Re: Vision of the three Rs: Regular, Reliable and Reusable

On Feb 19, 12:51 am, Fred J. McCall <fmcc...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ian Woollard <ian.wooll...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
:Derek Lyons wrote:

:> In other words - pork and handouts.
:
:Yeah, it's a subsidy on water in LEO/GTO.
:
:I believe I'm right in saying that subsidies can be economically
:justified in situations where the long-term situation is one where the
:lower prices are going to be in line with the subsidy.

It's not quite that simple. It assumes there is a 'knee' in the cost
curves which must be overcome in order to get down to the subsidized
price AND that the 'knee' is related to scale of operations. In other
words, this only works depending on very specific curve shapes and
very specific economies of scale.

I have found the "knee" in the curve of
cost/kg vs number of flights for a space
transport to be an almost right angle turn.
For our Space Van 2010 and Space Van
2011, the knee occurs at about $1 or 2
million per flight or about $500 or $1000
per kilogram.

Space transports do not make much
economic sense unless you can get
beyond the knee. This is tantamount
to ignoring the current market as being
irrelevant to what a good space transport
can and **needs** to do.

Len

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw


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