How low is low enough

You are right for tourism. Overall I do not see
tourism ever being a substantial driving force to
lower the economic barriers to accessing space. It is
the drive for efficiency in industry that have
traditionally lowers costs.

To put this into perspective, even though tahiti is a
nice place to visit, no one ever plans on lowering
costs to get there cause tourists are willing to pay
alot to get there and don't need to ship alot to
there. Whereas take someplace like indonesia which is
rich in resources and the price for shipping there is
drastically less then tahiti as there are
substantially more options to choose from.

The reason however why i thought this interesting for
this discussion group however was in terms of thinking
of economical feasibility of things like SPS,
tele-robotic mining and manufacturing, and orbital
debris cleanup.

Often times costs are quoted to be around $10k per
pound and what is needed is $1k per pound. Personally
I do not agree with this. I think even at $5k per
pound, the transportation costs are feasible for most
business plans. Again, I am VERY interested in
hearing from anyone if they can show what percentage
of large ticket item's (cars, cranes, industrial
equipment) price is attributed to transportation
costs.

> More seriously, though...
>
> It is surely the case that for those businesses such
> as telecom and remote
> sensing for which successful profitable businesses
> currently exist, that
> those businesses do not find launch costs to be an
> unsurmountable barrier.
> But that's almost a tautology --- these are the
> small number of business
> models that have extremely high value, high enough
> to overcome the
> awesomely high launch costs.
>
> But there are other potential businesses, not yet
> operating in space, that
> are blocked by high launch costs from getting
> started. Such as space
> tourism for the everyman...
>
> Ron
> ******
>
> rmenich@...
> 09/17/02 04:04 PM
>
> low enough
>
> My mass is approximately 100 kg. At $11,250 per
> kg, my mass alone would
> cost $1,125,000. That's more money than my net
> worth at this point in my
>
> life. And that $1,125,000 doesn't even account for
> all the support mass
> that would need to be launched to keep me alive once
> I get to orbit.
>
> So, as far as space tourism goes, I contend that
> launch costs are still a
> factor that makes it impossible for me to get to
> orbit. Now, Lance Bass
> might have that kind of money, but I don't !!
>
> Ron
> ******
>
> Ryan Zelnio ryjaz@...
> 09/17/02 03:47 PM
>
> enough
>
> Alot of talk on here is about how expensive
> transportation costs are to space. An article today
> came out on space.com (for those with subscriptions:
>
http://www.space.com/spacenews/launchindustry/spainsat_0916.html)