Another mag lev approach

As fas as building a city for the workers,,,perhaps you're not familiar with the "city" we built in the Arabian desert when we were constructing the natural gas plant at Jubail Berri. It was mostly 2 room prefabs with a shared bathroom between, a mess hall, library, pool room,,,all from prefabs and,,,very cheap,,,
I don't see why an airport would require a hundred sq miles,,,the refinery at Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia was built mainly from sea transport and,,,a single airstrip in Dhahran.
We don't have to build cities to service this system, at least, not initially, though I expect as business picked up, those amenities would follow of their own accord. In other words, THAT expense is not a part of the start up infrastructure costs,,,
Gary Ansorge

Mike
The launch rate would depend on power available and launch to launch time.Just the time in preparing a launch tube for the next launch could be considerable.
So multiple launch tubes need to be part of the facility design solution. Facilities can be built in phases but in this case, any drilling would increase the risk of a launch especially for humans and other vertebrates.
Constructing a number of tubes might amortize the cost further.Two tubes at a time would ensure a backup.One could envision multiple sites with at least two tubes each. Maintenance alone would require multiple sites with multiple tubes.
From the business or consumer side, the ticket cost will depend on the costs of the design/build of launch facilities, operations/maintenance, and mission (destination/path/time in space). Since the ground facilities will be the greatest cost without regard to specific mission, that is where any business plan for space needs to focus. The ground facilities will require an international airport (50 to 100 miles of surface land with subway tunnels to the loading zone.
Dollars per pound tries to reduce all the various costs to one figure. In reality, it's the dollars per pound per mission. An up and back mission to LEO in one day is quite different than a two week orbital mission. The rough estimate begins with the weight of the humans. Add to that ten times (10x) the weight for food and air per week.
Given the launch rate and the facility requirements, whole cities would need to be built just to house the workers and guests.
David

Any kind of electromagnetic launcher ought to have advantages over rockets. That said, Ill have to admit that since I wrote The Bridge to Space back in 1995 Ive heard an interesting assertion made in regard to the advantages of EM launchers over rockets. It was pointed out that most economic analyses of EM launchers assume an extraordinary launch rate (typically many per day). The question is then asked how much more economical rocket launches would be if we launched at the rate of several a day every day. Rand Simberg sometimes talks of an analysis he participated in where they examined just about every technology imaginable, and found that the affect the different technologies had was minor compared to the affect of launch rate. In other words, a technology far from optimal launching at a rate of several times a day would undersell a much more advanced technology launching at once a month. It was all about the launch rate. So EM launchers may or may not be the panacea for reducing launch costs that some might have thought. Star Trams superconductive cables are to provide lift to the far end of the launcher, which permanently resides in the upper atmosphere. Electromagnetic repulsion between superconducting cables on the ground and attached to the launch tube suspends the tube against the pull of gravity.
Regards,

Mike Combs