Re: Skylon SSTO

On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 08:15:35 +1100, Sylvia Else
<sylvia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

ianparker2@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

The real question is though would a launcher be a good use of money? If
it can be made to work cheaply it would be. Anyone would be ill advised
to invest major resources at this point in time. I tend to feel that
Bill would probably be more interested in my pet project - the Von
Neumann machine.

At this point, Skylon doesn't need major investment. It needs, by Bill
Gate's standard, a very modest investment to allow further work to prove
the concept.

By standard commercial aerospace practices, developing something like
Skylon would require several billion dollars. That is a very large
investment even by Bill Gates' standards.

And while it might be possible to reduce the cost to a few hundred
million dollars by means of highly nonstandard aerospace project
management, that is not the sort of management that one can simply
hire and delegate, but the sort of hands-on management that Gates
has indicated he doesn't have time for.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schillin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx * for success" *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
.

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