Career in space

[Crazy Eddie]

Show me how you are going to take a technology as mature as rocketry and reduce its costs by a factor of a thousand - because that is what it is going to take to make travel to orbit a routine thing.

If I could do that I wouldn't be poor.

Of course not; you would be richer than Bill Gates! The problem is nobody can do it and never will be able to do it.

Never say never.

Besides, it's been done before. There's no logical reason it can't be done again. And in point of fact I've already given you one simple thing that could be changed that would make a pretty big difference.

How much do you think costs could be reduced if we can come up with a non-cryo fuel with the same thrust/weight ratio as cryo fuels? Two, three, five times?

At least. This would drop launch costs from around $5,000/kg to around $1,000/kg. The reduction in cost increases the size of the market for launch vehicle consumers, reducing demand and driving those costs lower. Economy of scale has to be considered too, since most of the existing 5,000/kg is the marginal cost of the vehicle's development and the only reason it takes so long to reduce in price is because so few people can afford to use them.

Compare this with, say, air to air missiles and commercial aircraft, whose development costs are similar (and in some cases far greater) but whose marginal costs are more spread out and therefore the cost to consumers is much lower. Or to put that another way: a system that costs 50 million dollars to develop will cost 25 million dollars if you only build two of them. The same system only costs five dollars if you build it for ten million people.

I don't know if the space elevator will be that paradigm or not but if we don't find something capable of getting costs down to single or at least double-digit dollars a pound, we won't have a future in space.

Even space elevators won't do that. Even with a cheaper launch vehicle, the lowest you could realistically get is around $500/kg.

There's only one thing on Earth that would reduce those costs to double digit numbers: tremendous injection of government subsidies (the same reason we can afford to blow money on fighter planes and aircraft carriers designed to fight wars that will never happen against enemies that don't exist). Anything is feasible if you throw enough tax dollars at it... just ask Neil Armstrong.

The only way to justify that kind of government investment is to create something in space to invest IN. That means, in the interim, you're going to need a slightly cheaper launch vehicle that can allow more businesses to try new types of operations in space. The more businesses operate in space, the more business is DONE in space, the more important the astro industry becomes and therefore the greater the impetus for injection of government stimulus. It worked for the oil industry, it worked for aviation, it worked for the arms industry, hell it even worked for Henry Ford. It can work again in space exploration.


That, therefore, is your new paradigm: if space is going to be explored, it will be explored by businessmen and lobbyists, not by scientists.