Re: It's In-Line (Shuttle Derived)
- From: gherbert@xxxxxxxxx (George William Herbert)
- Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:31:36 -0000
Ed Kyle <edkyle99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Henry Spencer wrote:
>> Ed Kyle <edkyle99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >I think it is a sound opinion, considering that
>> >the Mars reference missions call for 200 to 800 tonnes
>> >of payload to low earth orbit for each Mars mission...
>>
>> That puts a big priority on being able to launch it *cheaply*, since
>> there's so much of it.
>>
>> When somebody needs 200 tons of machinery installed in a new factory, they
>> do not start looking for a 200-ton truck.
>
>That's because trucks are reusable. If each
>truck could only make one trip before its
>destruction, buyers would find themselves
>wanting fewer, bigger trucks because that
>would be the cheapest solution.
The actual situation we find ourselves in is
either buying a large quantity of expendable
Ford F-250s at retail cost, significantly more
expensive Big Rig trucks whose factories are
now producing at most a dozen units a year
due to falling demand of shipment of 40-foot
intermodal containers, or cheering for the
Government Truck Factory Giant Truck Projekt,
which will produce our 200-ton payload trucks
at a rate of two or three per year, and require
most of the Truck industry's workers and
current spending to get going.
Advertised Falcon V price is $3 million per metric
ton to LEO, plus or minus epsilon.
Do you believe that the new Shuttle Derived HLV
will cost less than $350 million per flight, including
its development cost amortization and all the government
overhead and the like, at flight rates of 2-3 per year
and a 10 year development cycle?
Do you believe that it will cost less than $700 million
per flight? Less than $1 billion? $1.4 billion?
A reasonable estimate including the R&D cost amortization
is going to be in the range of a billion plus, which is
only 3-4 times what the launch cost would be on Falcon V
rockets.
There's going to be more cost in an orbital facility
for propellant collection and storage with Falcon, true,
but it's not going to be billions of dollars a year more,
which is the cost differential.
This is all back-of-the-envelope, but the costing exercises
have been done before, and HLV at these prices is not
attractive.
-george william herbert
gherbert@xxxxxxxxx
.
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