Re: the "Spencer Launcher"


Monte Davis wrote:
> John Schilling <schillin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >The spaceflight industry was, by historical accident, founded by people
> >whose skills lay in recipe development. They came to like being the people
> >who got most of the money, and want to keep it that way.
>
> Obviously R&D costs predominate at first in *any* new industry using
> new technologies. But we expect unit costs to decline and the fraction
> of costs going into production to grow as the industry expands.
>
> If that hasn't happened yet in spaceflight, it seems simpler -- if
> less gratifying -- to explain it by limited demand than by invoking
> greedy conspiracy by BoLockMart et al. It's naive to expect
> mass-market economies (or rapid technological progress) from a
> transportation technology that moves a few hundred tons per year
> worldwide.

One of the problems, at least in the U.S., is that the launch
customer won't leave the vehicle alone long enough for it to earn
a return on the R&D costs. Thor-based launchers have flown
most-often from the U.S., 688 in all (including IRBMs), but the
most often-flown space launch variant, Delta 2, has only flown
120 times - and the Air Force is abandoning Delta 2 after next
year. More than 580 Atlas launches took place, but
Atlas Agena D, the most often flown Atlas variant, only lifted off
76 times. There were 147 or so Atlas Centaurs, but using
11 different versions! Each version required its own development
monies. Titan 4 is the absolute worst example. $20-30 billion
for a program that only flew 39 times. And the Air Force couldn't
even leave Titan 4 alone - it had to develop a "B" version at
great expense that only flew 17 of those 39 missions.

Russia, on the other had, has flown more than 600 identical
Soyuz-U variants of the R-7 family alone. Bought and paid for,
that one.

- Ed Kyle

.

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