Bootstrapping Hawaii

I would be intersted in your take on the fact that has so often been
stated, which is that fuel costs are but a minor cost component of
the journey. Why are they an impediment to furthr development of sub-
orbital transport if the fuel costs can be offset by faster turnover
of flights thus increasing utilization of the expensive hardware and
by being able to charge some degree of premium for the ticket.
They are a problem for suborbital because airflight costs are currently approaching the cost of fuel (perhaps a factor of 2 or so currently). Orbital costs, and suborbital costs are much, much higher. But what I'm saying is that it's unlikely that suborbital will ever compete with airflight, even if the suborbital costs fall down just to the fuel costs because the fuel costs are so much higher than the airflight costs. But what I'm saying is that it's unlikely that suborbital can ever to compete with airflight, even if the suborbital costs fall down just to the fuel costs; because the fuel used is determined by the physics of these vehicles. Also, if sonic booms are a problem, why aren't they are problem for
sub-orbital tourism and orbital tourism?
They are. However for those cases you can operate from certain carefully chosen sites which mitigates the problem (in the extreme- operate from the sea). But they still are a problem to a degree. The Shuttle throws off sonic booms across America as it reenters. People mostly put up with it because it is relatively rare.

>> I don't agree. I do personally know some people that have built a
>> liquid fuelled rocket engine and lit it several thousand times. It
>> has never exploded.
>
> Well I don't see where we can go from here. I've flown hundreds of
> thousands of miles on planes and I've never been involved in a crash.
> Others have though. What does this tell us?
The standard rule of thumb is that the reliability of rocket engines is such that they catastrophically fail about 0.2% of the time. However, this particular rocket engine was designed for reliability and has lit many more times more often than that; and has not failed. The clear implication is that there is no inherent unreliability in rocketry.
> I don't know enough about Soyuz to comment intelligently. Didn't they
> just have a landing malfunction a few months back?
Yup guidance system failed. The backup system kicked in, as designed. You'll notice that everyone was fine. Some people have compared this to the Shuttle failure...
> If the Russians were smart about they'd first determine the price
> elasticity associated with price reductions. It one outcome it may
> not make economic sense to lower prices because the expected increase
> in launches may not offset the reduced income.
They're not stupid or they wouldn't be making rockets.
> Competition would be a welcome turn of events.
Yes.
> Very true, but is the US legal system from a century ago the same in
> character as it is today? And for that matter, are the citizen's of
> today more or less litigious than a century ago? Didn't a judge just
> approve lawsuits against the airlines and Boeing on the expectation
> that they should have known that boxcutters could have been used to
> take over a plane and fly it into a building. I hold the opinion that
> this type of ruling wouldn't have been issued a century ago.
If that is a big problem, then flights will not go from American soil or will not be run by American companies. Still, the airlines have this mostly but not completely sorted- they face a similar sort of issue. Basically paying up a largeish sum of money, no questions asked, goes a long way to head off these sorts of problems. But it doesn't always work as we see here.
TangoMan