By-Pass the Moon?

> From: Michael Persohn-Costa
> Are you certain about this 90% figure? From what I am aware,
> the amount spent regularly is usually much less than half the
> cost of any space mission,

Ah, but that is why I said directly and *indirectly*.

Because launch costs are so high it's impossible to replace a component that
breaks during or just after launch. So everything has to be designed to
extremely high standards of reliability, and have identical copies tested
for this realiability in extreme enviroments. They also have to be extremely
light weight. Because practical experience in space is limited to a few
organisations, space has gathered a form of mythology around itself; much of
which is extremely stupid. (Space is a vacuum and a vacuum cannot have
temperature. But you wouldn't know that from NASA press briefings on the
subject!)

Extreme to the forth power closely approximates 90% of launch costs. And
it's all largely the fault of current ELV technology and it's $10,000/kg+
price tag.

Compare and contrast with a reliable reusable rocket. If you want to go to
the moon, you don't design, or build or even own one of these rockets; you
rent cargo space. Put one of these in orbit and refual it and you can take
50% of it's rated payload to the lunar surface. Put two of them together, as
stages, and you can deliver 700% of rated payload to the surface. The math
works out to 6x times LEO cost. Since a reasonable R3 LEO cost would be
$500/kg, lunar missions woudl only cost $3000/kg.

Want to land a man on the moon? That'll be about half a million. Even if you
add a few zeros to these figures, they still compare *very* favourably with
anything NASA plans.

> At the same time, mass concerns do still have a significant
> affect on spacecraft design, much as they did during the
> Apollo era. But would that really make a mission
> half-a-billion more expensive just so the satellite can ride
> on a $100m USD rocket instead of a $250m USD rocket?

No. Don't be silly. NASA doesn't work that way. What NASA does is make a
mission cost two billion more than it needs too, so it can ride on a rocket
that costs three billion more than it needs to. It's contractors work on
cost+ remember? Fixed percentage profits mean the only way they can double
their profits is to double the cost of development.

John