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Tango,

My first Q on this is how are you going to keep the
tower up there? Even at this height you are talking
some very major drag effects. Of these 800 flights
you have mentioned, how many are needed yearly to
provide a boost too keep the altitude? I am also
assuming this is at a 0 inclination (thinking of J2
effect here).

Second, you'd have to retrofit Korou for the Proton.
Currently it is being fitted for launching the soyuz
last I heard but the proton would cost more not to
mention the politics of europe letting russia launch
from there when it would directly compete with their
pride and joy the arianne.

Third, the time scale. You have 800 launches in 3.5
years. Generally a launch campaign is about a month
(actually a little less but approzimately correct).
Korou can only handle to launch campaigns
simultaneously. Now this is with the arianne rocket.
So your looking at about 24, possibly 25 launches a
year a launch base can handle.

Of course, assuming you can show the demand, more
facilities can be created but as it right now, arianne
cannot keep up with the schedule it has. One of our
satellites had its launch date bumped back three
months because of parts delay on the rocket. Sea
launch is even worse as it can only do one at a time
because of the ship processing (not sure if they are
adding another though). Theoritically, the quickest
turnaround are the new atlas and deltas, as they can
be carted out to the tower and launched the same day.
Though I am not to sure about their processing time.

None of these are major hurdles in and of themselves,
I just think they need to be factored into your
overall costs and schedule.

Ryan

> Just thought I'd sit down and do a first order
> costing approximation
> on how to lower launch costs and see where it leads
> me. I haven't
> figured this out yet because I'm writing this as I
> go, so at the end
> this may all turn out to be an exercise in
> determining it can't
> work. Be warned that this'll probbly be an exercise
> of meaningless
> numbers coming to a conclusion.
>
> Space tourism seems to me to be a ready market if we
> can hit the
> right price points and generate enough volume. So
> how do we do it.
>
> I'm going to rely a lot on my notes which I've
> gathered from various
> sources with varying degrees of attribution. It's
> kind of a big
> jumble broken into topics.
>
> Let me break the question into two sceanrios:
> orbital and sub-
> orbital technology. I'll leave the orbital question
> for another time
> or for someone else.
>
> Suborbital obviously requires a secondary means to
> cover the
> remaining distance. I'm going to look into an
> orbiting tower. Here's
> the proposal.
>
> A 1,380 km long tower. Center of mass orbiting at
> 1,250 km, a
> docking station at 260 km, and a low gravity section
> at 1,640 km.
> From the docking station a winch is lowered to an
> altitude of 145 km
> to intersect with a shuttle and then pulls the
> shuttle up to the
> docking station.
>
> What to build this out of. Spectra 1000 has a
> tensile strength of
> 3.0 GPa and a density of 0.97 g/cc but the Van Allen
> radiation belts
> are going to make it pretty useless.
>
http://www.matweb.com/search/SpecificMaterial.asp?bassnum=PCF007
>
> Spectra 2000 is an improvement.
>
http://www.spectrafiber.com/pdfs/hon-pf-ps10-sp2000.pdf
>
> While we're awaiting the perfection of carbon
> nanotubes, we can
> consider carbon fibers. Thornel Carbon Fiber T-40
> has a density of
> 1.81 g/cc and a tensile strength of 5.65 GPa.
>
http://www.matweb.com/search/SpecificMaterial.asp?bassnum=ETHOR0
>
> Taking into account a 2.4:1 safety factor, solar
> panels, electrical
> cabling, counterwieght (10,000 tonnes), radiation
> shielding,
> gondolas etc, the mass of material should be on the
> order of 15,500
> metric tonnes. Of this about 2,800 tonnes should be
> carbon fiber.
>
> How much will it cost?
>
> First let me say that the study of optimization is
> very interesting
> and leads down many paths. Very flowery isn't it?
> What I mean is
> that rather than lifting all of that carbon fiber
> and counterweight
> mass, it may be more efficient to send a probe to a
> NEO and bring
> back liquid ammonia, liquid methane and water. Then
> build an orbital
> Polyacrylonitrile plant. Disassociate the methane
> and ammonia into
> constituent parts and reassemble as follows:
>
> CH2=CHCH3 + NH3 + 3/2O2 --> CH2=CHCN +3H2O
>
> This gives you acrylonitrile, the basic building
> block of PAN, or as
> we know it, carbon fiber.
>
> While you're at it bring back other mass which can
> be used for the
> counterweight.
>
> Is it worth it? I have no idea. But you see the
> benefit of having
> some orbital infrastructure.
>
> So let's assume you've got to lift all that mass
> into orbit.
>
> Using the figures I have available to me:
>
> The Proton 8K82K can lift 6,000 kg to a 1,500 km
> orbit at 63
> degrees. If it could be launched from Kourou or
> Alcantara it could
> get a boost in payload capacity. The cost of launch
> is $70 million.
> It's probably lower than even that. Anyone have some
> good figures
> for this?
>
> So we need 2,583 launches at let's say $25,000,000
> because of volume
> discounts to the Chelomei Rocket Company. This
> should really boost
> the Russian economy. Total price = $64.5 Billion.
>
> Price of carbon fiber and fabrication: I have no
> clue. Anybody have
> access to industry price lists. The stuff I get on
> the web is
> consumer grade, small quantity carbon fiber, not
> aerospace grade,
> high volume, high performance prices.
>
> I found a reference to c.f. price per kg of $11 -
> $22 here:
> http://www.hypercar.com/pdf/Hypercar_EVS19.pdf
>
> Something else to consider; such a project is going
> to tax worldwide
> carbon fiber capacity. It will consume 15% of
> worldwide output of
> generic carbon fiber.
>
> QUOTE
> Over the past two years, we increased our installed
> capacity for
> producing high-performance carbon fibers from 3.5
> million pounds to
> 10.5 million pounds per year. That is about 25% of
> the total world
> capacity.
> END QUOTE
>
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