Launch costs?

> [Re NSS roadmap]
>
> It's actually #3:
>
> 1. Lack of government funding mechanism.
> 2. Lack of incentives for private capital investment.
> 3. Launch costs.
>
> But I don't think you can conclude (taking their "barriers" at face
> value) that the reduction of "launch costs" isn't significant to the
> opening of space to commercial efforts.

No, I didn't mean to say that, sorry - it's obviously significant. It is
one of the NSS barriers, after all. But the problem is not really on the
"supply" side - there are a lot of competing companies for launch
services; there are several Russian companies that can launch for 20-30%
or so the costs usually cited for US launches. There is a lack of supply
for very heavy lift vehicles (> 25 ton) - but the real problem is
there's also no demand currently. It's a complicated chicken-and-egg
problem; and most of the costs are really in the hordes of people still
required to prepare vehicles for launch, and in the very tight margins
in all these systems that allow almost no tolerance for minor changes or
mistakes. There is no purely technological solution that is likely to
help if aggregate demand doesn't somehow materialize. Boeing's new
Delta-IV was intended to address some of the human resource issues
through mass-production and standardization; it may help but it'll still
be hard for them in cutting costs per launch without at least somewhat
increased demand for launch services.

One suggestion I had heard that might be able to promote sustained
demand, particularly by allowing companies to plan a few years in
advance, is to develop some sort of self-fulfilling Moore's law for
launch costs. If everybody expects launch costs to be 30% cheaper in 2
years, then everybody can plan for it and there's a good chance it will
actually happen as the demand and supply sides meet one another at
roughly where they expect the price should be. But somebody has to get
that ball rolling first so it actually is believable...

Arthur Smith (apsmith@...