The Godwall (beating gravity)

Ian Woollard wrote:

> Ok. I've been looking into the different launchers that there are as
> well as the different launchers that there are going to be. Right now
> the best new launcher is Kistler aerospace one- they are talking about 3
> tonnes or so to LEO for around 17 million. And it's reusable so in
> principle the cost can come down further as they develop it. They appear
> to have funding which is amazing, but still the costs are quite high;
> but I find the design rather boring; this is probably why they got funding.
>

Kistler is out of the business. Also, be careful camparing people "talking"
with people who are actually launching. Usually, by the time the talkers are
launching (if they ever do) the cost has gone up and capability has gone down.
This was particularly noticable with the shuttle: $500/lb to LEO and 1
failure/100,000 launches in the talking stage, $20,000/lb to LEO and 1
failure/100 launches in the launching stage. For the last 30 years people have
been talking about much cheaper launchers, but very few have ever launched
anything and those that did accomplished marginal, not revolutionary, cost
reductions. Today, only the Russians and the Ukrainians can achieve fairly
cheap launch, probably because their engineers are so poorly paid.

Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.

I think we should:

1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020 goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failure rate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels will need to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.

2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroid are
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about 500 times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand space colonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.

3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need their colony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearby stars.

Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.