Re: Death Sentence for the Hubble?

From: Rand Simberg (simberg.interglobal_at_org.trash)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:42:12 GMT

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:33:48 GMT, in a place far, far away, Fred J.
McCall <fmccall@earthlink.net> made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

>:>:>Of course there is, but we're talking about developing systems that it
>:>:>is claimed are easy to do and will have a huge market (which is a big
>:>:>piece of the rest of the business plan).
>:>:
>:>:But up until now, the "huge market" part generated a great deal of
>:>:skepticism. That's what's kept it from happening, not the
>:>:technological side.
>:>
>:>That doesn't seem to track, either. One need merely look at the
>:>number of current launches. Being able to come up with a reliable and
>:>inexpensive launcher would quite obviously allow you to capture a lot
>:>of those existing launches, even if lower launch costs didn't enlarge
>:>the market.
>:
>:That doesn't constitute enough business to amortize the development
>:costs. You need a much bigger market than that. The claim is that
>:it's easy to do, not that it's inexpensive to do. It still takes a
>:lot of up-front investment.
>
>If it takes that much up front investment in "development costs", then
>it is *NOT* "easy".

What's not "easy" is raising the money, not designing and developing
the launch system. The latter isn't a big deal, given the appropriate
investment.

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