Columbus, scurvy, deformed space fetii and plaintiff lawyers

Thanks for the reply. I have no qualms whatsoever with very small,
near-term projects.

I do take issue with one of the things you mentioned, namely,

"
The biggest problem is perhaps the most counterintuitive: for
commercial
space purposes, launch costs are not expensive (which means that the
cost of
the launch is only a small fraction of the cost of the entire
project...
"

Percentage of entire project cost is not a good measure of how expensive
launch costs are. A far better measure, in my opinion, is the absolute
scale in $ of the costs: to launch a sizable payload into space costs as
much as it would to construct an entire factory here on Earth! If I want
to ship a 10-ton object from where I live to Australia, it doesn't cost $50
million to do that!

If I launched a rocket whose payload was just water or just propellant for
an OTV or something, the percentage contribution of the launch cost to the
mission might be very high. And this would continue to be true even if
launch costs were lowered by a factor of 10 or 100. But I wouldn't even
consider launching such a low-value payload unless launch costs were lower
by a factor of 100. No one right now can launch such payloads because
launch costs are so high today.

So percentage contribution of launch costs to the entire project is, in my
opinion, an exceedingly poor metric by which to assess how expensive launch
costs really are. A much better measure is $ . And the $'s required
right now are, one might say, astronomically high.

Ron Menich

"Clements, Robert"
ssi_list@... ssi_list@...
03/23/01 12:58 AM and plainti ff lawyers
Please respond to
ssi_list

Please don't lump Columbus & Magellan together. To be blunt, Columbus was
an
idiot who cooked the books so badly in his proposal to sail to China by
going west rather than east that - had the Americas not happened to be in
the way - his crew would have starved to death barely a third of the way
across the Pacific... which is why the proposal had been kicked from pillar
to post until he found himself in a court too dumb to know that it didn't
make sense. He'd already crossed the failsafe point when he stumbled upon
the Caribbean islands (known to this day as the West Indies because of
Columbus's nutty belief - which he never lost; which is why the Americas
are
called the Americas rather than the Columbias - that he'd made it to Asia);
which is why the crew had just mutinied... they wanted off what they knew
was a deathtrap mission.

Magellen was a very competent sailor who did the best with the technology
at
his disposal during a mission which stretched that technology beyond the
breaking point... a very different situation indeed.

(Litigation is definitely an issue which needs to be taken more seriously -
after all: the one reason why commercial air flight took just 6 decades to
become widely accessible to the market [apart from the technology driving
World Wars, that is] was a cartel arrangement limiting the compensation
payable in cases of accidents. Such an agreement would have zero chance of
survival in this environment; & frankly, i'm not hypocritical enough to say
that that's a bad thing.

(There are other issues which need to be addressed, though: although other
victims of USAmerica's increasingly laughable technology transfer
regulations are better known - when a NAFTA signatory like Canada is
isolated from USAmerican technology because its a signatory to ESA, you
know
the situation is ridiculous - the space insurance & reinsurance is having
major problems setting quotes because they can't get descriptions on what
they're quoting on; & comsats sales are being lost to USAmerican suppliers
for this reason)

Actually the exploration of the Americas has more than a few uncomfortable
lessons for space advocacy: as a driver for sustainable space exploration,
project Apollo was only marginally better thought out than Columbus's plan
to sail to China; & after a few missions of novelty, the future colony was
somewhat ignored... only when Spain et al found some real cash reasons to
return to the Americas did the continent's European history begin. All of
the early missions were cheap - & as Columbus would'ave shown if the
Americas hadn't gotten in his way, somewhat disposable - in comparison with
real trading missions; & the idea of settlement tended to follow - often at
quite a distance - low cost raiding of assets.

Like the Americas, future space exploration needs to on a basis of
cost/benefits analysis rather than way cool enthusiasm; but like history,
such analysis doesn't always give the answers we want.

The biggest problem is perhaps the most counterintuitive: for commercial
space purposes, launch costs are not expensive (which means that the cost
of
the launch is only a small fraction of the cost of the entire project...
this statement would be true even if the market wasn't being flooded by
exSoviet technology at a bargain basement price, by the way). Under these
circumstances, there's no economic imperative to generate large amounts of
corporate debt developing cheaper technologies on the cusp of doability,
which is why all the reuseable LEO booster projects collapsed.

What we need, therefore, is not space visions which will cost a fortune
even
with new boosters but to develop new space development concepts which are
relatively cheap; so there's a real motivation to reduce the cost of
launches for this market. Such a situation more or less occurs now with
scientific missions - even the Discovery class of mission budgets at least
20% for launch nowadays; & for DS1, the launch cost more than a third of
the
entire budget - but not with current commercial payloads.

e2's goal has been to target the science side of the market; & to use ASAP
launches & cheap technology based on Earthorbiting microsat designs to
bring
the cost of launching space probes into the teens of millions, so that the
program is opened to more players. If we can get probes down to less than
US$10m (feasible with current technology & economies of scale), you
suddenly
open up a market for a reuseable lightweight launcher capable of (roughly)
Rockot's performance (1800kg to LEO; or approximately 300kg to HEV,
depending on the kick stage & burn scenario chosen) for a couple of million
(as opposed to the US$20m for Rockot; or around US$2m for the more awkward
ASAP piggyback option).

If the market exists, the technology will follow pretty quickly... & we
certainly know that there are plenty of agencies, corporations & other
organisations for whom cheap access to robotic space would be very
appealing
indeed.

I stress that this solution reflects our experience only; & that it may not
be the only solution which can be followed... but it's certainly a solution
which works economically as well as technologically. I'm not sure that the
mighty space solutions being talked about here really will cut it: can we
work out some way to make these schemes smaller so that can provoke
commercial infrastructure support?

All the best,
Robert Clements Robert.Clements@...
endeavour2 project http://www.geocities.com/robtclements/endeavour2.html>