Smells Like Teen Spirit

There's overcapacity in the commercial launch market right now relative to
demand. The U.S. military has just gotten new Delta 4 and Atlas V
launchers, and both of these have some really dynamite engines, the RS-68
and and the RD-180. There are still lots of old U.S. and Soviet
ballistic missiles that can be converted to launchers for civil or
military use.

It's really not clear to me that technology advancement is right now the
solution to the high cost of accessing space. What is needed is more
demand for launchers.

But of course the high cost of accessing space limits demand severely. And
small reductions in the price of accessing space may or may not increase
demand significantly; it is not clear how price-elastic that demand might
be. We might, for example, have to see a further 10-fold reduction in
price before we really see a demand explosion, but of course that 10-fold
reduction in price can't occur without the demand explosion to support it.
That's a conundrum, and I don't know what the answer is to how to
increase demand. But to assume that the answer lies in more launcher
technology development does not seem to me to be necessarily wise.

It seems to me that the major cost of launching is not in the variable
cost of launching, but rather in the amortization of initial R&D costs.
This is one of the reasons (although not the only) that Russian launchers
are 'cheap'. There are actually quite a few new or relatively new
launchers on the market, for example, Ariane V, Delta 4, Atlas V (plus new
variants of Delta 4 and Atlas V that will show themselves over the next
year or two), India's GSLV, H-2, and so on and so on. But each of these
launchers has had very few launches.

Even the venerable Ariane 4, recently retired, only saw 114 launches
during it's entire service life. I don't know what the initial
development cost of Ariane 4 was, but let's assume it was $1.14 billion.
That works out to $10 million per flight just for amortization of
development costs, excluding any discount factor, or double or triple that
to account for discounting and risk and so forth.

Ron
******

Al Globus
05/15/03 04:22 PM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

I was refering primarily to NASA's budget. NASA has a 15 billion
dollar per year budget, of which only a small fraction goes into any
launch activity other than the shuttle (around $4 billion/year). While
all the activities you mention are great and certainly help, most are
either very small or are aimed at minor improvements in current
vehicles. What I would like to see is about half of NASA's budget
devoted to launch. I'd like to see it spent on:

- Propulsion and materials R&D
- Providing launch and test facilities to private industry
- Some sort of prize (like X-prize, but more money for orbital flight)
or purchase of initial flights (10-15) for reusable orbital vehicles.
- Other R&D of value to launch vehicles.