economics of bootstrapping

> Here's the problem with an uncritical involation of
> precedent. Let's
> say you've done this snowball trick on many
> mountains before and
> it's always worked. So now you climb another
> mountain and start the
> snowball rolling. It rolls down the hill, gathering
> more snow, and
> keeps growing. All of a sudden it enters a steel
> mill and encounters
> such high temperatures that it melts very quickly,
> even while it
> continues on its downward slope. Result: Stopped and
> destroyed.
>
> Moral of the story: for the precedent to hold, the
> conditions have
> to be the same.
>
> The conditions of orbit have no common goods that
> were always
> available and usually free on all past frontiers.
> When orbital
> ventures may come to require a common good, they may
> individually
> find it too expensive to provide, thus they may find
> it impossible
> to proceed to the next step, resulting in stalled
> progress.
>
I have a real hard time agreeing with you here. I am
a firm believer in learning from history. It is true
that you can say no two instances are identical and
therefore you cannot apply the lessons of one to cover
the other. But you can find instances where there is
enough data gathered from previous experiences which
are similar to draw likely scenarios.

For instance, we can draw from our knowledge of how
lessons learned from biosphere to understand the
difficulties that lie in attempting to create a closed
life support system. Is this the exact same scenario
which will come up in an island three? no, but there
is more than enough data gathered from these
experiments to help us refine our models which define
the issues surrounding island three habitats.

Your right we can never have a complete correlation.
But we can model given enough data to something that
is around 90% probability.

> > I'll see if i can find an online reference for the
> > reason NO is produce over the next few days. It
> has
> > to do with the heating of molecules in the air
> caused
> > by reentry.
> >
> > Ryan Z
>
looked around and found two references:

an interesting thread i found on google which gives an
equation for computing this as well as references to
look up the original study:
http://yarchive.net/space/launchers/reentry.html

the second reference is an faa environmental impact
study of RLV at (see page 10):
http://ast.faa.gov/lrra/environmental/envc/PEISRV5-28-92.pdf

The impact study recognize this issue but then blows
it off. I've talked though with scientists on this
subject and they feel this report is in error due to
the assumption that it is looking at launches as a
matter of only a few a week. When you take this to
1000 per day, the situation changes. I personally am
not an atmospheric scientist enough to know the
impact, but it is an interesting thing to note
nevertheless.

Ryan