Re: Space Access Update #112 9/19/05

"Jeff Findley" <jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>The key to lowering costs and producing a truly operational system is to fly
>often. Reusability, or lack of reusability, isn't as important as flight
>rate.

And the rest of the vicious circle is that there's little demand for
high flight rates *at present costs.*

Almost any CATS scheme can be made to work if the Space Fairy provides
a big enough, long enough, interest-free loan. Use it to design, set
up production, and build the long mass-production run of EELVs, or the
big dumb boosters, or the fleet of reusables or spaceplanes (and
infrastructure to turn them around fast), or the laser launch
facility, or the space elevator.

Once you've bodily "moved the market" down to a much lower $/lb range
-- and we have nothing but guesses about where that magic number is --
presumably elasticity kicks in, your payload fairings or cargo bays or
seats fill up with new categories of customers who could never afford
space before, you start making money and start paying off the loan.

Without such a loan, though, the challenge is to find an economically
viable path *from* where we are today *to* the promised land of CATS.
It's a tough challenge that's almost certainly going to require a long
series of incremental nibbles at the problem from technology AND
politics AND alt.space entrepreneurial economics... not a "silver
bullet" breakthrough from any one angle.



.

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