economics of bootstrapping

>

> >
> > 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.

So am I. From a study of history you can learn many lessons and
benefit from them. In other instances, history has nothing to teach
you if that past has no precedent for what confronts you in the
present.

An extreme example: We've learned many lessons from encounters with
primitive societies. If we encounter another primitive society in
the future we should be better prepared by having learned the
lessons of past encounters. The counterpoint is if we land on a new
planet and encounter a new species that has formed a society, the
lessons of the past may not apply because the conditions are so
different. We can't take for granted that societies develop along
universal lines. We've only studied Earth's societies.

Orbit is different from Africa, New Guinea, the New World,
Australia, etc. Things we could take for granted in those frontiers
we may not be able to take for granted in orbit. Why then would you
expect the lessons learned from past frontiers to unquestionably
hold in the different frontier of space?

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.

Are you willing to subject the last sentence to a test of
falsifiability?

> 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

Thanks for the links. I'll read them this evening.

TangoMan