What if NASA followed Prof. O'Neill and the L5 Society?

> From: Al Globus [mailto:aglobus@...]

> It's a little like building a really nice airport connected to a
> nearby city by a 200 mile dirt track.

It's possible that Bush has realised that NASA is a bunch of clowns when it comes to developing vehicles, and that the task might best be left to X-prize winners and their successors. Or he might realise that after the screw-up they have made of the last *dozen* chances to develop a cheap launcher, a mars mission is more likely to gain support from congress.

A big problem though is that '200 mile' is not an accurate measurement, and there is quite a lot of variation of opinion in how far away that airport actually is. If you want to build a cheap road then for obvious reasons you want it as short as possible. And there are a few VTOL TSTO designs that promise 100mile orbit and figures approaching $100/lb. As near as I can tell the numbers add up. That is to say they have enough deltaV and don't appear to require horribly complex maintenance.

A fictional, though very detailed, account of the development of such a vehicle can be found here at http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/SpecialTopics/RocketCom/titlePage.html I suspect there is a small amount of technical BS here (certainly enough journalistic BS) but if there is I can't find it using publicly available information.

Of course many would look at that and say, "Oh you don't want to do that! You want something that'll take 30 tons to 300 miles and land like and take off and land like an aeroplane..." The latter is slightly more difficult to develop, and therefore will take much longer.

So how about it? How long does the road need to be?

ANTIcarrot.