Re: Around the Moon for $100M!
- From: henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Henry Spencer)
- Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:37:54 GMT
In article <1122508240.650214.158880@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
hop <hellsownpuppy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...If it was only a one-off, getting the development and per flight
>costs for $100 million sounds very optimistic to me...
Perhaps optimistic but not ridiculous. If you look at list prices (insofar
as such things exist), you'd think the Proton launch would use up almost
all of that. But *cost* and *price* are very different things for Proton:
its manufacturing and launch operations are much less labor-intensive than
Western launchers, partly just because of more efficient operations and
partly because of Soviet-era investment in automation. The actual cost is
low enough that just what price you get depends a whole lot on how good a
negotiator you are and what the current political situation is (i.e., what
repercussions a low price might have, if it became public knowledge).
If you're willing to accept a fairly spartan trip -- Soyuz only, no
supplementary pressurized module -- the spacecraft side of this isn't
major engineering. The only big item is the heavier heatshield, and a
flight-proven design for that already exists. Mounting a docking fitting
on a Breeze-M upper stage is not that big a deal. And this work is being
done in Russia, where hard currency goes a long way.
>Finding multiple
>tourists to pay for $100 million flights is probably a tall order.
Yeah, that price is awfully steep.
>if there was some other market for the dockable upper stage, that might
>have some chance...
Note that a suitable upper stage -- Breeze-M -- already exists. Making it
dockable (especially if you're willing to assume that the docking is flown
manually) just requires bolting a spare docking assembly to it. That's
not a big-ticket item.
>I would also be very hesitant to fly on it without an all up
>demonstration flight of the modified systems.
Indeed so.
People are focusing on the wrong end of this. Boosting a Soyuz into a
lunar trajectory is no big deal -- pretty much all the hardware needed
already exists, and putting it together into a workable system should not
be that hard. The real questions, to my mind, are navigation/guidance and
the durability of the long-duration spacecraft systems (air, power, etc.)
(the existing Soyuz systems won't suffice, especially since a fair bit of
their normal working life will have been used up getting to the station).
These things aren't *hard*, per se, but they have to be gotten *right*.
And while there is no doubt that the Zond heatshield worked, it would
certainly be comforting to see the modern re-creation of it flight-tested
before entrusting my own tender hide to it. Preferably accompanied by a
successful skip maneuver (navigation/guidance, again), since a purely
ballistic reentry from lunar trajectory is really brutal -- much worse
than doing it from LEO -- and should be reserved strictly for extreme
emergencies.
The reason why cosmonauts didn't go around the Moon before Apollo 8 was
that the Soviet-era policy called for two successful unmanned test flights
before going manned. (Several of the Zond tests looked like successes to
the West but had sufficiently serious problems that the Soviets classed
them as failures.) If I'm flying as a passenger, I want to see a *manned*
test flight first.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert | henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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