Nibb31

But what you were saying was that "basic cost/demand" economical rules mean that if you reduce cost then demand automatically increases. The car analogy was to counter that argument by demonstrating that things are much more complicated and that demand does not automatically increase when you lower prices. The launch market is saturated right now. The only lucrative activities in space are: - commercial GEO communication satellites - government and institutional contracts (NASA, DoD, governments...) There is no other way to make any money in space. If there was, people would be investing, ordering more rockets, and the price would go down mechanically because of economies of scale. New markets cannot emerge in this environment. Space tourism, orbital manufacturing, or asteroid mining are not viable. Not with a 50% reduction in launch. Not even with a 90% reduction. And those reduction levels are not going to happen in the foreseeable future. A 50% reduction in launch cost is not going to happen. Microgravity could be useful for producing some molecules, but going from $100 million/launch to $50 million isn't going to change the game. And you are still going to need to build a spacecraft to carry your manufacturing machine to orbit, and that is going to cost much more than $100 million. Launch vehicles are already cheap compared to their payloads. By reducing launch costs by 50%, you are not going to multiply the number of payloads by 200%. That's not how it works. First, please stop using Skylon as an example. Skylon is never going to fly in its current form. They have no money, no industrial capability, no infrastructure. Their cost estimations are bogus and they are not going to get the huge investment they need, because their economical model is unrealistic. Please read the following threads where the Skylon project is debunked, because I really shouldn't need to reiterate the same argument over and over again: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/72850-Skylon-may-fly-this-year-first-SSTO-spaceplane Skylon is not happening. Now, with Skylon out of the way, let me explain this: getting to orbit will ALWAYS be an expensive job. It takes huge amounts of energy to accelerate payload mass from 0 to 27000km/h while fighting gravity and drag. Huge amounts of energy like that will NEVER be available to the general public, because they are just too dangerous. Huge amounts of energy will ALWAYS require large organizations and infrastructure to safely produce, handle, and convert that energy into delta-v. Large infrastructures will ALWAYS require highly-qualified people to run them. And this is where the cost is: highly-qualified people. Hardware and propellant are commodities. When you pay $100 million for a launch, only a small part goes into paying for the propellant and the metal that makes the actual tanks, engines. You are paying for the people who build, test, integrate, fuel, transport, and operate the launcher, as well as the administrative overhead, the facilities, the catering, etc... for all those people. Also, the industry has been working for decades to reduce the cost of getting to orbit. This has been done through competition, outsourcing, streamlined processing, automation. The current batch of Delta, Atlas, Ariane, Falcon, are all cheaper to fly than their counterparts of 30 years ago. You know about the law of diminishing returns: the first gains in efficiency are cheap, but the more you squeeze the sponge, the less you get out of it proportionally. So yeah, expendable rockets are already cheap. The people who work in the civilian or military aerospace industry are among the most brilliant on Earth. They are not idiots. They produce innovations and improve the technology incrementally on a daily basis. If there was some easy way to reduce costs or to get to orbit with less energy, or to drastically reduce costs by 10 or 20%, they would have figured it out by now. For these reasons, unless there is a huge breakthrough in technology, there simply isn't any way to reduce launch costs by 90% as you suggest in the foreseeable future. SpaceX is going to reuse the first stage of their rocket. Reusing one part of the rocket does not generate huge savings in the total launch cost, so this might optimistically translate into a 10% price reduction for customers, bringing the cost of a launch from $60 million to $55 million, bringing the total cost of a satellite project from $300 million to $295 million. That sort of reduction is not going to create massive new emerging markets. PV in space: -doesn't have dust, but MMOD hits reduce PV efficiency. Dust can be cleaned off with a brush. MMOD hits need panel replacement and expensive EVAs. -MW transmission is untested. The power losses for beaming power from 36000km away into a focused ground area are going to be high. -You need land to build your ground receiving antenna. The required area depends on how focused you can make your beam. -The gains from being in orbit are negated by the losses of beaming the power back down. If you need 6GW, then just make your 1GW solar farm 6 times bigger. Buying more land will always be cheaper than the sheer cost of the 14 km/s of delta-v that you need to put your solar panels into GEO.

What you're missing is that expendable boosters are already optimized for cost. They are already designed to be cheap and expendable. You won't be able to get any cheaper without sacrificing reliability, and reducing reliability will only increase insurance costs, which would offset any reduction in cost.

How long are you prepared to wait?

I don't see why not. We know how moon landings work nowadays, so there would be no point in an Apollo 10 kind of mission. Training is done on simulators, not in real conditions. An engineering test flight would be a more appropriate term, but doing a simple lunar orbit doesn't test anything more than a circumlunar flight. It only adds a LOI and a TEI burn, but you can validate upper stage restartability without leaving LEO. If you plan to land on the moon, then you will need more than a Shenzou and an upperstage to do so, so your engineering test flight wouldn't test any of the real conditions anyway.

Hydrogen isn't a source of energy. It's a method of storage, in the same league as batteries.

It's good practice to change your password on a regular basis. Personally, I suggest using Keepass to generate and manage your passwords. That allows you to use strong passwords and to keep different passwords for every website or service, which is even more important than the strength of your password. You can keep the database in the cloud, so that you can access it from anywhere, but be sure to use double encryption to keep it safe.

None of those potential payloads are funded or planned. If any of them were given a green light today, none of them could be ready in less than 5 to 10 years, which means that SLS is going to sit around for years waiting for a payload to be ready. In all likeliness, it won't, because the Administration will cancel it. Taxpayers don't want to pay infrastructure and employees to sit around for years waiting for a payload. SpaceX is a private subcontractor working for the government. It's still the taxpayer footing the bill.

I still don't understand why you are referring to Gemini 8, which had nothing to do with lunar orbit. Are you just referring to a dual launch architecture? If so, then it's just a matter of matching the dV provided by your booster and spacecraft with the dV required for TLI, LOI and TEI. But what is the point of lunar orbit if you're not going to land?

Did you manage to actually get that inflatable heat shield to fly? I think nobody has been able to actually use it because it flips over the spacecraft on reentry and acts like a parachute. Also, I really can't wait for the Beta 1 !

It sucks, but national security usually trumps an engineering flight test. This is really just a test of some basic avionics systems and the heatshield and parachute. All the rest is either boilerplate material or stuff that is only designed for this test. Of course, NASA's PR machine is going to spin it into "the first flight of America's new exploration spaceship", but it really isn't. Well, at least it's better than Ares I-X.

Basic theory is basic. In reality the mechanisms are much more complex. Also, you are confusing price and cost. If someone reduces the cost of launching stuff by 10%, it doesn't mean that they will reduce the price by 10%. Pricing is an art, and if you go an look at just about any industry (aerospace, automobile, cell phones, game consoles, razor blades, insurance...) you'll see that the retail price is decorrelated from the actual production cost of the product. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower, sometimes there are huge margins, sometimes there are subisidies. It all depends on your plans for maximizing profit over a given period in a particular market. And you don't generate new markets by simply slashing prices. If what you said was true, then car manufacturers would simply have to lower the prices of cars by 10% and they would automatically gain a 10% market share. They would just have to hire 10% more people and produce 10% more cars. If it was really that simple, then there would be no crisis in the car industry and the economy would flourish. Well, it doesn't work that way, does it? Huh? The large part of the "launch cost" is hardware, pad handling, integration, and operating the launch. Then there is all the support personnel (HR, cleaners, caterers, facility management, finance, administration, sales...). All of those tasks are performed by different people, often highly qualified. Manpower is the real cost. Hardware is only a small portion of the "launch cost", so you will never get a 50% of launch cost reduction by just using a new launch technology. But let's be optimistic and imagine that you do reduce the price of a launch by 50%. If the launch cost is 20% of the cost of operating a spacecraft and reduce the launch cost by 50%, then you only get a 10% overall reduction. Let's go crazy and imagine that you actually manage to bring the entire operational cost down by 50%. You can sell launch slots for $50 million instead of $100 million. What are the "huge business opportunities" that suddenly appear here? It's still too expensive for space tourism. Asteroid mining is still not viable. Orbital solar plants are still going to be more expensive than ground-based solar. You might get a slight increase in institutional launches (government, science...) because these people need to fly and have tight budgets, but that's it. There are plenty of issues with all of this. If it was as easy and simple as you say, why is it that the thousands of brilliant people that work in the space industry haven't found a way to make money in space other than selling launches to the government or launching communication satellites? Are you implying that you are smarter than them?

No. Demand depends on actual use, on reasons to go to space. For the foreseeable future, there is no commercial use for space other than the ones that already exists, and that is not only because of launch costs. In the total project cost of operating a satellite, launch cost is only a small part. Operators also have to pay for the payload development, testing, integration, ground equipment, transport and actual operating costs. Even if you reduce the launch costs by 50%, it hardly makes a dent in the total operational cost of space hardware. New business opportunities are not going to magically appear out of thin air just because you reduce the cost to orbit. Even if a bridge to nowhere is cheap, it's still a bridge to nowhere. It doesn't magically provide worthwhile reasons to cross it if there is nothing on the other side.

In your OP, you talked about non-orbiting. Why do you bring up Gemini 8 in the context of circumlunar flights? What are you asking for exactly? I'm confused.

If you don't know the spec, you can't determine whether it would be cheaper or not. Skylon is also hypothetical. Nobody knows how reusable it can be or how efficient it can be. Reusability doesn't necessarily mean that it will be cheaper. You also have to include the initial development cost, the production cost, and the operational cost. Are glass cups cheaper than paper cups? Why does McDonald's choose to use paper cups? In all likeliness Skylon will never fly because nobody is willing to pay for it. Please look at the other threads about Skylon and let's not start another off-topic debate in this one.

Yes. Or more precisely, not enough organizations are willing to pay to what it costs to send stuff into space. There simply aren't enough commercially viable applications for space and the launch market is already saturated and highly competitive. Actually, it's the other way round. The biggest market is for GEO comsats. Scientific payloads represent a much smaller market.

Why do you assume that riding on a space elevator would be cheap? How do you know how much it would cost to develop and build one? How do you know the payload capacity of one? How do you know the energy requirements for lifting those payloads to GEO? Without the engineering problems fully figured out, there is no way to estimate how much it will cost. And similarly, what makes you think that Skylon is ever going to be economically viable either? It will always be expensive to get things to orbit. This is because the amount of energy needed to accelerate any mass to orbital speed is huge, and because huge amounts of energy will always be potentially dangerous and expensive to play with.

The headline of that article says exactly the opposite: they need "at least" four times more to develop SABRE. That's an estimated development cost of $400 million. Where is the rest of the money coming from? Where are the other investors? There are none, because there is no viable business case for a reusable SSTO spaceplane. And seriously, only $400 million? The cost of development a conventional civilian jet engine by P&W or GE is around $1 billion dollars, yet 4 blokes in a shed claim they can industrialize SABRE, which is based on completely new and unproven solutions, for less than half of that budget? Their estimates are completely unrealistic. Just buying a factory to build and test those SABRE engines would cost twice that UK government grant. I apologize for bringing this thread off-topic again. We should be having this discussion in one of the numerous Skylon threads...

That's not true for the aerospace industry. The "If you build it they will come" meme can be countered with the "Bridge to nowhere" meme. Building a bridge to space won't suddenly make people want to send stuff to space because there simply is nothing to do in space and going to space will still be expensive because you still have to pay for the bridge. You build an infrastructure to meet a demand. There is no demand. There are no new station modules.

Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/about/

What are you asking for exactly? If circumlunar flights are possible? Of course they are, since Apollo 8 did it, as well as a number of Russian Zond flights. To do the same with Shenzhou in a dual-launch setup, you would need to dock it with an autonomous upper-stage, like a Block DM or a Centaur. I don't know if the Chinese have an equivalent. For Gemini 8, the Agena didn't have enough delta-V for TLI, but there were plans for a Gemini-Centaur circumlunar flight. None of them went anywhere, because Gemini would have been stretched to its limit and Apollo was being built for the purpose. The plans existed as a backup in case something went wrong with the Apollo-Saturn project and the Russians might have got the advantage. And just in case you have $200 million floating around, you could book a flight with Space Adventures who claim to be able to send you around the Moon in a Soyuz after docking in orbit with a Block DM upper stage. They have announced that they have at least one flight booked, so now it's just a matter of building the hardware.

Please have a quick look at the other threads about Skylon in this forum. They have no industrial base or support, no infrastructure, no logistics, no facilities, and most of all no funding. I've demonstrated in various other threads that the whole project is not viable economically because the demand is simply not there and their budget estimates are bogus. As for the technology, all REL's promises are based on the most optimistic figures for each of the components, none of which have been developed into engineering prototypes, let alone tested to see if those figures make any sense. There is zero margin in their design and they are practically reinventing the wheel in just about every area of aerospace design. If any single one of those unproven components ends up being too heavy or underperforms in any way (which they always do when you get to real-world engineering), then payload capacity is reduced and the whole project is no longer viable. If major EU governments suddenly had a revelation tomorrow that SSTO spaceplanes are a major industrial priority, if ESA magically provides funding for billions of euros, if Airbus or BAE Systems got on board if all the unproven technology was properly developed and performs exactly as planned, if there are no budget overruns or performance loss (which is impossible), and if someone invents a new application that actually requires frequent unmanned launches to LEO, then maybe it could fly in 10 to 15 years. But none of that is happening. Skylon is not happening. Period.

First, Skylon isn't going anywhere in the next 10 years. Second, if it did work as advertised (which it won't), its payload to LEO is about 7 tons. Its payload to GEO would be abysmal. Third, even with Skylon and with a lower efficiency rate, it will be cheaper to collect Sun energy on the ground. Trucks are cheaper than SSTO spaceplanes. Fourth, microwave beaming at that scale is unproven and untested. We don't know anything about the side-effects on wildlife, radio interference, or ionization of the upper atmosphere.

Of course it is. It's useless for Earth too in the real world. However, if you could set up an ISRU facility on the Moon and find a cheap launch method to send propellant to EML-2, then you might be able to design an interplanetary gateway infrastructure. This isn't happening in our lifetimes of course, but neither is an Earth-based space elevator.

Responsibility of each part of the spacecraft are clearly defined in the terms of the launch contract. The upper stage is typically part of the launcher, but GEO sats have their own propulsion systems, which can also fail, so it really depends on the sequence of events. As for the rest of your post, I'm sorry, but I couldn't understand it. I understand that English isn't your first language, but you are going to have to make an effort if you want to be understood.

Tallinn is actually only 900 km from Plesetsk. Not that far.