncle Sugar’s money, emigrate to
    > Singapore (for example) or Australia and build as many RLVs as desired.

    The ancient truth. He who has the gold makes the rules.

    > ==
    >
    > Again, it sure looks to me like the propellant depot advocates
    > lost a window of opportunity when Sean O’Keefe resigned. If
    > he hadn’t resigned, Admiral Steidle might still be running the
    > CEV show, today and maybe a genuine test of Spencer’s theories
    > would be happening right now.

    A lot of opportunities were lost when O’Keefe and Admiral Steidle leftNASA.

  10. Kelly, you wrote:

    Not really. For a 25 ton lift, very low operating and servicing cost, RLV; all the areo firms have said its pretty much a low risk efort. The subscale prototypes of concepts and designs were done long ago. (The DC-X program was the most well known.) so unless your going really exotic like a Star Raker, the bids for commercial (not gov) development is for $5B-$10B and 5+ years for a 25 ton ish RLV with a thousand fold labor cost per flight reduction. No takers from DOD, NASA, or anyone else though.

    I wasn’t advocating a 25 ton RLV at this time. Not enough launch volume to justify it. Second, no aero firm actually has experience making low flight cost RLVs and those that come closest, aren’t interested. So I don’t think your optimism is warranted.

    Moving on, the Shuttle was such a vehicle in the 70’s. $10k per kg marginal cost per launch isn’t bad for the 70’s.

    Besides this is the same failure mode that we’ve been talking about all this thread. NASA or another big sugardaddy buys and operates the launch vehicle. NASA shouldn’t be buying a 25 ton RLV since that doesn’t support its mandated objectives. It shouldn’t be in the launch business.

    Thats still so low there is nothing like economies of scale. Hell competician actually raises prices all things being equal. Which show how nasty a economic corner were into with space launch.

    It’s more than you spin it. There’s a lot more tonnage launched in space than a “couple dozen tons”. There’s more launches than “50” and they’re increasing rather than decreasing.

    Finally, I just have a comment about political fatalism and NASA. We have the power to change this process and make better decisions. It is foolish to be satisfied with the mediocre results of the past 50 years and content with similar performance for the next 50. All I can say is that if the US fails to enter space and develope it, then someone else will. China, Europe, and Russia are the most likely suspects right now. Hopefully US businesses can make it happen where NASA has failed.

  11. Um, in my previous post, I meant that the Space Shuttle was relatively low priced for the time, not that it was low priced in a useful sense.

  12. As you know Ed it’s common with NASA contractors to overstate capability and understate final cost for internal products that you know will never see the light of day.

    British Aerospace wasn’t a NASA contractor. They’re not even an American company. And I think there’s reason to believe McDonnell Douglas knew how to estimate the weight of Gemini hardware.

    There’s a lot of assumptions that go into any blanket generalizations of what’s required to accomplish but my numbers are pretty fair compared to historical figures for spacecraft and the hard math of the rocket equation.

    Sorry, but you aren’t even basing your numbers on the right equation. The rocket equation tells you nothing about “generic human support equipment.” The rocket equation only calculates propellant weight — not structural or systems weight.

  13. >
    > # K a r l H a l l o w e l l S a y s :
    > D e c e m b e r 1 6 t h , 2 0 0 8 a t 7 : 2 2 p m
    >
    > K e l l y , y o u w r o t e :
    >
    >> N o t r e a l l y . F o r a 2 5 t o n l i f t , v e r y l o w o p e r a t i n g a n d
    >> s e r v i c i n g c o s t , R L V ; a l l t h e a r e o f i r m s h a v e s a i d i t s
    >> p r e t t y m u c h a l o w r i s k e f o r t . T h e s u b s c a l e p r o t o t y p e s
    >> o f c o n c e p t s a n d d e s i g n s w e r e d o n e l o n g a g o . ( T h e D C – X
    >>p r o g r a m w a s t h e m o s t w e l l k n o w n . ) s o u n l e s s y o u r g o i n g
    >> r e a l l y e x o t i c l i k e a S t a r R a k e r , t h e b i d s f o r c o m m e r c i a l
    >> ( n o t g o v ) d e v e l o p m e n t i s f o r $ 5 B – $ 1 0 B a n d 5 + y e a r s f o r
    >> a 2 5 t o n i s h R L V w i t h a t h o u s a n d f o l d l a b o r c o s t p e r f l i g h t
    >> r e d u c t i o n . N o t a k e r s f r o m D O D , N A S A , o r a n y o n e e l s e t h o u g h .
    >
    > I w a s n t a d v o c a t i n g a 2 5 t o n R L V a t t h i s t i m e . N o t e n o u g h
    > l a u n c h v o l u m e t o j u s t i f y i t .

    It actually makes a bit more sence to build the bigger ones. The bigger craft can carry the smaller cargo as well, and theirs more interest in arger cargos. Smaller ones arn’t that much cheaper, since their so much fixed costs.

    > S e c o n d , n o a e r o f i r m a c t u a l l y h a s e x p e r i e n c e m a k i n g l o w
    > f l i g h t c o s t R L V s a n d t h o s e t h a t c o m e c l o s e s t , a r e n’ t
    > i n t e r e s t e d . S o I d o n t t h i n k y o u r o p t i m i s m i s w a r r a n t e d .

    All the major ones give ythose estimates, adn tests with cost reduction have shown it to be pretty trivial to do. After all the cost factors are the same as for aircraft adn other systems. So thers not a big learning curve.

    The big cost rdivers arn’t technocal, but market size. So building a low cost RLV is easy – but doesn’t mean you’ll save much costs unless you get a bigger market.

    > M o v i n g o n , t h e S h u t t l e w a s s u c h a v e h i c l e i n t h e 7 0’ s .
    > $ 1 0 k p e r k g m a r g i n a l c o s t p e r l a u n c h i s n t b a d f o r t h e 7 0 s .

    It was a hell of alot more then the low cost shuttle designs proposed, but not funded.

    >
    > B e s i d e s t h i s i s t h e s a m e f a i l u r e m o d e t h a t w e’v e b e e n
    > t a l k i n g a b o u t a l l t h i s t h r e a d . N A S A o r a n o t h e r b i g
    > s u g a r d a d d y b u y s a n d o p e r a t e s t h e l a u n c h v e h i c l e .
    > N A S A s h o u l d n’ t b e b u y i n g a 2 5 t o n R L V s i n c e t h a t d o e s n’ t
    > s u p p o r t i t s m a n d a t e d o b j e c t i v e s . ==

    How do you figure?

    >
    >> T h a t s s t i l l s o l o w t h e r e i s n o t h i n g l i k e e c o n o m i e s o f s c a l e . H e l l
    >> c o m p e t i c i a n a c t u a l l y r a i s e s p r i c e s a l l t h i n g s b e i n g e q u a l . W h i c h
    >> s h o w h o w n a s t y a e c o n o m i c c o r n e r w e r e i n t o w i t h s p a c e l a u n c h .
    >
    > I t s m o r e t h a n y o u s p i n i t . T h e r e s a l o t m o r e t o n n a g e l a u n c h e d
    > i n s p a c e t h a n a c o u p l e d o z e n t o n s . T h e r e s m o r e l a u n c h e s t h a n
    > 5 0 3 a n d t h e y r e i n c r e a s i n g r a t h e r t h a n d e c r e a s i n g .

    Sadly thats not what any of the gov or journals list. And historically Shutle caried the bukl of everything to orbit with its poittiful flight rate and usually mostly empty bay.

    ;/

    >
    > F i n a l l y , I j u s t h a v e a c o m m e n t a b o u t p o l i t i c a l f a t a l i s m a n d
    > N A S A . W e h a v e t h e p o w e r t o c h a n g e t h i s p r o c e s s a n d m a k e
    > b e t t e r d e c i s i o n s . ===

    Whose we?
    In a democracy the majorities preference rule.

    >== A l l I c a n s a y i s t h a t i f t h e U S f a i l s t o e n t e r s p a c e a n d d e v e l o p e
    > i t , t h e n s o m e o n e e l s e w i l l . C h i n a , E u r o p e , a n d R u s s i a a r e t h e
    > m o s t l i k e l y s u s p e c t s r i g h t n o w . ==

    Really, no ones trying much.

    >== H o p e f u l l y U S b u s i n e s s e s c a n m a k e i t h a p p e n w h e r e N A S A h a s f a i l e d .

    NASA was never supposed to open up space industrially.

  14. What the hell happened with the font ??!!

    One more time

    > # Karl Hallowell Says:
    > December 16th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
    >
    > Kelly, you wrote:
    >
    >> Not really. For a 25 ton lift, very low operating and
    >> servicing cost, RLV; all the areo firms have said its
    >> pretty much a low risk efort. The subscale prototypes
    >> of concepts and designs were done long ago. (The DC-X
    >>program was the most well known.) so unless your going
    >> really exotic like a Star Raker, the bids for commercial
    >> (not gov) development is for $5B-$10B and 5+ years for
    >> a 25 ton ish RLV with a thousand fold labor cost per flight
    >> reduction. No takers from DOD, NASA, or anyone else though.
    >
    > I wasn _t advocating a 25 ton RLV at this time. Not enough
    > launch volume to justify it.

    It actually makes a bit more sence to build the bigger ones. The bigger craft can carry the smaller cargo as well, and theirs more interest in arger cargos. Smaller ones arn’t that much cheaper, since their so much fixed costs.

    >Second, no aero fIrm actualy has experIence making low
    > flight cost RLVs and those that come closest, aren’t
    > interested. So I don _t think your optimism is warranted.

    All the major ones give those estimates, adn tests with cost reduction have shown it to be pretty trivial to do. After all the cost factors are the same as for aircraft adn other systems. So thers not a big learning curve.

    The big cost rdivers arn’t technocal, but market size. So building a low cost RLV is easy – but doesn’t mean you’ll save much costs unless you get a bigger market.

    > Moving on, the Shuttle was such a vehicle in the 70’s.
    > $10k per kg marginal cost per launch isn _t bad for the 70 _s.

    It was a hell of alot more then the low cost shuttle designs proposed, but not funded.

    >
    > Besides this is the same failure mode that we’ve been
    > talking about all this thread. NASA or another big
    > sugardaddy buys and operates the launch vehicle.
    > NASA shouldn’t be buying a 25 ton RLV since that doesn’t
    > support its mandated objectives. ==

    How do you figure?

    >
    >> Thats still so low there is nothing like economies of scale. Hell
    >> competician actually raises prices all things being equal. Which
    >> show how nasty a economic corner were into with space launch.
    >
    > It _s more than you spin it. There _s a lot more tonnage launched
    > in space than a _couple dozen tons _. There _s more launches than
    > _50 3 and they _re increasing rather than decreasing.

    Sadly thats not what any of the gov or journals list. And historically Shutle caried the bukl of everything to orbit with its poittiful flight rate and usually mostly empty bay.

    ;/

    >
    > Finally, I just have a comment about political fatalism and
    > NASA. We have the power to change this process and make
    > better decisions. ===

    Whose we?
    In a democracy the majorities preference rule.

    >== All I can say is that if the US fails to enter space and develope
    > it, then someone else will. China, Europe, and Russia are the
    > most likely suspects right now. ==

    Really, no ones trying much.

    >==Hopefully US businesses can make it happen where NASA has failed.

    NASA was never supposed to open up space industrially.

  15. Kelly, you wrote:

    It actually makes a bit more sence to build the bigger ones. The bigger craft can carry the smaller cargo as well, and theirs more interest in arger cargos. Smaller ones arn’t that much cheaper, since their so much fixed costs.

    Wake me when “more interest” translates into “more money”. For your last point, keep in mind that there are more fixed costs for bigger rockets and the smaller rockets will have a higher launch frequency and be able to serve commercial space as well.

    All the major ones give ythose estimates, adn tests with cost reduction have shown it to be pretty trivial to do. After all the cost factors are the same as for aircraft adn other systems. So thers not a big learning curve.

    Keeping in mind that you are claiming bigger rockets are cheaper, what in aerospace industry proves your point? For example, the Spruce Goose only flew once. Currently, there’s only one Antonov An-225 flying. While Aerobus is giving the giant airplane a try, it is worth noting that Boeing decided to go with the 787, a more modest plane as its money maker. There’s plenty of examples of small planes and jets and only a few examples of big planes.

    NASA was never supposed to open up space industrially.

    Incorrect. From the National Aeronautics and Space Act:

    (c) The Congress declares that the general welfare of the United States requires that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (as established by title II of this Act) seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.

    This is before any other purpose listed in that act. And given the implications of the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, I’d say a good case has been made that NASA shouldn’t be in the launch services business.

  16. Thats the only purpose the space projects (ISS, AOS, etc) have. NASA is seen bythe public as really serving2 purposes.
    #1 – national pride in having a went to the moon agency.
    #2 – jobs in districts.

    ISS was a mistake and a waste of money. If that’s the best argument you can come up with, you’re in big trouble.

    NASA doesn’t create that many jobs any more. If that’s all you care about, you should shut down the space centers and just pay people to sweep the streets.

    If say NASA fielded a CATS system, commercials could open up space on a very large scale, making everything NASA is doing, dull and small. That eliminates the political justification and value for NASA.

    Everything NASA’s doing is dull and small right now.

    If NASA stopped trying to develop its own systems, the private sector could drive down costs and NASA reap the benefits to do things that are interesting and big. Like sending a hundred geologists to the Moon, say. Or building a big observatory in LEO. Or even sending people to Mars, instead of tiny little radio-controlled cars.

    > As for the “limited number of job slots,” that’s the result of the high
    > cost of space transportation, not a law of nature.

    Yes and no. Its far more then NASA really needs for its misions, and NASA has a strong disincentive to expand the numbers and make it less prestigious. Another incentive to hire high end researchers, not blue colars.

    Not if you give NASA non-trivial, interesting missions. (See above.)

    How many people does NASA have on staff at the Lunar and Planetary Research Institute? How many of them have even been to the Moon? None of them. Does that make sense to you? That’s like having an oceanographic institute staffed by scientists who have never been to sea. LPI should be based on the Moon!

    Really? NAMER THEM. When you’re talking about building something like a space station, big sat, etc, thats high end aerospace level engineering. They are not built on site, or out of lots of tine assemble in pace parts. Not by anyone I ever heardof.

    Then you haven’t been paying attention. I’m sure someone must have built an office building in Houston recently.

    > Why should I care about the Altair/Orion stack?

    Because your point was you can build something like the Altair Orion stack in LEO (or something far larger) out of small little (tonish) peaces. Specifically you mentioned engines which would be x sized.

    “Something far larger” does not mean Ares/Orion. No one in his right mind would build that, in LEO or anywhere else.

    > Also, while NASA once considered a plan to launch a lunar on the
    > Shuttle, the plan was to integrate them with the transtage, Earth
    > return vehicle, and crew module at ISS.

    No that was never aNASA concept.

    Yes it was. Follow the URL and see for yourself: http://www.nss.org/settlement/moon/HLR.htm

    Don’t say ISS is in the wrong orbit or Dennis Wingo will rise up and womp on you. 🙂

    > Once you’ve assembled a big ship in space, why would you ever want
    > to bring it down again? That makes no sense.

    Because the servicing infastructure and personel are down here. Its far far cheaper to service it down here then in space. So really its looking like you land it, or throw it away.

    Sigh. Read my lips, Kelly. I want to reduce the cost of access to space so it won’t be “far cheaper” to do everything down here. You’re hung up on circular arguments.

    Of course, even if you keep space transportation expensive, what you’re proposing still makes no sense. No one is proposing that we disassemble ISS and bring it back to Earth for refurbishment. It would be cost-prohibitive.

    You don’t service ships at sea,

    Laugh. Obviously, you’ve never been a sailor, Kelly! What do you think those guys do all day long?

    don’t do aircraft in the air or remote fields,

    Rubbish. The last maintenance on my plane was done at a remote field in Arizona by mechanics brought in just for the job. You need to poke your head outside of JSC and see how the rest of the world works, Kelly.

    Try telling anyone in the Air Force that they don’t refuel planes in the air. See the expression on his face.

    As opposed to? NASA spend more to service the Hubble each time in trainnig then the flight. So recovery and landing and reflight would be cheaper. You need a space truck of some kind either way to do big projects.

    No, you don’t. Max Hunter used to say that anyone who thinks you can’t do big projects without heavy lift doesn’t know what we did in World War II with nothing larger than the DC-3.

    And please don’t tell me you don’t think World War II was a big project, or that we built all those airbases in factories and transported them in one piece because it’s impossible to build something on a remote island.

    So what’s the advantage of not recovery?

    The advantage is that it allows us to build things that are too large to fit in the payload bay of any vehicle. Just as all those airfields we built in World War II were too large to fit in a DC-3. Again, read O’Neill’s “High Frontier.”

    Throwaway and use nothing but ELVs like Ares? Build a smaller shuttle that really doesn’t save you much in total costs?

    I’ve corrected that mistake more times than I care to recall. If you choose to remain willfully ignorant, so be it.

    Shuttle cost the gov (adjusting for inflation) about $30b-$35b to develop. It costs about $6 B a year to operate, and the per flight direct cost is about $150M for the ET and SRBs.

    I don’t care what the Shuttle costs. I wasn’t talking about building another Shuttle, Kelly. That’s your dream, not mine.

    More like a hallucinogenic mushroom vision, actually. 🙂

    $40b for labor per launch (theres some overlap between these, but I don’t want to look it up.) So flights really don’t cost you.

    You’re pulling these numbers out of thin air. The Shuttle labor cost is huge but it’s nowhere near $40 billion per launch. That’s more than NASA’s annual budget.

    Do it commercial. $8B to develop a commercial shuttle, buy a pair and launch facilities. MAYBE a $1b a year to service facilities and craft. Margin cost per flight is a few hundred thousand per flight in labor, similar in fuel, couple million in parts, etc. So the flights, really are a trivial part of the costs.

    Great. So, you fly your Shuttle a dozen times a year, and you’re spending $100 million per flight. Not including amortization, insurance, and all the other things. Another $8 billion wasted on Very Expensive Access To Space.

    No, thank you.

    > All you’re doing is repeating the same arguments that were used
    > to justify the Shuttle. If those arguments were valid, the Shuttle
    > would have been an economic success.

    That was the problem with Shuttle, it was to easy to make economical — so congress refused to fund the upgrades since that was unacceptable.

    No, Congress refused to fund the upgrades because none of them ever made sense. I ought to know. I spent enough time talking Congress out of funding that nonsense. When a vehicle flies that seldom, it doesn’t make sense to spend any money upgrading it.

    > No, increasing flight rate reduces costs. Look up “learning curve effect.”

    Look up program costs. Its more expensive to do EVA’s, design craft down to to smaller parts, etc. And given the flight costs are not a major fraction of launch costs. How do you”learn” the costs down?

    I know about program costs. Program costs are another reason why RLVs must be small.

    You “learn” costs down by flying more often and gaining operational experience. Every time the number of flights doubles, experiences reduces the recurring per-flight costs by about 15%, accidents and failure rates are reduced by a similar amount, etc.

    Me to, but cities that don’t pay there way become ghost towns. They have to be economically productive. So upping costs as a excuse for the city –

    Oh, bog! I don’t want to “up” costs, I want to reduce them! The only way we’re going to get those cities in space is to make transportation cheap. Really cheap. Not your “commercial” Shuttle that costs $100+ million per flight.

    > http://tour2space.com/archives/economic/20013962.htm

    This proposal is suggesting the shuttle craft can be built for a “pre-operational investment to $200,000,000” – which is less then the dev costs for Falcon 1, half the costs to dev White Knight2 and SS2 — or any similar weight biz jet.

    Once again, you’re pulling numbers out of the air. The development costs for WK2 and SpaceShip 2 haven’t been publicly released.

    $200 million is not the cost to develop a business jet, it’s the cost to certificate it. Certification typically costs several times more than development. That’s irrelevant, however, because the FAA does not certificate spacecraft.

    About an order of magnitude less cost then commercial projections and anything similar I can think of? Its even a fraction of the cost for the BlackSwiftxplane drone!

    So? UAVS always cost more to develop than piloted aircraft. You would expect it to be expensive for that reason alone. Not to mention the fact that Blackswift required the development of an entirely new engine, based on an engine concept that’s vaporware. Insisting on unobtanium always runs up the cost of the project.

    I’m also wondering how you get 18 people in a ship with a 2400kg cargo capacity? Are you not including life support, suits, seats?

    Life support is part of the vehicle, not the cargo. Do you think the pilot isn’t going to breathe on a cargo flight?

    > There’s everything for it to do. Space tourism. Satellite refueling,
    > inspection, upgrade, and repair. Astronomy. Earth observation.
    > Crew rotation. Rescue missions. Military reconnaissance.
    > Counterspace missions. Cislunar and NEO missions.

    Sorry, all those together -excluding tourism which is a whole other argument – require anything like the flight rate your talking about.

    Oh? Ask the US military how many sorties they fly on a daily basis.

    All that’s currently supported by only a couple dozen flights a year.

    Huh??? Those missions are not “currently supported” by a couple dozen flights a year — they aren’t currently supported at all. When was the last time you saw Hughes dispatch a repair crew to fix a satellite, or a meteorologist hop on a rocket to gather some observations of a hurricane from space?

    > When did I say I thought NASA should build anything? You appear
    > to have NASA on the brain.

    If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get paid.

    You don’t think government agencies get paid unless they build things? The USGS doesn’t build 4×4’s. NOAA doesn’t build ships. The FBI doesn’t build police cars. I’m pretty sure they’re still getting paid.

    > Right. No launch market. All those thousands of people who
    > say they want to go into space don’t exist. ==

    Really even thousands a pretty tiny market, and it doesn’t currently exist.

    One of us needs some serious psychotherapy, Kelly. On my last trip to Fort Worth, I spoke to over 400 people who told me they wanted to go into space — and you’re telling me none of them exist?

    We could debate new markets, but currently with global launch demand now, you realy can’t close a biz case spending a couple billion to 10 for those markets – much less the current ones..

    We keep going around in circles, Kelly. Read my lips. I am not talking about spending a couple billion dollars. We should not spend a couple billion dollars. We need to start smaller than that. Not a couple billion dollars. A fraction of a billion dollars.

    Is that clear enough? Or do you still think I am advocating spending billions of dollars?

    Hell you can eat a half billion just geting it certified for passengers and FAA blessing to fly in normal airspace.

    When did I advocate FAA certification for commercial spacecraft? Why do you keep reading things I never wrote???

    Again, hes assuming he can field a RLV for… A fractino of SpaceX’s cost to field the Falcon 1 ELV.

    You mean, he reached the same conclusion that USAF and General Dynamics studies reached in the 1960’s? That RLVs are cheaper to develop than ELVs?

    You find that shocking? Why?

  17. Kelly is bordering on trollishness. He is clearly swinging at straw men and windmills.

    If I were to give a little benefit of the doubt then I can see where his problem lies. He is taking a bottom up approach to defining our project goals. The rest of us are taking a top down approach to addressing our issues of cheap access to space. Somewhere in the middle we are just talking right past each other. However, that is one of the challenges of a bottom up approach in that one can get mired in details and loose focus on formulating a clear and coherent project goal.

    Also, to commit an ad hominem, if Kelly really does work for NASA in some capacity then NASA is in far worse shape than I thought. If the best they can do is hire people that spell ‘sense’ as “sence”. As well as a number of other simple spelling mistakes.

  18. Yet, industry continues even though some cargoes fail to arrive. The world does not come to a grinding halt, even when a ship sinks or an airliner crashes.

    It largely depends on the industry and the cargo and what you’re doing.

    If a container of shoes or phones doesn’t arrive for distribution because your container is bobbing around in the South Atlantic (happens a lot) then things won’t stop.

    If you’re building a paper plant in Jacksonville and GE “lost” one of the 115KV transformers and SKC lost a shipment of bearing housings for the main press rollers, then you’re in a world of pain. Sure, you can re-jig the project plan to do other stuff, but if the stuff falls in the critical path then you’re in a dark and expensive place.

    How about if you get your fastening supply wrong, I mean that couldn’t possibly be a problem, there’s _lots_ of fasteners aren’t there…

    The kind of things your talking about are difficult for large and complex projects on Earth, they won’t get easier in space even if you handwave the problems of getting stuff there.

  19. Max Hunter used to say that anyone who thinks you can’t do big projects without heavy lift doesn’t know what we did in World War II with nothing larger than the DC-3.

    Good for Max. We used a lot more in WW2 than DC-3s, a lot more planes and heavy ocean transports. I seem to recall we even built a modular harbour out of floating concrete slabs to make sure we didn’t have to rely on parachuting people in or using small amphibious vehicles.

    One of us needs some serious psychotherapy, Kelly. On my last trip to Fort Worth, I spoke to over 400 people who told me they wanted to go into space — and you’re telling me none of them exist?

    Firstly, he didn’t say that they didn’t exist. He said the numbers you’re were referring to were tiny (they are) and that the market doesn’t currently exist (it doesn’t).

    There could be a nice little niche market with some specialist vehicles in the sub-orbital domain in a few years time and there are so many people queuing to pay for flights to the ISS that they’re already flying people a second time…

  20. Good for Max. We used a lot more in WW2 than DC-3s, a lot more planes and heavy ocean transports.

    Yes, Dave, we built *thousands* of heavy transports.

    Of course, those “heavy transports” have nothing in common with the “heavy transports” you want.

    A World War II “heavy ocean transport” meant a ship that was sized to carry a small fraction of the trade going across the Atlantic every week. Maybe 1% of it.

    It did not a single ship sized to carry the entire world’s demand in one trip, then sit around in port for months waiting for another customer. If you quantified your analysis instead of relying solely on verbal arguments, you would realize that.

    An equivalent transport for space would be sized to carry a few tons would be size to carry a few tons, because that size repesents a reasonable number of flights in the current space launch market. Sizing a vehicle larger than the available market is not reasonable, it is insane, even if you (mistakenly) believe we did that during World War II.

    World War II heavy transports also operated in convoys, which you think are impossible. The Navy and Merchant Marine coordinated multiple launches, rendezvous, underweigh replenishment, and other operations that you say no sensible person would ever attempt. And they did it routinely.

    Furthermore, no one even considered your idea of putting an entire invasion force on a single ship that could sunk by one torpedo. If you told any professional military man that a single ship was “more reliable,” or that a convoy would fail if it lost just one ship, he would laugh at you.

    Firstly, he didn’t say that they didn’t exist. He said the numbers you’re were referring to were tiny (they are) and that the market doesn’t currently exist (it doesn’t).

    You’re having trouble with English comprehension again. Saying something “doesn’t currently exist” does not mean that it is “tiny.” It means it doesn’t exist.

    The numbers are not tiny. You just don’t know what the numbers are. We have tried to educate you but you refuse to be educated. Instead, you just keep using madeup numbers that pull out of your head.

    There could be a nice little niche market with some specialist vehicles in the sub-orbital domain in a few years time and there are so many people queuing to pay for flights to the ISS that they’re already flying people a second time…

    Yes, just as the airlines are flying people a second time. Are you going to start denigrating air travel as a “niche market” now?

  21. If you’re building a paper plant in Jacksonville and GE “lost” one of the 115KV transformers and SKC lost a shipment of bearing housings for the main press rollers, then you’re in a world of pain.

    LOL. Even coming from a Brit, that is hilarious. We aren’t a third world country, Dave. We have advanced a *little bit* since Colonial days.

    In that situation, we just call Fedex with the tracking numbers and they locate the missing shipments for us. It happens all the time. If Fedex can’t find them, we call the supplier and ask them to Fedex replacements.

    Of course, we would be in a world of pain if we lived on Planet Daveon, where the only way to move goods is via the Air Shuttle (National Air Transportation System) that only flies five or six times a year. Fortunately, we don’t like on Planet Daveon. We have lots of airplanes, and they fly all the time.

    Now, it would be a world of pain on Planet Daveon, where everything is dependent on the National Airplane Transportation System, which only flies five or six missions a year.

    How about if you get your fastening supply wrong, I mean that couldn’t possibly be a problem, there’s _lots_ of fasteners aren’t there…

    The kind of things your talking about are difficult for large and complex projects on Earth, they won’t get easier in space even if you handwave the problems of getting stuff there.

  22. 1. Karl Hallowell Says:
    December 16th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    >Kelly, you wrote:
    >>It actually makes a bit more sense to build the bigger ones.
    >>The bigger craft can carry the smaller cargo as well, and
    >> there’s more interest in larger cargos. Smaller ones aren’t
    >> that much cheaper, since their so much fixed costs.
    >Wake me when “more interest” translates into “more money”.
    When you get more clients for the big then the small – yup its more money. Musk was rather surprised when he started marketing his Falcon line and found the bulk of the interest was for the 25 ton Falcon , not much for the smaller ones.

    > For your last point, keep in mind that there are more fixed costs
    > for bigger rockets and the smaller rockets will have a higher
    > launch frequency and be able to serve commercial space as well. ==
    The bigger ones could have the higher launch frequency, since there is more they can launch. We can debate about how the industry could decide to break down all their cargos into 1-2 ton chunks, but they are not going to do that (and increase the likelihood of it failing, increasing total costs, etc) just to save a bit on launch costs, and are moving to bigger cargo. As to new markets: Biggelow wants 25 ton plus lift. Space industrial (research, materials, etc) would need bigger rather then little. Tourisms hard to quantify, but if there are lots of would be tourist, bigger craft would likely be as appealing as 2 3 seat craft.

    >>All the major ones given those estimates, and tests with cost
    >> reduction have shown it to be pretty trivial to do. After all
    >> the cost factors are the same as for aircraft and other
    >> systems. So there’s not a big learning curve.

    >Keeping in mind that you are claiming bigger rockets are cheaper, ==
    Not saying that. Proportionally cheaper per pound etc. Cheaper per flight potentially. Not cheaper in absolute.

    >==what in aerospace industry proves your point?
    > For example, the Spruce Goose only flew once. Currently,
    > there’s only one Antonov An-225 flying. While Aerobus is
    > giving the giant airplane a try, it is worth noting that Boeing
    > decided to go with the 787, a more modest plane as its
    > money maker. There’s plenty of examples of small planes and jets and only a few examples of big planes.
    Please not when were talking small vs. large here were talking 1-2 ton vs. 25 tonish cargo, not 100- 300 ton cargo lift capacity airliners. A 1-2 ton cargo cap aircraft would be a twin engine Beechcraft prop plane (including its fuel), or something like a Rocketplane or SS2 sized craft. 25 tons would be a 737 size airliner, maybe. So if you want to get into air cargo, starting with the Beechcraft isn’t going to get you very far.

    On the other hand the Beech craft small biz jet sized craft will cost you a billion or two to develop, the 737 $8 billion or so. So spending 4-8 timing more money for more then ten times the cargo capacity (and a much bigger market) makes good sense.

    NORMALLY, for NORMAL craft the extra operating cost of the bigger craft would make it uncompetitive. For smaller loads. But with space craft (well designed ones) the direct costs are under 1% of the per flight costs. Facilities overhead (range, insurance, licensing launches, etc) are a big cost and unrelated to size. R&D dev costs are a factor, but a 4 fold difference in a fraction of the per launch costs doesn’t bite much, no the other hand potentially doubling or tripling your flight rate cuts the per flight costs 2-3 fold.

    http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=15404#comments

    >>NASA was never supposed to open up space industrially.

    >Incorrect. From the National Aeronautics and Space Act:

    >(c) The Congress declares that the general welfare of the
    > United States requires that the National Aeronautics
    > and Space Administration (as established by title II of
    > this Act) seek and encourage, to the maximum extent
    > possible, the fullest commercial use of space. ===

    That’s what congress put in the paper, its not what they funded them doing, its not what they intended them to do. Claims in brochures for federal agencies are not enforceable – usually carry no more weight then campaign promises.

    Its never been a directive of any major program. You could say shuttle claimed it was for that, but that’s not what congress directed it to.

    >This is before any other purpose listed in that act. And

    > given the implications of the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990,
    > I’d say a good case has been made that NASA shouldn’t
    > be in the launch services business.
    Pretty paperwork. Its not what congress pays for NASA to do. If congress real starts enforcing that – it means they are going to gut and close down NASA.

  23. 1. >Edward Wright Says:
    December 17th, 2008 at 12:03 am

    >> That’s the only purpose the space projects (ISS, AOS, etc)
    >> have. NASA is seen b ythe public as really serving2 purposes.
    >> #1 – national pride in having a went to the moon agency.
    >> #2 – jobs in districts.
    >ISS was a mistake and a waste of money. ==
    Depends no what you want. Wasting money (I.E. pork and bloat) are the goals for NASA projects. Its what get them votes. Same way the ethonal bill was to get votes in corn producing states even though id increases pollution and fossel fuel production. So if you’re a clean air person it’s a waste of money and counter productive. But if you’re a corn state congressman, or presidential candidate interested in your scores in the Iowa caucases, its budget critical.

    You can’t judge the value of a government program in its ability to accomplish your goals or mine (hey I worked on shuttle and station and wanted to open up the high frontier with my carreer, not deliver pork), you have to judge it no the value to the customers. ISS and the current peace of shit shuttle config got votes for congress, and money into voters pockets in space districts. That’s what they voted for and demanded – that’s what it delivered.

    >NASA doesn’t create that many jobs any more. If
    > that’s all you care about, you should shut down
    >the space centers and just pay people to sweep the streets.
    That has been a problem for NASA politically, but hey a big centers 100,000+ high paying jobs. Economic rule is about a 40 fold magnification effect of new jobs in a community on overall community economy. So its certainly competitive with bridges to no where and other pork programs, and the PR value of havnog a NASA flying astruonauts is worth a lot. You can get votes saying your pro the space program. That’s worth a lot to congress.

    … course bigg flashy accidents undercut that BIG TIME!!

    >>If say NASA fielded a CATS system, commercials could
    >> open up space on a very large scale, making everything
    >>NASA is doing, dull and small. That eliminates the political
    >> justification and value for NASA.
    >
    >Everything NASA’s doing is dull and small right now.
    Which is a political problem for the agency. It hoped return to the moon would excite the public – it aint!!

    >If NASA stopped trying to develop its own systems,
    > the private sector could drive down costs and NASA
    > reap the benefits to do things that are interesting and big.
    > Like sending a hundred geologists to the Moon, say. Or
    > building a big observatory in LEO. Or even sending people
    > to Mars, instead of tiny little radio-controlled cars.

    But NASA couldn’t compete in that world. Say I fielded that ArcJet craft I sent you the pitch for. Cost to orbit goes to low tens of dollars a pound. Yeah Nasa could set up a huge base no the moon, but the Discovery channel and Virgin “Galactic could do one too, and do it faster and much much cheaper. When I was in McDonnel douglas the rule of thumb for a major project was that doing it with NASA it would cost 4 times as much as doing it commercially. But estimates by NASA and its contractors is that it would cost it nearly 40 times as much as Paul Allen paid for them to do SS1, and years more, and would get their but chewed by congress for trying something so technologically risky

    NASA returning to the moon for the first time in 50 years is good pr, but not if a Discover Chanel crew is already there filming you land. Building a big observatory sounds good, unless Harvard beats you to the punch at a tenth the price.

    In a world with CATS, NASA becomes a also ran. That’s staggeringly great for us – but not for NASA, and NASA isn’t working to putitself out of a job..

    >How many people does NASA have on staff at the Lunar
    > and Planetary Research Institute? ==
    A handful I’ld guess. It’s a small old mansion (cool building – assuming its still there now?)

    >== How many of them have even been to the Moon?
    > None of them. Does that make sense to you? That’s
    > like having an oceanographic institute staffed by
    > scientists who have never been to sea. LPI should be based on the Moon!
    Woods hole isn’t based in the ocean. National Geo society isn’t even headquartered in mountain states.

    ..And LPI is paid with NASA crumbs. When I was last there they didn’t even get to use a empty office building at next door JSC. NASA isn’t a science agency.

    >>Really? NAME THEM. When you’re talking
    >> about building something like a space station,
    >> big sat, etc, thats high end aerospace level engineering.
    >> They are not built on site, or out of lots of tine
    >> assemble in pace parts. Not by anyone I ever heardof.

    >Then you haven’t been paying attention. I’m sure someone
    > must have built an office building in Houston recently.
    Which is certainly nothing like a aerospace high-tech system, and still isn’t built out of couple hundred kilo parts.

    >>> Why should I care about the Altair/Orion stack?
    >>Because your point was you can build something
    >> like the Altair Orion stack in LEO (or something far
    >>larger) out of small little (tonish) peaces. Specifically
    >> you mentioned engines which would be x sized.
    >“Something far larger” does not mean Ares/Orion. No
    > one in his right mind would build that, in LEO or anywhere else.
    If you want to get to the moon or Mars you need at least that much. They are figuring that they will need a 190+ ton stack in LEO to get 6 folks to and from lunar surface. Mars would of course take something much much bigger.

    [You did realize I was talking about the stack in LEO, not the on the pads stacks, right?]

    >> Also, while NASA once considered a plan to launch a lunar on the
    >> Shuttle, the plan was to integrate them with the transtage, Earth
    >> return vehicle, and crew module at ISS.
    ==

    >Don’t say ISS is in the wrong orbit or Dennis Wingo will rise up and womp on you.
    Rather anger him then the physics Gods. Gravity scares me.

    😉

    >>> Once you’ve assembled a big ship in space, why would you ever want
    >>> to bring it down again? That makes no sense.
    >>Because the servicing infastructure and personel are down
    >> here. Its far far cheaper to service it down here then in space.
    >> So really its looking like you land it, or throw it away.
    >Sigh. Read my lips, Kelly. I want to reduce the cost of access
    > to space so it won’t be “far cheaper” to do everything down here. ==
    But reducing the cost to orbit makes it even cheaper to do it here then in space. So you’re fighting to undercut your own goal.

    😉
    Think of fixing Hubble.
    You cuold grab Hubble, land it, ship it to L/M or whoever to reform, and reluanch. Servicing likely a hundred million or two, but 2 shutle flights are (GAO evel) worth close to 3 billion. So instead you spend most of a billion to trin and develop ways to refurb it on orbit and noly fly one flight. AKA $2 billion worth.

    Now if you field a high grade CATS system with cost to orbit of tens to a hundred or 2 a pound. The flights are Tens of millions of dollars, but the training would still be most of a billion, and risk lives. So you send it back to the manufacturer like normal people do.

    ==
    >>You don’t service ships at sea,
    >Laugh. Obviously, you’ve never been a sailor,
    > Kelly! What do you think those guys do all day long?
    Nothing like a real overhaul. That’s why even big navy ships crawling with sailors servicing them, spent a lot of the year in port being serviced in ship yards.

    >>don’t do aircraft in the air or remote fields,
    >Rubbish. The last maintenance on my plane was
    > done at a remote field in Arizona by mechanics
    > brought in just for the job.==
    Define maintenance? I’m not talking

    >== You need to poke your head outside of JSC
    > and see how the rest of the world works, Kelly.
    Oh trust me I get all over. [Have resume will travel.] Most of this year is in Connecticut on Orion and 787. And yes for the big tear downs the birds go to a depo level place. You don’t tear a 747 down at the gate.

    >Try telling anyone in the Air Force that they don’t
    > refuel planes in the air. See the expression on his face.
    They don’t service them in the air. If a engine comes off in mid air, it usually means they are benig shot at. Radar goes down or a engine cuts out – you go to a hanger.

    >> As opposed to? NASA spend more to service the Hubble each
    >> time in trainnig then the flight. So recovery and landing and
    >> reflight would be cheaper. You need a space truck of some
    >> kind either way to do big projects.
    >No, you don’t. Max Hunter used to say that anyone who thinks
    > you can’t do big projects without heavy lift doesn’t know what
    > we did in World War II with nothing larger than the DC-3.
    >And please don’t tell me you don’t think World War II was a big
    > project, or that we built all those airbases in factories and
    > transported them in one piece because it’s impossible to
    >build something on a remote island.

    Actually you needed the bases before the DC-3 could land – runways.

    And major bases needing ships to carry them stuff to. You don’t ship landing craft or buildings for hundreds of guys (a smallish airbase for a couple dozen planes) just with DC-3.

    >>So what’s the advantage of not recovery?
    >The advantage is that it allows us to build things that are
    > too large to fit in the payload bay of any vehicle. ==
    What vehicle can the ISS fit into? Its recoverable – not that we don’t intend to dispose of it – but thas another issue.

    More to the point. What do you do with something like a LEM.

    >>== Throwaway and use nothing but ELVs like Ares?
    >>Build a smaller shuttle that really doesn’t save you much in total costs?
    >I’ve corrected that mistake more times than I care to recall.
    >If you choose to remain willfully ignorant, so be it.

    You give equations, I give historic records. I don’t think your proving your point.

    >>Shuttle cost the gov (adjusting for inflation) about $30b-$35b
    >> to develop. It costs about $6 B a year to operate, and the
    >>per flight direct cost is about $150M for the ET and SRBs.
    >
    >I don’t care what the Shuttle costs. I wasn’t talking about building
    >another Shuttle, Kelly. That’s your dream, not mine.
    Eaither way, its about the only operational case study to get real hard numbers off of. Bloated numbers, but numbers.

    >>$40b for labor per launch (theres some overlap between
    >> these, but I don’t want to look it up.) So flights really don’t cost you.
    >You’re pulling these numbers out of thin air. =
    No but I’m typoing really badly.!! I ment to type $300M. NO idea where $40B came from?? Very sorry.

    In another post I typed could for couldn’t – which might have confused my point.

    ;/

    And the numbers are old GAO stats.

    >>Do it commercial. $8B to develop a commercial shuttle,
    >> buy a pair and launch facilities. MAYBE a $1b a year to
    >>service facilities and craft. Margin cost per flight is a few
    >> hundred thousand per flight in labor, similar in fuel, couple
    >> million in parts, etc. So the flights, really are a trivial part of the costs.

    >Great. So, you fly your Shuttle a dozen times a year, and you’re
    > spending $100 million per flight. Not including amortization,
    > insurance, and all the other things. Another $8 billion wasted
    > on Very Expensive Access To Space.
    I would assume more flights, and the costs include the overhead.
    20 year service life,
    20 flights a year, ignore interest (I have no time) your at
    $25 billion for 400 flights.
    $63M a flight.
    $1,250 a pound if its loaded,
    $30K a pound if it lifts only a ton (actually good for small launches).

    If you assume a new market, tourists, etc, you might go to hundreds of flights a year. Ten times the flights, 1/10th the cost per flight.

    Lets do mini shuttle/rlv/etc. Which is where you like
    2 ton capacity. $2 billion to develop and field given estimates and experience form aircraft and space folks from Gulfstream to Scaled composits.

    $0.4 bilion a year facilities and service (ranges are so expensive, and the costs are fixed for year regardless of size or number of flights).

    You fly 7 times a year (the others the big shuttle would have flow won’t fit in your bay).
    20 years
    $10 billion
    140 flights
    $71 million a flight.
    $18,000 a pound to orbit for the 2 ton cargo. Actually cheaper for the 2 ton cargo to fly on the big shuttle.

    If you assume a new bigger market. The big craft has capacity to service all of it.

    1000 tourists a year.
    5 tourists per flight in your 2 ton craft.
    Could you really do 200 flights a year (plus the 7 cargo)? 4 a week? That might need another ship – or need to add in more servicing costs.

    20 years
    $10 billion
    4140 flights
    $2.4 million a flight.
    $583,000 a tourist to orbit

    62 tourist per flight in the big craft

    20 year service life,
    16 flights a year, plus the 20 before. 36, 3 a month.
    $25 billion for 400 flights.
    $34M a flight.
    $560K a tourist. But they are in a airliner sized craft not a biz jet sized craft. Might get better service?
    Anyway similar costs.

    >>> All you’re doing is repeating the same arguments that were used
    >>> to justify the Shuttle. If those arguments were valid, the Shuttle
    >>> would have been an economic success.

    >> That was the problem with Shuttle, it was to easy to make
    >>economical — so congress refused to fund the upgrades
    >> since that was unacceptable.
    >No, Congress refused to fund the upgrades because none of
    > them ever made sense. ==
    Like replacing the tiles with a metal shelled TPS that would save $8 m a flight in labor? Re packing the bays for serviceability to cut hundreds of millions of $ a flight in labor, in ships that were built for several hundred million a peace? Replacing the SRBs? And lets not even touch on the safety improvements.

    >== I ought to know. I spent enough time talking Congress out
    > of funding that nonsense. When a vehicle flies that seldom, it
    >doesn’t make sense to spend any money upgrading it.
    Though you were the one pushing for higher flight rate vehicles? Those fixes would allow doubling or tripling flight rates and no added yearly costs?

    >>> No, increasing flight rate reduces costs. Look up “learning curve effect.”
    >>Look up program costs. Its more expensive to do EVA’s, design
    >> craft down to to smaller parts, etc. And given the flight costs
    >>are not a major fraction of launch costs. How do you”learn” the costs down?
    >I know about program costs. Program costs are another reason why RLVs must be small.

    Why?

    >You “learn” costs down by flying more often and gaining
    > operational experience. Every time the number of flights doubles,
    > experiences reduces the recurring per-flight costs by about
    >15%, accidents and failure rates are reduced by a similar amount, etc.
    But your not going to learn down the costs of dismantling and reassembling in space rather then ship in one peace from the factory. Or learn down the overhead and R&D. You can learn dow the per flight service costs and training – but that’s like 1/1000th current cost, so its lost in round off errors.

    >>Me to, but cities that don’t pay there way become ghost
    >> towns. They have to be economically productive. So
    >> upping costs as a excuse for the city –
    >Oh, bog! I don’t want to “up” costs, I want to reduce them! ==
    I know, but you were…

    Nana na na na!!
    >==The only way we’re going to get those cities in space is to
    > make transportation cheap. Really cheap. Not your
    >“commercial” Shuttle that costs $100+ million per flight.
    Its cost $63 million a flight for only 20 flights a year. If your building cities (Stanford O’Neils I presume), SSPS, your talking tens of thousands of tons of lift a decade.

    2500 tons per year, 100 flights per year, $12.5 million a flight, $250 a pound.
    😉

    >>> http://tour2space.com/archives/economic/20013962.htm
    >>This proposal is suggesting the shuttle craft can be built for
    >>a “pre-operational investment to $200,000,000” – which is
    >>less then the dev costs for Falcon 1, half the costs to dev
    >>White Knight2 and SS2 — or any similar weight biz jet.
    >Once again, you’re pulling numbers out of the air. The development
    > costs for WK2 and SpaceShip 2 haven’t been publicly released.
    Program cost to Virgin to develop both craft and deliver 5-6 sets is public at about $500M-$600M?
    As you know for lot sizes that small your pretty much just paying for a R&D program. So yout likely looking $400m-$500m for R&D for WK2/SS2.

    ==
    >About an order of magnitude less cost then commercial projections
    > and anything similar I can think of? Its even a fraction of the cost for the BlackSwiftxplane drone!
    >So? UAVS always cost more to develop than piloted aircraft. ==
    X craft are cheap, and your skiping over that order of mag higher for commercial projections or commercial small aircraft!! Hell it takes a billion to get a new model car out the door!

    >== that Blackswift required the development of an entirely new
    > engine, based on an engine concept that’s vaporware. ==
    ??
    Ah, the mils been flying turbo ramjets for decades operationally, and the Blackswifts were to be built up out of pretty much all off the shelf parts!

    >>I’m also wondering how you get 18 people in a ship with
    >> a 2400kg cargo capacity? Are you not including life support, suits, seats?
    >Life support is part of the vehicle, not the cargo. ==
    Its counted as extra weight in airliners. Cargo craft don’t need to carry seats, paneling galleys, bathrooms, etc for cargo.

    >==Do you think the pilot isn’t going to breathe on a cargo flight?
    He won’t breath and wear the suits, sit in the seats, etc for the 18 folks.

    >>> There’s everything for it to do. Space tourism. Satellite refueling,
    >>> inspection, upgrade, and repair. Astronomy. Earth observation.
    >>>Crew rotation. Rescue missions. Military reconnaissance.
    >>> Counterspace missions. Cislunar and NEO missions.
    >>Sorry, all those together -excluding tourism which is a
    >>whole other argument – require anything like the flight rate your talking about.
    >Oh? Ask the US military how many sorties they fly on a daily basis.
    To space? Likely 1 a month. Not likely to soar that much for current missions if you droped the lift cost a order or two of magnitude.

    >>All that’s currently supported by only a couple dozen flights a year.
    > Huh??? Those missions are not “currently supported” by a couple
    > dozen flights a year — they aren’t currently supported at all.
    > When was the last time you saw Hughes dispatch a repair crew to fix a satellite,
    They last for decades without servicing. ..And given they are mostly in geosync, you really don’t want to get out and service them.

    >or a meteorologist hop on a rocket to gather some observations of a hurricane from space?
    Millions of hits a day – via the web. You don’t carry the camera up and down every time.

    >>> When did I say I thought NASA should build anything? –
    >>If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get paid.
    >You don’t think government agencies get paid unless they
    > build things? ==
    NASA doesn’t. It exists for prestige and jobs in districts.
    >You don’t build things yourself, the jobs go away, and you don’t look cool.
    Ok, technically NASA never builds anything they contract it under gov contracts, but they keep the costs way up due to gov rules, and can keep it in the right districts.

    We’ld all love NASA to do productive things, but we’re out voted.

    >>>Right. No launch market. All those thousands of people who
    >>> say they want to go into space don’t exist. ==
    >>Really even thousands a pretty tiny market, and it doesn’t currently exist.
    >One of us needs some serious psychotherapy, Kelly. On my last
    > trip to Fort Worth, I spoke to over 400 people who told me
    > they wanted to go into space — and you’re telling me none of them exist?
    No I’m saying that’s 400, and none of them were asked to pay for it. If you were asking who would give you $500,000 that day or year to fly into orbit…

    The big question is how many a year can you get on ave for a decade or two? If its 10,000, that’s enough to warrant cruse ship investlents. 100,000 – not enough to warrant a new model airliner, but close. 1,000 – that hardly keeps the SS2’s full.

    >We keep going around in circles, Kelly. Read my lips.
    > I am not talking about spending a couple billion dollars.
    > We should not spend a couple billion dollars. We need
    > to start smaller than that. Not a couple billion dollars.
    > A fraction of a billion dollars.
    You can’t. Most of a billion hardly gets you the SS2/WK2 fleet. Even scaled and Virgin is talking a couple billion for a starter orbital maned craft. Most of a billion gest you Falcons and Dragon, but that’s WAY bellow the capacity your talking about.

    I think the maint point of our circling this is that your assuming you can build a small RLV (2 ton cargo cap) can be fielded for a couple hundred million. Everyone whose worked on these from Boeing to scaled is quoting a couple billion to do it. Everyone whose done anything like it has run up cost pointing to a couple bil for your concept. That factor of ten difference is warping all your estimates.

    I simple won’t by you can build a mini RLV for 1/10th what everyone else estimates, or what 2 ton cap biz jet programs cost.

    That’s also why for the ArcJet I figured space is to spall and you need a big (biz jet sized) market to pay for a biz jet + cost vehicle.

    >>Again, hes assuming he can field a RLV for…
    >>A fraction of SpaceX’s cost to field the Falcon 1 ELV.
    >You mean, he reached the same conclusion that USAF and
    > General Dynamics studies reached in the 1960’s?
    > That RLVs are cheaper to develop than ELVs?

    >You find that shocking? Why?

    Because its never proven out that way in practice. Your assuming you can field a man capable RLV for a fraction of what Virgis fielding the SS2/WK2s for, a tiny fraction of what Cirrus is fielding a new mini jet aircraft for. I just don’t get any way you can beat all relatedareospace history by a order of magnitude.

  24. Josh Reiter Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 8:28 am

    > Kelly is bordering on trollishness. He is
    > clearly swinging at straw men and windmills.
    Just pointing out inconvenient math.

    >== The rest of us are taking a top down approach to
    > addressing our issues of cheap access to space. ==
    Problem is – often doing that without looking at what drives the costs.

    > Also, to commit an ad hominem, if Kelly really does
    > work for NASA in some capacity
    > worse shape than I thought. If the best they can do is
    > hire people that spell ’sense’ as “sence”. As well as a
    > number of other simple spelling mistakes.

    Worked at NASA or on NASA projects – among a long, weird, list of other things. And yes my inability to spell is legendary!

  25. > Daveon Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 10:22 am

    >> Yet, industry continues even though some cargoes fail to arrive.
    >>The world does not come to a grinding halt, even when a ship sinks or an airliner crashes.

    > It largely depends on the industry and the cargo and what you’re doing.
    ==
    > How about if you get your fastening
    > possibly be a problem, there’s _lots_ of fasteners aren’t there…
    Like the whole 787 line grinding to a halt when the vendor couldn’t supply the quantity of fasteners needed to assemble them.

    Or the night mare for a Mars trip – what if you run out of fuses, or contaminant filters, or gaskets for the suits, 12 months out?

  26. These are getting long – so.

    Point summary
    1- we all want NASA to be about opening the frontier for the rest of us and getting cutting edge technology out. None of us here want it to be about pork in districts and turf wars over who owns space. But we are outvoted by a landslide.

    2- CATS would allow NASA to save a fortune per launch, so they could do bigger things –
    –except NASA is a federal agency, so its votes per program – not cost – that decides if they can do it. If its to cheap, its not generating enough economic coat tails and public profile to be worth a congressman’s time.

    3 – CATS makes building things in space less economical then building and servicing them on the ground and shipping them to/from space, because CATS drops the space access cost barrier.

    4 – the weird non linearity or developing cats craft of various sizes (a billion or so for a ton or two RLV, $10B for a 25 ton RLV) and the high carrying cost per flight regardless of the size of the flight, so dwarf the cost of the actually flight direct costs. The flights are nearly free compared to the overhead, so big RLVs and small RLVs cost you about as much to operate in anything like current markets. (See numbers below.)

    5- Edwards going to get HUGE sticker shock when he sees the real cost to develop his little RLV.
    😉

    6- To really get costs down to $10-$40 a pound to LEO (which the engineering with current tech is capable of) you need to be talking about closer to 100,000 flights a year, then to 10 or 100 a year.

  27. > Daveon Says:
    >December 17th, 2008 at 11:07 am
    >
    >…and there are so many people queuing to pay for flights
    > to the ISS that they’re already flying people a second time…

    Now that one is a serious jaw dropper. Unless this guy bid out folks ahead of him in line — that implies only a handful of clients world wide! Ok, at low tens of millions a flight – in a ship not that unlikely to kill you – the markets down to the super desperate space cadet ubernares. But .. We only flew a handful and there are repeats?

  28. >
    >
    > #
    >
    > # Edward Wright Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
    >
    =
    > An equivalent transport for space would be sized to
    >carry a few tons would be size to carry a few tons,
    >because that size repesents a reasonable number of
    > flights in the current space launch market. Sizing a
    > vehicle larger than the available market is not reasonable, ==

    Your obviously seeing a different market then I’ve been hearing reported. Certainly different then SpaceX is seeing and reporting.

    Also. Why isn’t it reasonable? Your looking to support a market most economically and profitably – not the most efficently or serve the parts you like?

    >
    > Furthermore, no one even considered your idea
    >of putting an entire invasion force on a single ship
    > that could sunk by one torpedo. If you told any
    >professional military man that a single ship was
    >“more reliable,” or that a convoy would fail if it
    > lost just one ship, he would laugh at you.

    Guess you havn’t heard the arguments about super carriers vers more distributed air wings on smaller ships.

    In any case – what are you talking about?

    If your referring to the estimates that launching a mission like return to the moon on multiple ships LOWEERS the odds of completing the mission. That’s kind of a no brainer since more ships have to work to do the mision. If any one fails – the missions scrubbed. That’s a common problem with serial redundancy, rather then parallel redundancy. Like why more engines doesn’t make airliners more reliable.

    >
    >> There could be a nice little niche market
    >> with some specialist vehicles in the sub-orbital
    >> domain in a few years time and there are so many
    >> people queuing to pay for flights to the ISS that
    >> they’re already flying people a second time…
    >
    > Yes, just as the airlines are flying people a second
    > time. Are you going to start denigrating air travel as a “niche market” now?

    Now your really getting specious. If airlines ran out of new pasengers and started into repeats after what 6 passengers? They would be gone.

    >> If you’re building a paper plant in Jacksonville
    >> and GE “lost” one of the 115KV transformers
    >> and SKC lost a shipment of bearing housings
    >> for the main press rollers, then you’re in a world of pain.
    >
    > LOL. Even coming from a Brit, that is hilarious.
    > We aren’t a third world country, Dave. We
    > have advanced a *little bit* since Colonial days.
    >
    > In that situation, we just call Fedex with the
    > tracking numbers and they locate the missing
    > shipments for us. It happens all the time. If
    > Fedex can’t find them, we call the supplier
    > and ask them to Fedex replacements.

    Yeah, your just skiping over the likely fourtune your losing waiting for the reship.\

    >
    > Of course, we would be in a world of pain if
    > we lived on Planet Daveon, where the only
    > way to move goods is via the Air Shuttle
    > (National Air Transportation System) that
    > only flies five or six times a year.==

    Sorry, that would be planet “Edward Wright”. No one else is suggesting such a unresponcive system.

    Also in planet Wright everyone will cut up there whatever to biz jet sized chunks, don’t mind higher costs, etc. And you can design and field a RLV for less then Rutan can field suborbitals a fraction of the side.

  29. 4 – the weird non linearity or developing cats craft of various sizes (a billion or so for a ton or two RLV,

    Okay, Kelly, when you start lying about what people have said, you’ve crossed the line.

    No credible company has said it would cost a billion dollars. Even the Air Force came up with an estimate of about $100 million for Black Horse. You’re just pulling numbers out of your rear end.

    Once again, a NASA employee is spreading FUD about competitors in order to promote his own Shuttle replacement hobby horse. And you wonder why people don’t like NASA?

    Honestly, Kelly, I don’t understand you guys. If NASA would work with private enterprise (and perhaps the military), you could do all kinds of things that you aren’t able to do now. Yet, you act as if it’s more important that we fail than you succeed.

    Okay, the military thing I kind of understand — NASA has always been a hotbed of liberal pacifism — but what’s the deal with the private sector?

    6- To really get costs down to $10-$40 a pound to LEO (which the engineering with current tech is capable of) you need to be talking about closer to 100,000 flights a year, then to 10 or 100 a year.

    Yet, you want to rape the taxpayers to build a Shuttle replacement that would be hard-pressed to fly even 10 times a year — let alone 100?

    Well, you did say that working for JSC had damaged your brain. 🙂

    Oh, by the way. Since you think it’s so ridiculous that the private sector would sell someone a ticket to go into space twice, what does that say about you guys giving “super desperate space cadet ubernare” John Glenn a free ticket for a second flight? 🙂

  30. Your obviously seeing a different market then I’ve been hearing reported. Certainly different then SpaceX is seeing and reporting.

    Yes, very different. The market SpaceX is interested in — getting enough Federal dollars to send Bob Zubrin to Mars — is not one I care about. (Although I admit that sometimes I really would like to send Bob Zubrin to Mars.)

    Also. Why isn’t it reasonable? Your looking to support a market most economically and profitably – not the most efficently or serve the parts you like?

    Because it can’t be supported by real numbers (as opposed to the numbers you keep pulling out of your rear end).

    Guess you havn’t heard the arguments about super carriers vers more distributed air wings on smaller ships.

    Well, that’s another thing you guessed wrong about. About 983 or so on the list.

    Have you heard that aircraft carriers operate as part of battle groups that have more than one ship? And that they’re capable of launching more than one aircraft, sometimes within minutes of one another?

    Hey, I hear NASA’s aviation group at Ellington Field can even launch their T-38s in formation. Haven’t you told them that multiple launches are impossible to coordinate?

    If your referring to the estimates that launching a mission like return to the moon on multiple ships LOWEERS the odds of completing the mission. That’s kind of a no brainer since more ships have to work to do the mision. If any one fails – the missions scrubbed.

    Sigh. Yes, Kelly, that’s a no-brainer. Now, try using your brain, and you’ll see that isn’t true. Anyone who’s using his brain will distribute supplies and equipment between the ships so that doesn’t happen. Do you think a carrier battle group fails if it loses a few planes or even a destroyer or a frigate? Have you read the accounts of World War II battles?

    Or the accounts of early explorers? Columbus lost a third of his fleet the first time out and still completed his mission.

    That’s a common problem with serial redundancy, rather then parallel redundancy. Like why more engines doesn’t make airliners more reliable.

    Okay, Kelly. I’ll wait here while you run out and tell Boeing. Maybe they’ll see the error of their ways and decide to make the 787 a single-engine airplane. 🙂

    Where did I say that spacecraft should have serial redundancy and not parallel redundancy? You keep reading things I never wrote.

    If airlines ran out of new pasengers and started into repeats after what 6 passengers? They would be gone.

    I’d have to check, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find Uncle Orville and Uncle Wilbur had some repeats among their first six customers.

    Unlike you and Dave, the airlines actually like repeat customers. Have you heard of frequent flyer programs?

    Gee, Kelly, didn’t some of NASA’s Mercury astronauts “repeat” in Gemini and Apollo? Are you going to tell us that’s a sign that NASA was failing?

  31. Kelly Starks says (and says, and sayzzzz….) Erk! Oh, yeah.

    “If congress real starts enforcing that – it means they are going to gut and close down NASA.”

    Yay! About damn time.

    Mister Starks! Tear down this wall!!!

  32. But with space craft (well designed ones) the direct costs are under 1% of the per flight costs. Facilities overhead (range, insurance, licensing launches, etc) are a big cost and unrelated to size. R&D dev costs are a factor, but a 4 fold difference in a fraction of the per launch costs doesn’t bite much, no the other hand potentially doubling or tripling your flight rate cuts the per flight costs 2-3 fold.

    Actually, those numbers are for *poorly* designed spacecraft.

    A basic principle for all transportation systems (air, sea, land, or space) is that costs should be balanced evenly between three major components — propellant, capital costs, and labor/maintenance. In a well-designed, well-managed system, each of those components is roughly 1/3 of total costs.

    When one of the three components rises much above 1/3, that means that something has gone wrong. Costs for that component are out of control, and you need to work to bring them back in line.

    When fuel costs start to rise above 1/3, for example, airlines get nervous.

    If capital costs for your proposed vehicle represent 99% of total costs, that indicates you’re spending way too much on hardware relative to fuel and maintenance. (If airlines operated with capital costs at that level, an airline ticket would cost about 200 times what it does today.) You need to redesign the vehicle to get capital costs down.

  33. > # Edward Wright Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    >> 4 – the weird non linearity or developing cats craft of
    >> various sizes (a billion or so for a ton or two RLV,

    > Okay, Kelly, when you start lying about what
    >people have said, you’ve crossed the line.

    No lieing, those are the numbers.

    > No credible company has said it would cost
    > a billion dollars. Even the Air Force came up
    > with an estimate of about $100 million for Black Horse. ==

    Using the article on Black Horse ands black colt by Robert M. Zubrin and Mitchell Burnside Clapp for ref, ( http://www.risacher.org/bh/analog.html ) they list the SUB-orbital Black colt, carrying a separate upper stage delivering a half ton to orbit as likely to cost $100M in ’95 dollars. Actual programs like SpaceX falcon, SS1 and SS2 have proven MUCH more expensive then that, and you and I were referring to a RLV craft capable of carying1-2 tons. Hell in the mid ‘90’s the DC-X ran $60 million and it was using off the shelf to literally scrap yard parts. Assuming you can get (As the AIAA paper you offered URLs to) a 18 person RLV in operation for $200 million in now dollars is just a fantasy.

    I have been quoting real estimates and realhistory of real programs. I’m not making it up as I go along.

    > Once again, a NASA employee is spreading
    > FUD about competitors in order to promote his
    > own Shuttle replacement hobby horse. ==

    I’m not a NASA employee. I worked on NASA programs and at NASA centers adn HQ, but I’m not NASA civil servant.

    You might have noticed I’m not exactly singing the prises of NASA here.

    >==
    > Honestly, Kelly, I don’t understand you guys. If
    > NASA would work with private enterprise (and
    > perhaps the military), you could do all kinds of
    > things that you aren’t able to do now. Yet, you
    > act as if it’s more important that we fail than you succeed.

    Wellto NASA it ismore important that civilian low cost fails then NASA succeeds, but your resorting to ad homium atacks when you don’t like the facts has nothing to do wioth that.

    > Okay, the military thing I kind of understand
    > — NASA has always been a hotbed of liberal
    > pacifism

    No, other then fear of competition with the AF over turf (space) and fearing they will beleft behind by the more advanced and bigger mil program, the AF personel and NASA folks work fine together. — At least at JSC. In joint programs like NASP, or things like SSTO, NASA looked like complete incompetents. Which is obviously bad in turf wars.

    >— but what’s the deal with the private sector?

    Fear and contempt. Obviously with the COTS contract they (correctly) thought the idea anyone could develop a launcher for $100M was laughable, and figured they could put that out, a bunch of alt.space clueless types would face plant, they could tell congress they gave them a shot but they just aren’t ready for prime time…..

    The COTS money was openly considered future “management reserve funds” for Ares/Orion.

    Then of course SpaceX delivered with flying colors when NASA face planted with Ares / Orion! SpaceX didn’t have to deliver within the COTS budget since they were building for completely other reasons anyway, and just happened to have a craft in work able to replace Orion’s cargo and manned ISS delivery duties.

    This is bad, nightmarishly bad for NASA. For NASA head Griffen, this is a personal attack on his dream, his legacy, his career monument, Ares / Orion.

    >> 6- To really get costs down to $10-$40 a
    >> pound to LEO (which the engineering with
    >> current tech is capable of) you need to be
    >> talking about closer to 100,000 flights a year, then to 10 or 100 a year.

    > Yet, you want to rape the taxpayers to build a
    > Shuttle replacement that would be hard-pressed
    > to fly even 10 times a year — let alone 100?

    I never wanted the Tax payers to do it — well if of agencies contracted to use it, thus being anchor tenants that would be good and necessary. DOD and NASA are the bulk of the lift. But I’ldlike it to be built commercially, and all the big aero firms (the normal suspects) have offered to build various versions.

    >== what does that say about [NASA] giving
    > “super desperate space cadet ubernare” John
    > Glenn a free ticket for a second flight? 🙂

    PR and sucking up to a powerful senator. NASA has flown several folks on shuttle for PR, political necessity, or favors to helpful contractors leads.

    >>
    >> Your obviously seeing a different market
    >> then I’ve been hearing reported. Certainly
    >> different then SpaceX is seeing and reporting.

    Specifically a interview with Musk where he explained that they expected falcon 1 and the other smaller falcon designs, were assumed to be what would generate most of the market interest. With some interst in Falcon 9. Instead they were getting the most interest in the Falcon-9.

    >> Also. Why isn’t it reasonable? Your looking
    >> to support a market most economically and
    >> profitably – not the most efficently or serve the parts you like?

    > Because it can’t be supported by real numbers==

    You could perhaps offer some, or some argument, rather then just insults and blowing folks off?

    ==

    > Hey, I hear NASA’s aviation group at
    > Ellington Field can even launch their
    > T-38s in formation. Haven’t you told them
    > that multiple launches are impossible to coordinate?

    Not impossible, but its riskier, and has caused problems before. Given the lower quality and redundancy NASA was specifying for Orion, I presume Ares would also be less reliable.

    >> If your referring to the estimates that launching
    >> a mission like return to the moon on multiple
    >> ships LOWEERS the odds of completing the
    >> mission. That’s kind of a no brainer since
    >> more ships have to work to do the mision. If
    >> any one fails – the missions scrubbed.

    > Sigh. Yes, Kelly, that’s a no-brainer. Now,
    > try using your brain, and you’ll see that isn’t
    > true. Anyone who’s using his brain will distribute
    > supplies and equipment between the ships so that
    > doesn’t happen. ==

    Not possible in this case, and certainly not what was designed. You have a Orion, a Altair, and a Ares upper stage LEO to TLI booster. So you can’t seperate them into a complete set of systems in both ELVs, since the ElVs can’t carry them. So there are 2 different ELV’s, carrying 2 different classes of craft. If one of the ELVs could carry a complete mission set, there would beno reason to coordinate with the other ELV launch, or fly them at the same time..

    >> That’s a common problem with serial redundancy,
    >>rather then parallel redundancy. Like why more
    >> engines doesn’t make airliners more reliable.

    > Okay, Kelly. I’ll wait here while you run out
    > and tell Boeing. Maybe they’ll see the error
    > of their ways and decide to make the 787 a single-engine airplane. 🙂

    Note how its a twin engine, and Boeing switch al their liners to twin from 4 engine – 2 is the min number legal for extended over water ops, and they hadto push the FAA to move to except 2.

    > Where did I say that spacecraft should have serial
    > redundancy and not parallel redundancy?

    Your assuming parallel redundancy. Specifically above, “…..Anyone who’s using his brain will distribute supplies and equipment between the ships so that doesn’t happen…” That would be parallel redundancy, like parallel strands in a riope or steel cable. Ares is serial redundancy, like a chain -any link fails, you got nothing.

    >> If airlines ran out of new pasengers and
    >> started into repeats after what 6 passengers?
    >> They would be gone.

    > I’d have to check, but it wouldn’t surprise
    > me to find Uncle Orville and Uncle Wilbur
    > had some repeats among their first six customers.

    Orville and Wilber wern’t runing a airline, or boosting about the longline of people via for the few avalible slots.

    And Orville and Wilber had a new craft they were showing of, not marketing flights on a 40 year old series of craft.

    > Gee, Kelly, didn’t some of NASA’s
    > Mercury astronauts “repeat” in Gemini
    > and Apollo? Are you going to tell us
    > that’s a sign that NASA was failing?

    Reusing employees to fly your craft, isn’t the same as being unable to attract new customers so quickly.

    Your getting very defensive Ed.

  34. > # Simon Jester Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
    >
    > Kelly Starks says (and says, and sayzzzz….) Erk! Oh, yeah.
    >
    >> “If congress real starts enforcing that – it
    >> means they are going to gut and close down NASA.”
    >
    > Yay! About damn time.

    Really!! If the best NASA can do after 50 years is reenact their glory days of Apollo, they aren’t doing anything I see as usefull!!!

  35. > # Edward Wright Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
    >
    >> But with space craft (well designed ones)
    >> the direct costs are under 1% of the per flight
    >> costs. ===

    Actually under 0.1% of per flight costs.

    >>===Facilities overhead (range, insurance, l
    >> icensing launches, etc) are a big cost and
    >> unrelated to size. R&D dev costs are a factor,
    >> but a 4 fold difference in a fraction of the per
    >> launch costs doesn’t bite much, no the other
    >>hand potentially doubling or tripling your flight rate cuts the per flight costs 2-3 fold.
    >
    > Actually, those numbers are for *poorly* designed spacecraft.
    >
    > A basic principle for all transportation systems
    > (air, sea, land, or space) is that costs should be
    > balanced evenly between three major components
    > — propellant, capital costs, and labor/maintenance.
    > In a well-designed, well-managed system, each
    > of those components is roughly 1/3 of total costs. ==

    True, but in the case of space craft theres simply to little market. Its like buying anew car you only drive a mile or two a month. Your gas oil, repair costs per mile are the same, but the overhead of car payments, insurence, lisences, etc start utterly dwarfing normal operating costs per mile.

    Spacecraft are stuck there though. They can be developed for something similar to similar weight aircraft, their usage rate is something like a million fold less. So that same overhead per fleet, that in aircraft would be nearly negligible, dwarf normal operating costs that would normally fit you’re 1/3rd 1/3rd 1/3rd rule of most craft.

    Guess the good news is there is no technical issue against lower costs, we just can’t find a significant market.

  36. No lieing, those are the numbers.

    They are numbers you made up. They are not numbers that come from any credible source. I have given you pointers to the real numbers, but you don’t seem to care about the real numbers.

    > Even the Air Force came up with an estimate of about $100 million for Black Horse.

    Using the article on Black Horse ands black colt by Robert M. Zubrin and Mitchell Burnside Clapp for ref, ( http://www.risacher.org/bh/analog.html ) they list the SUB-orbital Black colt, carrying a separate upper stage delivering a half ton to orbit as likely to cost $100M in ’95 dollars.

    Okay, you’re confused about the difference between Black Horse and Black Colt. Aside from that, do you have a point?

    Nothing in that article supports your whopper about $1 billion.

    Actual programs like SpaceX falcon,

    Falcon is an ELV, not an RLV. Do you not understand the difference?

    you and I were referring to a RLV craft capable of carying1-2 tons. Hell in the mid ‘90’s the DC-X ran $60 million and it was using off the shelf to literally scrap yard parts.

    Yes, and NASA said DC-X was going to cost $2 billion. It’s hardly unprecedented for NASA employees to say it’s impossible to do things at low cost.

    And there are people in the private sector building DC-X like vehicles for even less right now.

    So, what is your point? That NASA employees have been wrong in the past, so you must be right now?

    I’m not a NASA employee. I worked on NASA programs and at NASA centers adn HQ, but I’m not NASA civil servant.

    Neither is Mike Griffin. Your point is…?

    >— but what’s the deal with the private sector?

    Fear and contempt.

    Do you expect Congress to give you umpteen billion dollars to build Shuttle II just to relieve your fear and contempt???

    There may be weaker arguments for selling your program, Kelly, but I don’t know what they are. Do you have anything more convincing than that?


    > Yet, you want to rape the taxpayers to build a
    > Shuttle replacement that would be hard-pressed
    > to fly even 10 times a year — let alone 100?

    I never wanted the Tax payers to do it

    Really??? Who do you think pays for NASA projects?

    the big aero firms (the normal suspects) have offered to build various versions.

    Yes, with taxpayers’ money. On a cost-plus basis, of course. They certainly aren’t going to do it with their own money.

    Specifically a interview with Musk where he explained that they expected falcon 1 and the other smaller falcon designs, were assumed to be what would generate most of the market interest. With some interst in Falcon 9. Instead they were getting the most interest in the Falcon-9.

    You read an interview with Elon. That’s nice. I’ve read interviews with him, too. I’ve also met him. And I’ve been in meetings at FAA headquarters with SpaceX representatives where their plans were being discussed. So, maybe you could grant that I have some idea what I’m talking about?

    > Hey, I hear NASA’s aviation group at
    > Ellington Field can even launch their
    > T-38s in formation. Haven’t you told them
    > that multiple launches are impossible to coordinate?

    Not impossible, but its riskier, and has caused problems before.

    Okay, great. Have you convinced the T-38 operators to stop doing multiple launches because you think they’re so risky and cause so many problems? Or are they still laughing at you? 🙂

    Every major aviation operator in the world does multiple takeoffs and landings. Routinely. None of them consider it risky or problematic.

    What makes you so sure that you’re right and they’re wrong?

    To put it another way, Kelly, which do you consider to be more successful — aviation or the space program?

    > Sigh. Yes, Kelly, that’s a no-brainer. Now,
    > try using your brain, and you’ll see that isn’t
    > true. Anyone who’s using his brain will distribute
    > supplies and equipment between the ships so that
    > doesn’t happen. ==

    Not possible in this case, and certainly not what was designed. You have a Orion, a Altair, and a Ares upper stage LEO to TLI booster.

    So? You have those things because that’s the architecture NASA designed. Not because it’s the only architecture possible. It is not what various contractors designed in the pre-ESAS phase, and it’s certainly not what I’m advocating.

    What makes you think I am advocating Ares and Orion? Doesn’t the fact that I keep saying NASA should not do Ares and Orion suggest that I don’t think NASA should do Ares and Orion? How can I possibly make that any more clear to you?

    So you can’t seperate them into a complete set of systems in both ELVs, since the ElVs can’t carry them.

    Where did I advocate using two ELVs, Kelly? Or any ELV, for that matter? You’re apparently confusing me with Mike Griffin, or someone else.

    Note how [the 787 is] a twin engine, and Boeing switch al their liners to twin from 4 engine – 2 is the min number legal for extended over water ops, and they hadto push the FAA to move to except 2.

    Yes, Kelly, I know the 787 is a twin engine. That’s my point. The FAA doesn’t believe that an airliner with a single engine would be as reliable as an airliner with two. Why should I believe that you’re right and all the engineers at FAA (and NavAir) are wrong?

    That would be parallel redundancy, like parallel strands in a riope or steel cable. Ares is serial redundancy, like a chain -any link fails, you got nothing.

    ARGH!!!!!! I AM NOT ADVOCATING ARES! I AM NOT ADVOCATING ARES! I AM NOT ADVOCATING ARES!

  37. True, but in the case of space craft theres simply to little market.

    No, there’s not “to little market” [sic]. There’s too much rocket.

    If you design a vehicle that’s too big for the market, that’s not the market’s fault. It’s yours. You have to design to real world conditions.

    Spacecraft are stuck there though. They can be developed for something similar to similar weight aircraft, their usage rate is something like a million fold less.

    I feel like I’m speaking Martian, or you’re speaking Gaelic or something.

    That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Kelly. We have to design vehicles that are sized appropriate so that they *will* have high usage rates. Please find a Martian interpreter to read that sentence for you, if you can’t read it yourself.

    Guess the good news is there is no technical issue against lower costs, we just can’t find a significant market.

    No, we just find can’t find a significant market. It’s just not a market that you consider politically correct to acknowledge. 🙂

  38. 1. > Edward Wright Says:
    > December 17th, 2008 at 9:20 pm

    >> No lying, those are the numbers.
    > They are numbers you made up. They are
    > not numbers that come from any credible source.===
    McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Scaled Composites, Zubrin, MBC, Those aren’t credible sources??

    And could you manage some manors here? Yelling liar liar liar if I quote something you don’t like or don’t agree with is hardly mature, or convincing.

    >== I have given you pointers to the real numbers, but you don’t seem to care about the real numbers.
    >>> Even the Air Force came up with an estimate
    >>> of about $100 million for Black Horse.
    >
    >> Using the article on Black Horse ands black colt
    >> by Robert M. Zubrin and Mitchell Burnside Clapp

    >> for ref, ( http://www.risacher.org/bh/analog.html )
    >> they list the SUB-orbital Black colt, carrying a separate
    >> upper stage delivering a half ton to orbit, as likely to cost $100M in ’95 dollars.

    > Okay, you’re confused about the difference between
    > Black Horse and Black Colt. Aside from that, do you have a point?

    I’m not confusing them. Your numbers “of about $100 million for Black Horse” are contradicted by that article co authored by the Architect of Black Horse. Presumably said head of the Black Horse study (Mitchell Burnside Clapp) would know what he or his group were estimating it would cost. The article states Black Colt, not Black HORSE, could be built for $100 M in the mid ‘90’s ($160M in current year money). Black colt was a reduced cost/capability design only capable of suborbital flight, not Black Horses orbital capacity. I.E. its more like a SS2 then a Blackhorse shuttle.

    Also as a nit, given SS1 was only supposed to cost $20M not the $35M it wound up costing, and Rutan’s been doing this a lot longer then Zubrin and MBC, I’d expect Black Colt or Black Horse to cost more then they estimated as well. Which would suggest Black Colt costing ($35/$20)x 160 = $280M. With SS2/WK2 costing about $600M for a small fleet, and presumably designed for higher reliability and safety as a tourist craft, and given Rutan’s claims. This numbers seem consistent.

    > >Actual programs like SpaceX falcon,
    >
    > Falcon is an ELV, not an RLV. Do you not understand the difference?

    Actually later Falcons were supposed to be RLVs; but since ELVs are cheaper to develop historically, the fact these Falcon’s costs exceed your cost estimates for a larger RLV, your number estimates are again contradicted by history.

    >> you and I were referring to a RLV craft capable of
    >> carying1-2 tons. Hell in the mid ‘90’s the DC-X
    >> ran $60 million and it was using off the shelf to literally scrap yard parts.
    >
    > Yes, and NASA said DC-X was going to cost $2 billion.==

    No McDonnell Douglas said they were $3B (in mid ‘90’s money, in a commercial operation) and 3 years from being able to have full function FAA certified, DC-X derived shuttles rolling off a assembly line.

    Note that YES doing this for NASA was projected to cost 4 times as much (and SS1 would have cost NASA 30-40 times as much)

    > And there are people in the private sector building
    > DC-X like vehicles for even less right now.

    If you mean DC-X like low speed low alt craft (not the later DC-Y/3 orbit capable shuttles) the only thing I’m aware of it Blue Origin, and they spent far more, and haven’t gotten as far, and are a few years behind their schedule. (When I talked to them a few years ago, they expected to be flying commercial suborbital flights, and test orbital flights, years ago.)

    ==
    >>>— but what’s the [NASA] deal with the private sector?
    >> Fear and contempt.
    >
    > Do you expect Congress to give you umpteen
    > billion dollars to build Shuttle II just to relieve
    > your fear and contempt???

    Not MY fear and contempt. I’m not NASA, I don’t work for them, I don’t have their goals. I’m just explaining where they are at.

    NASA’s fear and contempt is that if the private firms like SpaceX, Virgin, Blue, succeed at the cost numbers they are projecting (a few billion to return folks to the moon, not $200 billion like “Apollo on Steroids”) then NASA serves no purpose. If Virgins taking tourists to the moon, NASA’s flying folks to the moon at vastly higher cost, is a joke not a point of national pride. If NASA programs don’t both seem valuable to voter, and are expensive enough to put enough money in districts to interest voters, Congress has no incentive to approve the money. Hence NASA dies.

    Contempt is mere ego of the agency assuming others can’t do it for vastly less, and that these unworthy private persons would dare try to take space away from NASA. They also Hate the DOD carving out some of space from NASA, but that’s another war.

    >>> Yet, you want to rape the taxpayers to build a
    >>> Shuttle replacement that would be hard-pressed
    >>> to fly even 10 times a year — let alone 100?
    >>
    >> I never wanted the Tax payers to do it
    >
    > Really??? Who do you think pays for NASA projects?

    I didn’t want NASA to do it. Your mis quoting me, — as well as others like Zubrin and MBC.

    >> the big aero firms (the normal suspects) have
    >> offered to build various versions.
    >
    > Yes, with taxpayers’ money. On a cost-plus basis, of
    > course. They certainly aren’t going to do it with their own money.

    Actually yes, they offered to do it with their own money, out of pocket, if someone NASA, DOD, anyone, would step up as a customer for services. McDonnell Douglas did this, L/M did this with Venture Star as a proposal after they won the X-33 contract, etc.

    No customers, no ships.

    >==maybe you could grant that I have some idea what I’m talking about?

    Not when your directly contradicting what the people themselves are saying! Such as above with the Black Horse folk’s, or me.

    > >> that multiple launches are impossible to coordinate?
    >>Not impossible, but its riskier, and has caused problems before.
    >
    > Every major aviation operator in the world does multiple takeoffs
    > and landings. Routinely. None of them consider it risky or problematic.
    > What makes you so sure that you’re right and they’re wrong?

    They don’t say they can do that with LVs reliably. No ones done it with LV’s successfully. Hardly anything NASA has launched, launched no time. Assuming they can routinely start launching Ares I and V pairs (which is what we were referring to here) on schedule in sequence is not a great bet.

    That’s what they say, that’s what I’ve been saying.

    > To put it another way, Kelly, which do you consider
    > to be more successful — aviation or the space program?

    Successful at getting into space?

    >>> Sigh. Yes, Kelly, that’s a no-brainer. Now,
    >>> try using your brain, and you’ll see that isn’t
    >>> true. Anyone who’s using his brain will distribute
    >>> supplies and equipment between the ships so that
    >>> doesn’t happen. ==
    >>
    >> Not possible in this case, and certainly not what
    >>was designed. You have a Orion, a Altair, and a Ares upper stage LEO to TLI booster.
    >>
    > So? You have those things because that’s the architecture
    > NASA designed. Not because it’s the only architecture possible. ===

    Well we were talking on this thread about the Ares and why its launching on multiple ships makes it less not more reliable. Which was offered as a counter to your statement that flying things in lots of ships is no mission risk.

    Ignoring that, every multi module (LEM/booster/CM design proposed or possible depends on each working. No one was talking about launching fleets of simultaneous craft to go together. Nor give the tiny numbers of folks per mission, separating them in redundant ships, makes much sense or is affordable.

    > Yes, Kelly, I know the 787 is a twin engine. That’s
    > my point. The FAA doesn’t believe that an airliner
    > with a single engine would be as reliable as an airliner with two.==
    The FAA used to assume 4 would be safer then 2, and Boeing convinced them that 2 was safer.

    And as a aside the FAA does acknowledge that in many cases (specifically small private twins) twins are much less safe the single engine craft. Just a aside.

    >> True, but in the case of space craft theres simply to little market.
    >
    > No, there’s not “to little market” [sic]. There’s too much rocket.
    > If you design a vehicle that’s too big for the market, that’s not the
    > market’s fault. It’s yours. ==
    >== That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Kelly. We have to
    > design vehicles that are sized appropriate so that they *will* have high usage rates.

    There is no market. Global world demand is only 50+ flights a year of everything. Even if you could develop a craft capable of carrying ALL of them its still nothing. There’s no way you could size more appropriately then capable of carrying everything in the world going to space. (And yes designing one craft capable of serving all the current market is politically and likely physically impossible.

    It is not that if you built the right craft the market would use it at high rates. There are no current high rates using anything. So the central wall to CATS is not technology. Obviously no current LV is designed to function at a high flight rate, but given there’s no demand, and all the big aero firms have proposed ones that could, it’s a moot point.

    So.. the good news is there is no technical issue against lower costs, we just can’t find a significant market.
    We all have ideas of what COULD BECOME a big market in the future, but no ones convinced enough to put down money and order the ships – so no one builds them for sale. Again, several firms have offered – no takers making deposits, not production run.

    I tried to get around this in The ArcJet proposal I sent you by using a existing NON space market that’s HUGE. Offer something they would buy for their non space transport needs that also can get to space, and you can tap a little bit of a HUGE market, rather then trying to fund a ship for a market that doesn’t exist now, while trying to develop the market for the ship that doesn’t exist but your trying to buy.

    One of the reasons I mailed it to you was to show you a alternate path that currently exists. Every previous transport system developed to take a bit of a current market, and then expand the total market. So with ArcJet I was trying to do that, rather then get stuck in the eternal chicken and egg lock space access has been in for 40 years.

    Summary points
    A- Your cost estimate, quoted by the Millennium folks AIAA paper, to develop a fairly large RLV for $200 million is contradicted by the experience even of people (SpaceX, Black Horse, etc) your quoting. Much less projections of groups (SpaceX, Scaled, etc) for a craft of that size and smaller. So I’m basing my cost estimates on what major groups with track records have shown. I.E. your likely going to need a billion to get a 2 ton, man carrying, RLV in anything like commercial operation, with acceptable safety/reliability/maintainability. Rutan and Virgin are saying more,

    B- multiple flights to do something aren’t necessarily safer or more reliable. Usually are more costly.

    C- current missions, like to the moon, are to small to use huge fleets of small craft. So hyper redundancy isn’t practical or possible.

    D- You can’t pay today for a ship, with no current buyer(s) paying you. You can’t get major investors (one with enough investment capital to bankroll a aerospace project of this scale) to pay for it with no current identified buyers (it would be illegal as well as stupid for them to do so).

    E- Scaled and SpaceX have identified 2 buyers R. Branson, and E. Musk who can and will pay for very small scale initial projects of a few hundred million. Branson and Musk hope/believe they can find / develop a market which will pay off their investment, and pay for later investments in the bigger scaled developments they are really interested in. So far no real luck. SpaceX has some COTS crumbs (though they may well have precipitated the unraveling of NASA) but not enough to fund the Falcon Dragon program they are using to get them. SpaceX also has won some contracts with Biggelow to ferry folks and supplies to the Biggelow stations. So far no flights, nor payments.

    Oh – in case your wondering why I dump these at night. I can’t access this thread http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=15404 from the office system.

  39. And could you manage some manors here? Yelling liar liar liar if I quote something you don’t like

    You didn’t quote anybody, Kelly. You just made crap up.

    I’m not confusing them. Your numbers “of about $100 million for Black Horse” are contradicted by that article co authored by the Architect of Black Horse.

    Nope. The article you’re talking about is available online. http://www.risacher.org/bh/analog.html.

    Nowhere does the article say Black Horse would cost one billion dollars, as you claim.

    The article states Black Colt, not Black HORSE, could be built for $100 M in the mid ‘90’s

    I never claimed the Analog article said Black Horse could be built for around $100 million.

    I never mentioned the Analog article at all. You found that article, and you assumed that must be the sole source of information about Black Horse.

    If you had asked me for sources, instead of assuming them, I would have pointed you to the USAF Spacecast 2020 paper, for example. Which states, “The top priority should be an X program to demonstrate the validity of the Black Horse TAV concept. The entire cost of such a program would be less than $150 million.”

    http://www.au.af.mil/Spacecast/app-h/app-h.doc

    Black colt was a reduced cost/capability design only capable of suborbital flight, not Black Horses orbital capacity.

    Yes, which explains why Black Colt was estimated to cost “under $100 million” while Black Horse was $150 million.

    Both figures are, as I stated, around $100 million. Neither is anywhere close to the one billion dollar figure you’ve been claiming.

    Also as a nit, given SS1 was only supposed to cost $20M not the $35M it wound up costing

    No, it cost $25 million. Stop making crap up.

    since ELVs are cheaper to develop historically,

    No, they aren’t. NASA historically assumed they are cheaper to develop. Studies of actual development programs show otherwise. A General Dynamics study found that the X-15 program cost only 60% as much as an ELV with equivalent performance. An independent Air Force study, conducted using different methodology, came to the same conclusion.

    the fact these Falcon’s costs exceed your cost estimates for a larger RLV, your number estimates are again contradicted by history.

    Falcon is not an RLV.

    SpaceX had to launch three rockets before they got one to work right. That means they had to build three rockets and pay for three rockets.

    An RLV can abort back to the launch site if something goes wrong. That means it can survive most failures, just as airliners survive most failures. That means you *don’t* need to lose lots rockets during the development program, and you don’t need to *pay* for lots of replacements. That saves money.

    The SpaceShip One development program included 66 flights of the first stage (White Knight) and 17 flights of the second stage (SpaceShip One). That’s a total of 83 flights. If it were an ELV, Scaled Composites would have had to build 83 vehicles to carry out that flight test program, instead of only two.

    Which do you think costs more, building 83 vehicles or building only 2?

    Plus, it’s usually a lot easier to determine why a failure occurred if you can examine the vehicle back in the hangar rather than having to send divers down to pick wreckage off the bottom of the ocean or rely solely on telemetry analysis.

    > Yes, and NASA said DC-X was going to cost $2 billion.==

    No McDonnell Douglas said they were $3B (in mid ‘90’s money, in a commercial operation) and 3 years from being able to have full function FAA certified, DC-X derived shuttles rolling off a assembly line.

    Which does not change the fact that NASA said it would cost $2 billion to build DC-X: which ended up costing about $60 million.

    Now, please stop making crap up.

    Not MY fear and contempt. I’m not NASA, I don’t work for them,

    You say you work at JSC, but you don’t work for NASA? One of us is seriously confused. Who do you think runs JSC?

    And why did you mention fear and contempt when I asked why you were spreading FUD?

    I didn’t want NASA to do it. Your mis quoting me, — as well as others like Zubrin and MBC.

    I never quoted Zubrin or MBC. I don’t even know what MBC is. Maybe you mean MSNBC, but I never quoted them, either. Stop making stuff up.

    As for not wanting NASA to do it, here are your own words:

    I’ld see NASA pay to have a commercial team/firm field a low cost RLV, eat the overhead, and let the team market the rest at margin cost etc

    Are there who Kelly Starks, one who wants NASA to pay a “commercial” team to build a giant 25-ton RLV, and one who doesn’t???

    > Every major aviation operator in the world does multiple takeoffs
    > and landings. Routinely. None of them consider it risky or problematic.
    > What makes you so sure that you’re right and they’re wrong?

    They don’t say they can do that with LVs reliably. No ones done it with LV’s successfully. Hardly anything NASA has launched, launched no time. Assuming they can routinely start launching Ares I and V pairs

    Once again, you’re confusing ELVs with reusable vehicles (and continuing with your inane assumption that I am advocating Ares I and V).

    The point, which you seem unable to grok, is that reusable vehicles are far more reliable than ELVs. Reusable vehicles can easily do multiple launches, landings, rendezvous, and other operations that you consider
    too difficult. Aircraft do those things every day. Often in bad weather, with far more variables than you ever have to cope with in space.

    Well we were talking on this thread about the Ares and why its launching on multiple ships makes it less not more reliable.

    That’s what you’re discussing, Kelly. That’s not what Henry Spencer was discussing in his article at all. Did you read his article?

    You haven’t shown that Ares is more reliable than launching smaller payloads on multiple RLVs. All you’ve done is make scattershot arguments, most of them based on the bizarre assumption that I am advocating using multiple launches of Ares.

    The technical term for that is “strawman argument.”

    Ignoring that, every multi module (LEM/booster/CM design proposed or possible depends on each working. No one was talking about launching fleets of simultaneous craft to go together.

    No one?

    Even if you confine your statement to NASA and VSE, that isn’t true. One of the original contractor studies, pre-ESAS, explicitly called for a flotilla of vehicles instead of a single CEV.

    Even Wernher von Braun called for a flotilla of lunar landers, in his original Moon plan. Do you consider him a “no one”?

    There is no market. Global world demand is only 50+ flights a year of everything.

    Sigh. Well, Kelly, either you’re right about that or you’re wrong.

    If you’re right, that means I’ve talked to several hundred people in the past few months who don’t actually exist. If I’m having that many hallucinations, it means I’m insane.

    If I’m insane, there’s no point in having this conversation because I can’t even be sure that you exist. So, I have to assume that I am not insane….

    Which means that you’re wrong, and the people I’ve spoken to really do exist. In that case, there is a market, even if it’s not a market you’re willing to acknowledge.

    Perhaps you’re just trying to drive me insane?

  40. 1. http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=15404

    2. Edward Wright Says:
    December 18th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

    >>And could you manage some manors here?
    >> Yelling liar liar liar if I quote something you don’t like
    >You didn’t quote anybody, Kelly. You just made crap up.

    I quoted Scaled Composites, Virgnin Galactic, SpaceX, Eclipse, Boeing, Mc Dac. In the aerospace bus they are somebody

    >>I’m not confusing them. Your numbers “of
    >>about $100 million for Black Horse” are
    >> contradicted by that article co authored by the Architect of Black Horse.
    >Nope. The article you’re talking about is available online.

    > http://www.risacher.org/bh/analog.html.
    I know, I gave you the URL. Given the archetech of the Black Horse co authored ot – it was likely accurate, and seems confirmed by the space cast report we both found.

    >Nowhere does the article say Black Horse would
    > cost one billion dollars, as you claim.
    Never claimed it would cost $1B, nor made any claims about Black horse’s cost. YOU claimed black hourse would cost $100M. The original cost estimate of the SpaceCast 2020 in ’95group was $150M ($250M adjusted for inflation) http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/im/magnus/bh/spacast3.html ” The top priority should be an X program to demonstrate the validity of the Black Horse TAV concept. The entire cost of such a program would be less than $150 million ..”

    Given a Black Horse X craft was projected at that, a operational craft would likely cost more, especially since the X-craft was not going to be orbital. From same space cast doc

    ” DESIGNERS CAN USE EXISTING and proven technologies – aluminum structure and Dura-TABI thermal protection – to develop and fly an X vehicle to demonstrate the feasibility and operational utility of the Black Horse. As an interim step, existing AR2 engines could be used to fly the vehicle through all of its atmospheric flight profile, testing handling, formation flying, refueling, and suborbital trajectories, while a concurrent engine development program produces the higher performance engines needed to reach orbit.”

    — and its not clear how much AF unique infrastructure they wee going to piggy back on. Or how capable a X craft they were talking about (certainly a airbase and all that range support, and no nisurence, would save them hundreds of $ a pound to orbit.)

    It also wasn’t going to be that cheap.
    “.. Initial estimates, using a cost model based on actual expense data for the SR71, suggest that a Black Horse vehicle could place payloads into LEO at a cost of less than $1,000 per pound (the model yields costs between $50 and $500 per pound, depending on assumptions), with a per-sortie cost of around $260,000 and an annual operating budget for an eight-TAV unit (with support) of approximately $100M. …”

    $1,000 in current year dollars would be about $1,600 – $1,700 a pound (others $80-$800), compared to about $8,600 a lb for Falcon 1. Though initially Musk was talking about maybe getting to $500 a lb with F-9m but now they are quoting $1,500 on their web site.

    Also black Horse had under a 0.5 ton cargo cap to orbit, as apposed to the ton or two you were talking about. So if you assume 4 times bigger 4 raised to 0.85 = 3.35. 3.35x $250M ($150m adjusted for inflation) = $812M for a Black Horse “x plane dev program” that I’m not clear from spacecast ever got to a operational cargo carrying craft.

    So were about a billion – but its not clear what the billion bought? Also these are not numbers from a actual, much less actual commercial dev program.

    Space cast was also talking about a $100m yearly operational costs. Adjust for inflation, scale for larger craft, adjust for commercial not military – fudge for real program not on paper cost estimates — not idea where it comes out. Probably half a bill per year – but who knows.

    ===
    >>Also as a nit, given SS1 was only supposed to
    >> cost $20M not the $35M it wound up costing
    >No, it cost $25 million. Stop making crap up.
    I’m not making it up, I remember Rutan saying it was $35 — Wikipedia says $25, and I kind find much else in costs refs quickly, so you might be right. THOUGH I’M NOT MAKING IT UP!

    >> since ELVs are cheaper to develop historically,
    >No, they aren’t.===
    Arh, last year I got into a argument with a guy with a alt.space ELV company with a paper being quoted around saying ELV’s “ALWAYS” cost less per flight the RLV’s unless you fly 50 times a year. I dug into his math and found he assumed the RLV’s would always cost 30 times more to develop.

    ;/

    EELV cost what $4-$5B and estimates for a similar weight RLV for NASA was $40-$50 (dubious about these) and RES Orion was projected at $20 is, though now folks are thinking it might push $50.

    Generally expendables are cheaper to design since that don’t have recovery system, nor are designed to the same quality standards. BUT testing can get much higher since you throw away everything each time, and have little recovered material to examin. So programs don’t test much to save money.

    ;/
    Historically they are usually cheaper to dev, but much more expensive to op. Varies though.

    >== A General Dynamics study found that the
    > X-15 program cost only 60% as much as an
    > ELV with equivalent performance. An independent
    > Air Force study, conducted using different
    > methodology, came to the same conclusion.

    That would be interesting reports to see. One pro RLV argument is you can incrementally test much cheaper, and with RLVs not requiring that much hard to design extra stuff (heat shields, chutes, landing pads?? Not hyper expensive compared to engines, avionics, etc..) the costs are much closer then assumed.

    Oh found this tidbit on X-15 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/204/1
    >> The Space Review: How do private program costs today compare to the X-15 which conducted 200 flights for $300 million in 1969 dollars or about $1.5 billion in 2004 dollars? How does price per flight by the 200th flight compare from an estimated $600,000 in 1969 dollars or $3 million/flight in 2004 dollars?<==
    >SpaceX had to launch three rockets
    > before they got one to work right. That
    > means they had to build three rockets
    > and pay for three rockets.

    True, though they are set up to build them cheaply so they can sell them for $8m-$9m a flight.
    Scarier for me, is the losses were from simple little mistakes, didn’t check for corrosion though they bragged it was corrosion proof so it could be recovered from seawater and reused. Given they were’t projecting safty rates much better then current to start with, I wonder how bad their real lose rate will be?

    ===
    >The SpaceShip One development program
    > included == a total of 83 [ test] flights. If
    > it were an ELV, Scaled Composites would
    > have had to build 83 vehicles to carry out
    > that flight test program, instead of only two.
    >Which do you think costs more, building 83 vehicles or building only 2?
    Corse LV programs, especially ELV programs, solve that by only flying 3-4 test flights, and spending much less no design, test, etc.

    Course that explains the insane loss rates

    >Plus, it’s usually a lot easier to determine
    > why a failure occurred if you can examine
    >the vehicle back in the hangar rather than
    > having to send divers down to pick wreckage
    > off the bottom of the ocean or rely solely on telemetry analysis.

    Oh hell yeah

    >>> Yes, and NASA said DC-X was going to cost $2 billion.==
    >>No McDonnell Douglas said they were $3B
    >> (in mid ‘90’s money, in a commercial operation)
    >> and 3 years from being able to have full
    >> function FAA certified, DC-X derived shuttles
    >> rolling off a assembly line.
    >Which does not change the fact that NASA
    >>said it would cost $2 billion to build DC-X:
    > which ended up costing about $60 million.
    Never heard that one!

    >>Not MY fear and contempt. I’m not NASA, I don’t work for them,
    > You say you work at JSC, but you don’t
    > work for NASA? One of us is seriously
    > confused. Who do you think runs JSC?
    I used to work at JSC when I was no the shuttle program, but only about a 1/10th (? Memories fading) of the personnel at the big centers are NASA employees.

    Who runs them is another question. Generally senior managers are civil servents, most staff are contractors.

    We were often boggled by crap the senior NASA managers would throw out. One UI worked under on the space station program decided that testing software was unnessisary, as long as all the paperwork indicated they understood what was nessisary. Another on shuttle (Gene Kratz – mr “failure is not a option” himself) was contemptuous of the idea of having pcs or something filter and graph data to find trend, or integrate data nito a “dashboard like screen” Figurnig Apollo mission control folks could watch hours of scrolling numbers and do trend trace in their heads, so shuttle controllers could to. – Oh and why ever upgrade from the 1960’s Univac mainframes.

    >==
    >> I didn’t want NASA to do it. Your mis quoting me,
    >>— as well as others like Zubrin and MBC.
    >I never quoted Zubrin or MBC. I don’t even
    > know what MBC is.==
    Mitchell Burnside Clapp the black horse designer, he and Zubrin founded rocketplane.

    >>As for not wanting NASA to do it, here are your own words:
    >I’ld see NASA pay to have a commercial
    > team/firm field a low cost RLV, eat the
    > overhead, and let the team market the rest at margin cost etc
    That’s not NASA building it, that’s NASA acting as a anchor tenant and eating the overhead (like the care and feeding of KSC, etc.). Sort of a COTS ilke project.

    NASA building it is a whole other 4 times more expensive, dev program.
    ===
    >> Every major aviation operator in the world does multiple takeoffs
    >> and landings. Routinely.
    >They don’t say they can do that with LVs
    > reliably. No ones done it with LV’s successfully.
    > Hardly anything NASA has launched, launched on time. =
    >Once again, you’re confusing ELVs with reusable vehicles (==
    >== The point, which you seem unable to grok,
    > is that reusable vehicles are far more reliable
    > than ELVs. ==
    No, you could build a RLV to be better or worse then a given ELV, but neither have ever been built to the quality standards of the aviation model your assuming. None have been built within several orders of magnitude of aviation standards. Hence the over 100,000 fold higher loss rate of LVs then commercial aviation no a per flight basis.

    So yes, airplanes can launch and meet in air with precise timing with virtually no issues. Airliners hardly ever fail to take off no the right time (give or take). —though my vacation flight tomorrow could be a issue with these storms.–

    But were talking LVs. LV’s virtually never fly on time. Ask anyone trying to catch a shuttle launch. If it launches in the same week its pretty much a on time launch.

    >>Well we were talking on this thread about
    >> the Ares and why its launching on multiple
    >> ships makes it less not more reliable.
    >That’s what you’re discussing, Kelly. =
    And what you were talking about to. And a topic used as a example to contrast some of your assumptions of divisibility.

    ==
    > You haven’t shown that Ares is more
    > reliable than launching smaller payloads
    >on multiple RLVs. ==
    The point was that launching a Apollo on steroids mission on 2 Ares, is much less reliable then launching it all on one big booster. And that breaking a AOS mission down to 1-2 ton blocks assembled in orbit was also not feasible or as safe. (Nor what Henrys Article was referring to.)

    Now there lots of other multiple launch senerios and concepts I’ld agree were more reliable, cheaper etc. I mentioned spacifically no orbit refueling. On of the alt.space companies Tspace I think, had a design where the upper stage was a big single stage from LEO, to luna surface, back to Earth reentry and landing craft. It could just get itself to LEO, but with no fuel or LOx. Tank up in LEO – and don’t launch until the orbital fuel farm is fueled up.

    ==
    >>Ignoring that, every multi module
    >>(LEM/booster/CM design proposed
    >> or possible depends on each working.
    >> No one was talking about launching fleets
    >> of simultaneous craft to go together.
    >No one?
    Nothing anyone credible I ever heard of suggested. You might augment with bunches of mini craft that bring auxilury stuff. Put you need to get 4 folks at a time to the moon. Dividnig up to 2-4 LEMS needing to work with 2-4 CMs and potentially 4-8 LVs, and whatever number of TLI stages is a pretty loopy and faiure prone system.

    >=. One of the original contractor studies, pre-ESAS,
    >explicitly called for a flotilla of vehicles instead of a single CEV.
    I’ld be interested in seeing that study.

    >Even Wernher von Braun called for a flotilla
    > of lunar landers, in his original Moon plan. ==

    That was the Collies articles!! http://home.flash.net/~aajiv/bd/colliers.html assuming the initial landings would rival the size of a Marine corp. landing, with Landers the size of big airliners!! All lifted to LEO assembly space stations the size of something out of 2001, with 260ft, 3 stage, RLV shuttles!! http://home.flash.net/~aajiv/bd/v3.jpg Said shuttles carrying the passenger load of a good sized airliner! http://home.flash.net/%7Eaajiv/bd/collier3.gif

    Oh, and his RLV shuttles had 40 ton to LEO cargo capacity! http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/vonbraun.htm

    And you think I’m pushing for 2 large a RLV?!

    >> There is no market. Global world demand
    >> is only 50+ flights a year of everything.
    >Sigh. Well, Kelly, either you’re right about that or you’re wrong.
    >If you’re right, that means I’ve talked to several
    > hundred people in the past few months who don’t
    > actually exist. ==
    Several hundred folks who actually paid for launches? Or even had firm plans to buy them? No. You talked to hundreds of folks who said they would like to go to space, and would think of buying a ticket at some given price.

    The 400? Folks you saw might or might not actually buy if a actual service came up. How many total folks a year you could actually sell flights in a given craft, at certain price/safty/covence levels is highly debated. Highly enough that no one can raise investment capital to build such ships.

    Lets face it, you could fly 400 or however many you said in a years worth of shuttle flights. Which obviously wouldn’t effect the economics of launch any. To effect launch costs you need to be talking hundreds, more preferable thousands of flights a year with whatever. And the LV has to be able to carry the customer desired cargo.

    You also like to point at
    http://tour2space.com/archives/economic/20013962.htm
    Where Len Cormier of Third Millennium suggests a 18 passenger and crew RLV for a lower dev cost then the AF expectation for Black Horse!! A fraction of the WK2/SS2 budget for dev and the first 6 set fleet. I don’t in any way see this as a credible. This contradicts every serious program I ever heard of. They were assuming 100 ton cargo capacity carrier aircraft for a purchase price half that for a flyable 747 out of a bone yard!!

    I’m just not seeing a realistic set of numbers.

    Our big debate was do you build a 2 ton cargo capacity RLV that would only be able to carry small cargo and 6-10 people. Or my assumed 25 ton craft, that could carry smallish airliner worth of folks or virtually any current cargo launched.

    Black Horse etc, still points at something like a billion to R&D and test a 2 ton cargo cap RLV. Add in producing a couple, building facilities, range issues, training a couple pilots etc. Your in the $1B-$2B total upfrount. (The references are above) Op cost a couple hundred million a year regardless of your flight rate unless the rate gets really extreme. (Black horse was assuming $100 million a year in then year dollars, but that was with AF normal facilities and operating rules (See http://colonyfund.com/Reading/papers/phys_econ_leo.html for pesky overhead cost that eat you alive)

    Cost for the 25 ton cap has been estimated at $5-$10B (full up DC-X shuttle was projected as $5b in current dollars) to develop and get into production. I as assuming $8B to develop to production, by 2 RLVs, and launch facilities, range gear.

    MAYBE a $1b a year to service facilities and craft, keep no staff etc

    -20 year service life,
    $25 billion for 400 flights.
    20 flights a year, ignore interest (I have no time) your at
    $63M a flight.
    $1,250 a pound if its loaded,
    $30K a pound if it lifts only a ton (actually good for small launches).
    If you assume a new market, tourists, etc, you might go to hundreds of flights a year. Ten times the flights, 1/10th the cost per flight.

    Lets do mini shuttle/rlv/etc. Which is where you like
    2 ton capacity.
    $2 billion to develop and field a few craft, facilities, range, etc given estimates and experience form aircraft and space folks from Gulfstream to Scaled composits. The Black Horse projections, etc

    $0.4 bilion a year facilities and service (ranges are so expensive, and the costs are fixed for year regardless of size or number of flights).

    You fly 7 times a year (the others the big shuttle would have flow won’t fit in your bay).
    20 years
    $10 billion
    140 flights
    $71 million a flight.
    $18,000 a pound to orbit for the 2 ton cargo. Actually cheaper for the 2 ton cargo to fly on the big shuttle.
    If you assume a new bigger market. The big craft has capacity to service all of it.
    1000 tourists a year.
    5 tourists per flight in your 2 ton craft.
    Could you really do 200 flights a year (plus the 7 cargo)? 4 a week? That might need another ship – or need to add in more servicing costs.

    20 years
    $10 billion (upfrount capital for R&D, ships, and facilities
    4140 flights
    $2.4 million a flight.
    $583,000 a tourist to orbit
    62 tourist per flight in the big craft
    20 year service life,
    16 flights a year, plus the 20 before. 36, 3 a month.
    $25 billion for 400 flights.
    $34M a flight.
    $560K a tourist. But they are in a airliner sized craft not a biz jet sized craft. Might get better service?
    Anyway similar costs.

    ———

    Summary,
    Still looks like your in the billion $ zone to develop to production a production commercial, passenger capable 2 ton RLV. Add in purchasing a couple, adding in fixed facilities, training, etc, you could be most of $2B to get your turn key 2 ton grade RLV operation going. The math I ran through assuming over 4000 tourist flights (5 tourists pre) for you’re mini shutles over 20 years, ignoring amortorization, insurance etc, your still at $583K a tourist in expences. Probably close to a million $ a ticket retail. Can you really sell a billion dollars worth of tickets a year? And with the bigger 25 ton bird giving similar cost numbers- would it not eat your market?

    At any near term market(next decade or two) no one seems to see a ave yearly flight rate for even mini shuttles of more then100-200 flights a year, especially if you’re thinking of 100 flights for just your model mini shuttle per year.

    Thousands to tens of thousands of flights per year, per fleet, would drive everyone’s costs per flight way down. But it would take a completely new market driven beyond anything currently conceived. Tens to hundreds of thousands of tourists a year to orbit. So at least not for a couple decades – unless you do a side shot like my ArcJet..

  41. Never claimed it would cost $1B,

    Eyeballs rolling.

    December 16th, 2008 at 9:53 am, you said, “the fixed overhead per flight is over a billion a launch, and much of it is insensitive to the size of the craft being launched.”

    December 16th, 2008 at 10:52 am, you said “Its likely your 2 ton RLVwould cost $10B-$20B?” — a lot more than $1 billion.

    December 16th, 2008 at 3:34 pm, you said, “[a small RLV is] like developing a helicopter that really only services Air rescue services on Everest, so the market is 2 reusable helos that fly a couple times a year – after a billion or two in dev costs. Cost per flight would be hundreds of millions of dollars a flight.”

    December 16th, 2008 at 7:04 pm, you said, “A billion or two for a orbit capable, safe RLV is pretty concervative.”

    Do you want me to go on? Must I quote everything you’ve said in this thread?

    Well, at least you know concede that it won’t cost a billion dollars.

    Given a Black Horse X craft was projected at that, a operational craft would likely cost more, especially since the X-craft was not going to be orbital. From same space cast doc

    Yes, it was intended to be orbital. Hence the statement that “a concurrent engine development program produces the higher performance engines needed to reach orbit.”

    In fact, Mitch had even worked out a way to land Black Horse on the Moon. (Although that was an idea he would only talk about at late-night parties.)

    It also wasn’t going to be that cheap…. $1,000 in current year dollars would be about $1,600 – $1,700 a pound (others $80-$800), compared to about $8,600 a lb for Falcon 1.

    Ahem. “Less than $1,000 per pound” does not equal $1,000 per pound. It is *less than* $1,000 per pound. In fact, the same sentence qualifies that number as “between $50 and $500 per pound, depending on assumptions.”

    You think that $50-500 per pound is “not that cheap”?

    Sounds like quite a bargain to me, compared to what NASA is planning to spend over the next few years.

    Also black Horse had under a 0.5 ton cargo cap to orbit, as apposed to the ton or two you were talking about.

    LOL. Haven’t you been trying to claim that the cost of a launch vehicle is independent of its size?

    >No, it cost $25 million. Stop making crap up.
    I’m not making it up, I remember Rutan saying it was $35 — Wikipedia says $25, and I kind find much else in costs refs quickly, so you might be right. THOUGH I’M NOT MAKING IT UP!

    I clearly heard Burt say it was $25 million. If he’d said $25 or $35, I would have bought a dozen. 🙂

    Generally expendables are cheaper to design since that don’t have recovery system,

    Yeah, you save some money by not having to design a recovery system, but you spend a lot more money by expending hardware in the test phase.

    nor are designed to the same quality standards.

    Ah, now that’s the catch. If you don’t design to the same standards, you’re cheating. Sure, you can design an ELV that’s very cheap, if you don’t care whether it blows up every time you try to launch it. If you want an ELV that’s reliable, however, you’re going to have to do a lot of test launches, which gets expensive. Or (and this is what tends to be done nowadays), you can dispense with a lot of those test launches and rely on massive amounts of systems engineering, which also tends to be expensive — and not entirely effective.

    I presume that you’re going to want whatever launcher you use for your lunar program to be fairly safe and reliable, right? At least comparable to the best “manrated” ELVs?

    >>As for not wanting NASA to do it, here are your own words:
    >I’ld see NASA pay to have a commercial
    > team/firm field a low cost RLV, eat the
    > overhead, and let the team market the rest at margin cost etc
    That’s not NASA building it, that’s NASA acting as a anchor tenant and eating the overhead (like the care and feeding of KSC, etc.). Sort of a COTS ilke project.

    Actually, it sounds a lot more like X-33/VentureStar. You remember how that one turned out?


    >== The point, which you seem unable to grok,
    > is that reusable vehicles are far more reliable
    > than ELVs. ==
    No, you could build a RLV to be better or worse then a given ELV,

    Um, if it wasn’t better than an ELV, it wouldn’t be *reusable.* An ELV loses the airframe on every flight, by definition.

    but neither have ever been built to the quality standards of the aviation model your assuming.

    Of course they have. They’re called “aircraft.” My statement was not limited to space vehicles.

    Compare the reliability of piloted aircraft with cruise missiles of similar performance.

    But were talking LVs. LV’s virtually never fly on time. Ask anyone trying to catch a shuttle launch.

    Not relevant. The Shuttle is a launch vehicle but it is not a reusable launch vehicle, even though NASA sometimes tries to define it that way. It’s salvageable, at best. Every flight requires the equivalent of a major overhaul/ partial rebuild.

    I am not advocating building another vehicle like that.

    The point was that launching a Apollo on steroids mission on 2 Ares, is much less reliable then launching it all on one big booster.

    Well, that may be true, but it’s not something you can generalize to any sensible architecture. It’s certainly *possible* to design a vehicle so badly that rendezvous and docking becomes difficult or impossible.

    And that breaking a AOS mission down to 1-2 ton blocks assembled in orbit was also not feasible or as safe. (Nor what Henrys Article was referring to.)

    Laugh. You might want to talk to Henry about that. Keep in mind that most of the weight you’re talking about propellant, which (I remember Henry saying) you can break down as finely as you look.

    Col. Bill Bruner (who is now an Association Administrator at NASA) wrote the following In his master’s thesis at Air University:

    “If a Titan IV launch costs $250-$320 million per launch, then one could theoretically take the payload up as separate components, launching it in 25 to 32 missions at $10 million per trip and still break even. In fact, work on ‘Line Replaceable Units’ for satellites (similar to those in the aircraft world) is presently underway at the US Air Force’s Phillips Laboratory. Even though the laboratory is working on modular satellite construction for standardization and cost savings purposes, some of this work could be directly transferable to the on-orbit assembly idea. Again, the extreme example makes the point. It is poor analysis to make the blanket assumption that a medium lift RLV will be unable to carry heavy payloads. The operability revolution inherent in RLV technology will enable new solutions to old problems, and create economic and military advantages for the United States in space that are difficult to foresee. This will be discussed in further detail below in the discussion of the national security implications of the RLV.”

    >>Ignoring that, every multi module
    >>(LEM/booster/CM design proposed
    >> or possible depends on each working.
    >> No one was talking about launching fleets
    >> of simultaneous craft to go together.
    >No one?
    Nothing anyone credible I ever heard of suggested.

    Ahem. T/Space, who you just quoted, called for “flotilla expeditions, not single vehicles.”

    http://exploration.nasa.gov/documents/reports/cer_midterm/tSpace.pdf

    So, do you consider them credible or not?

    And then, as I said, there was Von Braun….

    Several hundred folks who actually paid for launches? Or even had firm plans to buy them? No. You talked to hundreds of folks who said they would like to go to space, and would think of buying a ticket at some given price.

    You mean customers who are waiting for a product or service they can’t buy yet don’t count?

    In that case, Kelly, we should apply the same standard to NASA. Since NASA isn’t currently buying flights to the Moon, we must assume NASA will never buy flights to the Moon, right?

    How many total folks a year you could actually sell flights in a given craft, at certain price/safty/covence levels is highly debated.

    Well, if you think marketing questions should be settled by “debate” rather than research, I understand why you think there’s no market. I prefer facts myself.

    What about the DoD guys I’ve talked to, who want to use space for rapid delivery of forces to combat zones? Are they also nonexistant?

    Highly enough that no one can raise investment capital to build such ships.

    Obviously, the companies that are building vehicles right now would disagree.

    Where Len Cormier of Third Millennium suggests a 18 passenger and crew RLV for a lower dev cost then the AF expectation for Black Horse!! A fraction of the WK2/SS2 budget for dev and the first 6 set fleet.

    Let’s see. White Knight is a completely new airplane. Len’s proposed carrier was an An-22. Not only an existing airplane but one that’s available surplus on the world market. Don’t you think that might save some money? Do you doubt that developing an airplane costs more than not developing an airplane?

    (See http://colonyfund.com/Reading/papers/phys_econ_leo.html for pesky overhead cost that eat you alive)

    That paper is filled with bad assumptions, of which the authors have been informed and choose to ignore. They artificially inflate the numbers by including costs for things like ranges that no RLV company plans to use. In other words, they’re arguing a strawman.

    Lets do mini shuttle/rlv/etc. Which is where you like
    2 ton capacity.
    $2 billion to develop and field a few craft, facilities, range, etc given estimates and experience form aircraft and space folks from Gulfstream to Scaled composits.

    So, now you’re back to claiming billions of dollars, which you just denied claiming!

    Sure, you can get the cost up, if you throw in missile ranges, a cruise ship, and maybe a ranch in Iowa.

    Of course, none of those things are actually necessary.

  42. > Edward Wright Says:
    > December 20th, 2008 at 2:56 am
    >
    >> Never claimed it would cost $1B,
    >
    > Eyeballs rolling.

    I never claimed Black Horse would take a billionish. I said a 1-2 ton cap commercial RLV. I didn’t make any claims aboutBlack Horse, or a 2 ton carry capacity BlackHorse.

    >
    > December 16th, 2008 at 9:53 am, you said, “the fixed overhead per flight is
    > over a billion a launch, and much of it is insensitive to the size of the
    > craft being launched.”

    That was for NASA, not AF Black Horse. You don’t need to sponcer KSC JSC and Marshal forblack horse, you do if you are a NASA launcher.

    >
    > December 16th, 2008 at 10:52 am, you said “Its likely
    > your 2 ton RLVwould cost $10B-$20B?” — a lot more than $1 billion.

    Not written clearly – but it apears to be I was refering to what a NASA program to develop a 2 ton RLV would cost. Maybe more cynical then accurate, butyour refering to a commercial cost -whichlikely would be a billion maybe 2 depending. BlackHourse numbers suggest it (in xplane mode) would ne a billion, but given the needed overhead for mil

    >
    > December 16th, 2008 at 3:34 pm, you said,
    > “[a small RLV is] like developing a helicopter that
    > really only services Air rescue services on Everest,
    > so the market is 2 reusable helos that fly a couple times
    > a year – after a billion or two in dev costs. Cost per
    > flight would be hundreds of millions of dollars a flight.”

    Again not Black Horse, or anything like Black Horse

    >
    > December 16th, 2008 at 7:04 pm, you said, “A billion or t
    > wo for a orbit capable, safe RLV is pretty concervative.”

    Again not BlackHorse, but a reasonable number for a safe RLV.

    >
    ===
    > In fact, Mitch had even worked out a way to
    > land Black Horse on the Moon. (Although that
    > was an idea he would only talk about at late-night parties.)

    ??
    Easy from a delta-V standpoint. But how do you keep a blsackhourse operating a couple days in space — and add rear landing legs?

    >
    > It also wasn’t going to be that cheap…. $1,000
    > in current year dollars would be about $1,600 – $1,700 a pound (others $80-$800), compared to about $8,600 a lb for Falcon 1.
    >
    >==
    > the same sentence qualifies that number as “between $50
    > and $500 per pound, depending on assumptions.”
    >
    > You think that $50-500 per pound is “not that cheap”?

    $80-$800 would be cheap compared to Falcons $8,600, but I wonder about those “Assumptions”.

    >> Also black Horse had under a 0.5 ton cargo
    >> cap to orbit, as apposed to the ton or two you were talking about.
    >
    > LOL. Haven’t you been trying to claim that
    > the cost of a launch vehicle is independent of its size?

    Not its developent cost, itsper flight cost — which I outlined the math of several times.

    ==
    > >Generally expendables are cheaper to
    > > design since that don’t have recovery system,
    >
    > Yeah, you save some money by not having to
    > design a recovery system, but you spend a lot
    > more money by expending hardware in the test phase.

    Its not like folks test their elvs more then 3-4 flights eiather way..

    🙁

    Surprized the things ever work.

    > > nor are designed to the same quality standards.
    >
    > Ah, now that’s the catch. If you don’t design to
    > the same standards, you’re cheating. ==

    Which they virtualy always do. You couldn’t field a new Piper Cub with the crapy testing LVs generaly get. Hence why everyones talking about 1-2% loss rates likenow.

    >=== Or (and this is what tends to be done nowadays),
    > you can dispense with a lot of those test launches and
    > rely on massive amounts of systems engineering,
    > which also tends to be expensive — and not entirely effective.

    Yeah, but as von braun said- one test is worth a thousand expert opinions.

    >
    > I presume that you’re going to want whatever launcher
    > you use for your lunar program to be fairly safe and
    > reliable, right? At least comparable to the best “manrated” ELVs?

    I would, NASA does not. Orion standards were directed to be much below shuttles standards. It was making folks I worked with on Orion unconfortable.

    >
    > >>>As for not wanting NASA to do it, here are your own words:
    >>
    > >>I’ld see NASA pay to have a commercial
    > >> team/firm field a low cost RLV, eat the
    > >> overhead, and let the team market the rest at margin cost etc
    >>
    >> That’s not NASA building it, that’s NASA
    >> acting as a anchor tenant and eating the overhead
    >> (like the care and feeding of KSC, etc.). Sort of a COTS ilke project.
    >
    > Actually, it sounds a lot more like X-33/VentureStar.

    ??
    How? It sounds like what L/M offeredinstead of X-33. NASA was ADAMENT that X-33 NOT lead to a operational RLV.

    >> >== The point, which you seem unable to grok,
    >> > is that reusable vehicles are far more reliable
    >> > than ELVs. ==
    >>
    >> No, you could build a RLV to be better or worse then a given ELV,
    >
    > Um, if it wasn’t better than an ELV, it wouldn’t
    > be *reusable.* An ELV loses the airframe on
    > every flight, by definition.

    I quality and relyability.

    > > but neither have ever been built to the
    >> quality standards of the aviation model your assuming.
    >
    > Of course they have. They’re called “aircraft.”
    > My statement was not limited to space vehicles.

    Then your statement was irrelivent.

    > > The point was that launching a Apollo on
    >> steroids mission on 2 Ares, is much less reliable
    >> then launching it all on one big booster.
    >
    > Well, that may be true, but it’s not something you
    > can generalize to any sensible architecture. ==

    Well given a multi launch that needs all the launches to work, to have the mission work, (common on space projects) does multiply the odds of mission failure.

    > > And that breaking a AOS mission down to
    >> 1-2 ton blocks assembled in orbit was also not
    >> feasible or as safe. (Not what Henrys Article was referring to.)
    >
    > Laugh. You might want to talk to Henry about
    > that. Keep in mind that most of the weight you’re
    > talking about propellant, which (I remember Henry
    > saying) you can break down as finely as you look.

    And I said the same. But trying to break down equipment into lots of litle parts has real practical limits. Asside from the obviousthat you start having to first launch a factory to assemble the parts – some individual parts are bigger then that

    ==
    > Several hundred folks who actually paid for
    > launches? Or even had firm plans to buy them?
    > No. You talked to hundreds of folks who said
    > they would like to go to space, and would think
    > of buying a ticket at some given price.
    >
    > You mean customers who are waiting for a product
    > or service they can’t buy yet don’t count?

    Not really in a business sense. They taked about buying – but they nor anyone else have bough anything like it, and theirs no firm idea how to relyably judge how many reallyworld if given a real chance. So you can’t bank on them.

    >
    > In that case, Kelly, we should apply the same
    > standard to NASA. Since NASA isn’t currently
    > buying flights to the Moon, we must assume
    > NASA will never buy flights to the Moon, right?

    Buy commercially? Certainly not.

    Certainly they are not currently a potential market for launch services to the moon – and theirs good reason to think they never will be. They certainly never purchased it before (purchase gets to be a weird term given they contract folks to do things to build their ships, mixed in with doing a lot of other crap unrelated and contradictory crap.

    >
    >> How many total folks a year you could actually
    >> sell flights in a given craft, at certain price/safty/covence levels is highly debated.
    >
    > Well, if you think marketing questions should be
    > settled by “debate” rather than research, I understand
    > why you think there’s no market. I prefer facts myself.

    Got any solid facts/research?

    >
    > What about the DoD guys I’ve talked to, who
    > want to use space for rapid delivery of forces
    > to combat zones? Are they also nonexistant?

    They have any budget authority to buy such stuff?

    >
    > Highly enough that no one can raise investment capital to build such ships.
    >
    > Obviously, the companies that are building vehicles right now would disagree.
    >

    >> Where Len Cormier of Third Millennium
    >> suggests a 18 passenger and crew RLV for a
    >> lower dev cost then the AF expectation for
    >> Black Horse!! A fraction of the WK2/SS2
    >> budget for dev and the first 6 set fleet.
    >
    > Let’s see. White Knight is a completely new
    > airplane. Len’s proposed carrier was an An-22.==

    Rutan built the WK because he could do that so cheaply it was more cost effective then his first idea of refiting a airliner out of a bone yard – so thats not a program drive.

    …at least not if you run a compony thats bread and butter is making cheap prototypes..

    ===
    >> (See http://colonyfund.com/Reading/papers/phys_econ_leo.html for pesky overhead cost that eat you alive)
    >
    > That paper is filled with bad assumptions, of which
    > the authors have been informed and choose to ignore. ===

    Agreed, and I argued with them too.

    However they do make serveral valid points about a lot of costs generaly ignored – like ranges.

    >==They artificially inflate the numbers by including
    > costs for things like ranges that no RLV company
    > plans to use. In other words, they’re arguing a strawman.

    No RLV company? SpaceX conciders itself a RLV company. RpK did, they were going to use them.

    Also its not clear how you legally can launch without them unless you change some laws and REALLY upgrade your quality standards to hundreds if not tens of thousands of times current standards.

    Insurence,
    All the other un fun parts.

    >
    > >Lets do mini shuttle/rlv/etc. Which is where you like
    >> 2 ton capacity.
    >> $2 billion to develop and field a few craft,
    >> facilities, range, etc given estimates and
    >> experience form aircraft and space folks
    >> from Gulfstream to Scaled composits.
    >
    > So, now you’re back to claiming billions of
    > dollars, which you just denied claiming!

    See above.

    >
    > Sure, you can get the cost up, if you throw in
    > missile ranges, a cruise ship, and maybe a ranch in Iowa.
    >
    > Of course, none of those things are actually necessary.

    So you need no legal launch facilities, nor R&D, production facilities, ships?

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