Re: Cheap Access to Space

On 16 Dec, 21:04, Fred J. McCall <fmcc...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ian Parker <ianpark...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

:
:Basically the viability of SPS depends on transportation.
:

It depends on much more than that. It depends on all sorts of
resource costs, development costs, etc.

:
:If you are saying that it will be enormously easier with asteroid
:material, you are of course right. What I was trying to work out was
:the establishment of a market of some description.
:

You can't work out the establishment of a market until you can talk
about costs and prices.

:
:I do not believe there will be enough tourists for a killer market.
:"Killer" here refers to the market that justifies the costs and drives
:it.
:

I don't believe we'll get to space at all if we're waiting for the
proverbial 'killer app'. Think 'small bites'.

SSP can in fact be split into small bytes. In SSP you need 2 things.
You need

1) A method of transmitting power to earth. An attenna which has a
500m radius circle.

2) The guts of the power generation system.

"1" can provide a communication satellite with a large number of
circuits. In fact one 500m radius circle on Earth represents a circuit
of 10GHz bandwidth.

Now as you have rightly said there are communication satellites in
existence, but they do not have this sort of level of performance. I
have talked about WiFi going to satellites. You claim, also rightly,
that at the moment WiFi is confined to short ranges.. In fact in terms
of power requirements the communications satellite acts as a
telescope. In fact the power required is equivalent to that of a
dipole at 500m.

I am inclined to think that perhaps one effect of cheaper access, and
this is really cheaper access to MEO and GEO will be to have
communication satellites which are clusters of smart pebbles phase
locked to one and other and capable of WiFi. I believe that WiFi is
necessary for SSP BUT it could be provided as a service in its own
right.

For GEO/MEO you need to think about ion drive tugs as well as access
to LEO. The driver is total M/GEO cost.

:
:You will have to be rich and you will have to be a space
:enthusiast. Are there enough people with both those qualifications?
:

Several folks who have studied the situation intensely seem to think
so. I used to have my doubts, but when you look at the money that
people have put in up front to reserve tickets, there may be enough of
a market to get that first 'small bite'.

Virgin Galactic has several hundred tickets sold (some $26 million in
deposits, I think). With 5 spacecraft, each of which can carry 5
passengers, he's probably got enough tickets sold to cover a year or
more of operations. After that, some of the people who have put down
deposits will have to come through with the rest of the purchase
price.

Airline tickets used to be quite expensive, too, as such things went,
and only the well to do flew. Now millions of people do it. Tourism
of the type people are currently aiming at is the first 'small bite'.
Whether it takes off or not depends on whether or not places to go
develop.

In any case, as flight rates for the 'joyride' tourism go up, prices
should be able to come down, which expands the market. Technology
gets driven by trying to keep a 'tourist service' that the well off
will pay for. There has to be a differentiator there.

Another approach is the one Len is talking about, where a vertically
integrated market is sold 'as a block'. This is a somewhat bigger
bite and a harder sale (as Len's decades of experience trying to get
it off the ground would seem to attest). This one also leads to
further 'bites', though, since once the hardware is developed for one
vertically integrated application, prices will start to fall when it
comes to bringing new applications on stream, since every new
application leads to a higher flight rate.

This may be the case, but I would like to see some sort of market
survey. There is one point about tourism which I think everyone
forgets and that is that space is dangerous. Quite apart from accident
risks there is the risk of radiation.

On Earth we see risks that are quite small in comparison influencing
tourist behaviour. How, to take a simple example, can you say Syria is
dangerous and yet willy nilly talk about tourism in space? It does not
make any sort of reasonable sense.

Weigtlessness is not pleasant and most people rapidly get motion
sickness. You can train, maybe drugs can help but it is quite a
consideratrion.

In any case the only way to proceed is to attempt to do some sort of
market survey.

It is true that every reduction in cost leads to new applications (see
above)

Eventually you get to horizontal market progress this way, where you
get flight providers who just sell flights and don't have to sell the
'whole solution'.

Eventually you get to the point where you've got people living and
working in space, which bootstraps industry and helps with things like
SPS.

I'm not sure you can drive it the other way, because then the 'killer
app' has to justify way too much up front development and expense.
Spreadsheets and word processing and such didn't drive the creation of
the personal computer. Instead, that was driven in large part by
'computer fanbois' and techno-geeks. Once they were out there,
though, a lot of improvements and market enlargement happened due to
'killer apps'.

Think about it.

What is THE biggest driver in improving the performance and capability
of PCs? Gaming.

Where do a lot of the innovations in the auto industry come from? High
performance racing.

And so it will probably be with space. However, because capital
prices there are so much higher (as they are with aircraft), there is
a decent government role to be played. It would be good if there was
an independent piece of NASA to play that part - a NACA for space
vehicle development, if you will.

If you are engaging in long term research there is a government role.
Most mixed economies accept this. We look to government to provide
economic stability. The key question for subsizing a reusable space
vehicle, or even space in general is not the cost per bird whatever
that might be, but the development time required. I and most other
believers in the Market would give a time limit of 5 years. If X can
be built in 5 years it should be done by private finance, or not done
at all.

This effectively means that a 2STO if built must be private. There is
a public role in hypersonic aviation and magnetic aerodynamics.
--
- Ian Parker
.

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