Diminishing launching co$t...

> It was suggested that launch cost would
> diminish by 1/2 every 5 years...what
> could possibly drive such happenstance?

Well, we've lived with Moore's Law for semiconductors
for 30 years now, that's a doubling every 18 months
of speed. I believe that a similar doubling will
occur in space now that we actually have a competitive
marketplace.

It's been claimed that the costs of launching a
rocket is mostly to do with the wage packets of the people
building, maintaining, launching them.

As an example; each Space Shuttle is handbuilt;
if they had made a few hundred Space Shuttles, then
production line techniques would have been used,
and the unit cost would have come down many times.

Secondly, the number of people needed to launch a rocket
doesn't change much as the number of launches goes up.

If you need 1000 people to maintain and launch once per
year, you may only need 2000 people to launch 50
times per year. In fact those costs may be
inversely proportional to the launch rate.

The costs of the fuel are infact irrelevant in nearly
all vehicles; and even the physical rockets are
reasonably cheap. And as the launch rate goes up
reusable rockets make more sense.

The real, true, underlying costs of rocket fuel
appears to be ~$7/kg. Right now we are at $2600/kg
or so, so there's a loooooooong way down.

At about $100-300/kg there might start to be some significant
demand for space Tourism.

Anyway check out the following links:

http://www.optipoint.com/far/farbdb.htm
http://www.spacecityone.com/genastro/schnitt/971110.html
http://www.friends-partners.org/mwade/lvs/searagon.htm

Interestingly, Boeing seem to be looking at Space more
in the light of the current dip in the airline businesses...