HLLV vs. high flight rates: A look at economies...

Ah, but the burden of proof is on Ed Wright to prove he can produce high flight rates.

Extraordinary claims require extra-ordiary proof. Saturn V proved that HLLV will work, and Griffin understands this and could argue more convincingly than I ever could.

Personally I wouldn't give up on any type of launch capability. In the same fashion that we see all kinds of cars, vans, trucks and lorries, I expect that the future of space travel will include space worthy versions of the same thing. The economies mentioned don't seem to take into account the re-assembly of anything that had been shipped in parts. If I were in a position to put a new space telescope up, there is no way I'd trust anyone to assemble it up there. So it would require heavy lift facilities. Just because it's more expensive doesn't mean that it won't be done. That's just the cost of moving large heavy equipment. Yes I want it cheaper, but I'm not going to reduce the size of my payload just because it's cheaper.

Of course, micro satelites can and will be launched on relatively tiny modified ICBM's.

Horses for courses.

Anyway, that's my tuppence worth.

I'm just very nervous over the prospects of HLLV with the naysaying. In fact, Griffin is on Capitol hill as we speak. More at: www.nasaspaceflight.com and www.nasawatch.com

Hearings (see bottom)
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic ... 8&start=80

This is what I'm talking about:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opi ... 5.900.html


This is why I loathe folks like Ed Wright and the US 'Libertarian' Party types in some of the X-prize crowd.

If Ed and the rocket racers said:

"We support HLLV, and we are also going to race rocket planes to get more widespread support for spaceflight in general"

--I would have no problem.

But that isn't what he and Gump said. Both attacked Griffins heavy-lift mandate with their questionable little toys and I don't like it one bit. Gump attacked Griffin in an issue of AV Week awhile back, and Ed Wright wrote that miserable little HLV bashing piece for Space.com.

So there is no 'live and let live' philosophy on their part.

That is why I went after these US Libertarian Party types so much. They talk smack, hurt NASA--and when it is time to perform--have little to show for their efforts. To wit, their actions HURT spaceflight for us all.

That should be obvious to anyone who searches his soul.

Hello, Sean Girling,

I am using Ed Wright's article as illustration of the causal logics of costs simply and only - showing what costs of rockets, launch sites etc. fit inot what parts of the causal logics of costs as described theoretically.

The example of launching a telescope you mentioned doesn't have to do with that - the example yopu mentioned is part of causal logics of something that isn't cost. This "something" desreves and requires consideration also and I already have thoughts and ideas to inititate that consideration(s).

So you are right to some degree - there could be someone in the future who finds a way to reassemble a lot in space - but it doesn't have to do with costs but with choice and decision between several vehicles, several rockets, several launch pads etc.

I will go on using the illustartions and adding others later.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

I have said something about opportunity costs in the Costs-thread. It was a short remark only, saying that I didn't consider them while describing the behaviour and nature of costs and giving cost functions.

The following quote from teh article initially mentioned illustartes opportunity costs:



This quote says that the development of a Shuttle-derived super-booster has the opportunity costs of no longer being able to buy 100 Soyuz-flights around the moon or the opportunity costs of no longer being able to buy 20 Moon landings if these would cost five times the circum-lunar trip.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

That is a hazardous pitfall, Ekke...

I think that he is making a poor assumption in saying that we could buy manned lunar expeditions from Russia at a half billion dollars. The technology to accomplish that feat does not exist in the Russian Space Program, and the expense to develop it would have to be defrayed by any such theoretical sales, so the model is based on assumptions which have no real-world material basis.

And I doubt there is much scientific merit to cirumlunar manned expeditions, so 100 trips of minimal value doesn't seem like much of a bargain to me.

I'll go with the high flight rate with this one. Although to be honest being pro capitalist the High flight rate vs HLLV misses the point for me. The most important aspect is competition (which I doubt there will be on this). It should be up to market forces to decide the size of the vehicle.

As a general point America desperately needs to introduce competition into it's launch vehicle market. I find it incredible as a European that America does not dominate the commercial launch market considering how much it spends on space. Russian/Ukraine rockets appear to have stranglehold on the market with the exception of Ariane. Beyond the alt.space community there does appear to be competion to reduce costs by reducing ground staff and in the case of the Russians developing new rockets that require fewer ground staff. All this is happening quite slowly, but the fact that American companies (with the exception of the new startup spacex) do not appear to be participating I cannot believe would be seen as anything but alarming by Americas politicians.

Hello, SawSS1June21,

I don't intend to assist Ed Wright in his enterpreneurial interests by this thread - it's not meant to promote his ideas or something like that. It is not meant to defend him nor to do the oppsite.

The only purpose of this thread is to breath life into what is said in the Costs-thread which is that theoretical and abstract.

So it may be that you're right regarding Ed Wright's intentions etc. but that doesn't matter here - what he is saying is economically correct really.

The scientifc value of circumlunar flights is of no meaning regarding costs, their behaviour and nature - regarding science and scientific value of a mission the same answer is valid I responded to Sean Girling:



Costs alone never can be the only criterion to make up one's mind or to decide which vehicle to develop, build or construct.

Costs must be one of the criterions - but at least one more criterion is required and I am already thinking about how to consider it or them in this section.

Regarding the circumlunar flight offered by Space Adventures working together with the Russians they explicitly have said that there will be tests regarding the Soyuz, the Proton and the Block DM. So there seems to be a real project using existing and tested hardware.

Hello, broyale,

you are right by far.

The market I didn't consider yet and I mustn't do that in this thread. I mustn't do that in no thread about costs. To consider the market requires one additional consideration at least: second criterion required to choose a vehicle or rocket.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

We wouldn't even have R-7 if it were up to 'market forces.' I'd rather an engineer like Griffin define what we need, thank you.

I think the future of space will be very "market force" related, cause if it will not be for the market.. I think almost every government project may fade away in the end as it did before. We need "sustainability".

And Griffin has a good position,but that doesn't say other people their ideas or opinions are not valid, worth mentioning or thinking about.

I hope you are right.

2005 is about over--the first decade of the 21st Century is half done.
And what do we have to show for it?

I thought the future would look better than this. It has gotten to the point that I have no hope at all.

Hello to the "old hands":

The best handle on the cost aspect is certainly to look at the development until now. If you consider commercial launchers, there's a decreasing cost per kg of payload with increasing overall payload. However, there are also a number of catches: You need to fill up the big vehicle, and the up-front investment scales roughly with liftoff mass, and of course the number of launches decreases with increasing P/L. On the whole, medium-heavy vehicles certainly make commercial sense, but very heavy vehicles would only be justified by very heavy projects, such as we haven't seen in a while (disregarding the ISS which is just there to demonstrate how useless a great space laboratory is without proper, regular access). As an example, launch cost per kg on the latest Delta and Ariane versions is roughly half that of earlier, smaller versions. I'd not expect a near-future heavy launcher to undercut that by a factor of 10, but maybe 2.

Series production of a small launcher decreases cost per piece as well, but that scales inversely logarithmically to the number of launches, a classical law of diminishing returns (or Soyuz would have the market to itself). So I don't expect to see fleets of small launchers doing any heavy work.

Apart from that, very heavy launchers run into a law of diminishing returns; an Energija-size vehicle may be about the heaviest that makes sense with early 2000's technology. That's partly because if you scale up an engine, you'll run into ever greater heat fluxes per area - something that can only be circumvented with clustering, and that comes with its own cost through added complexity (see the N1).

Finally, re-use offers returns as long as the stage you reuse is the expensive one (I don't think it makes any sense just yet to fully reuse a launcher). Again, it's a calculation with a limited numer of unknowns for the aspiring system architect. I think we'll likely see partly reusable systems (fly-back boosters, winged first stages of suchlike) increasingly, but one-way upper stages will have a future still. Just my €0,02.

Cheers
Max

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There'll be enough space up there for all of us, if each of us leaves some space for the next one.

The ideas expressed above are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.

SO DID I!

I feel the same frustration. So does everyone who cares about space. Of course the people who don't care don't care. Unfortunately for us, they are the majority of the world or even the US population. And just like you don't want your tax dollars spent on Nuclear Electric or EELV, that majority doesn't want their tax dollars spent on any space activity at all. That is why we have to start over with private resources, that are all controlled by people who do care, like Musk. Unfortunately that means starting smaller than heavy lift because the startups are too small for such a big project, but hopefully we can build up to it.

More and more people are becoming (again) interested in space, I can clearly see a rise in space activity, thanks to my own sites statistics and the popularity of other space websites.

I think all those individuals who're interested will get some gadgets who're space related, creating a growing commercial private space business, even on small scale.
Somehow those thousands of people, will all toghetter support indirectly the space projects, cause more financial money will become available thanks to them.
More space interests, more advertisement deals, more gadgets companies can sell, more space games you can win a space flight etc etc.

Somehow you can compare it with a tax.. but only the people are paying who are interested.. that's the private business, and you always get something in return.
It's world wide, people can spent more resources on it, than a flat tax, it's not repeating yearly, but money keeps moving hands (re investments), and the industry is forced by other competing companies to deliver quality and always better products.

I hope Space Fellowship will help to get more people interested, many more things coming soon... Cause how more people.... how better the industry will be...

With beeing active.. building this website, I hope to push the industry (even if it isn't big...) into advancing more quickly.
So that I don't have to wait a few decades... to see human kind on the moon

That's because there is an ocean shipping demand on the order of millions of tons a week. Let's take the example of the trans-Atlantic trade, which started with Basque fishermen about 600 years ago, give or take a couple of decades. For the first two-thirds of that period, trans-Atlantic trade was carried exclusively in vessels the size of a large modern yacht. Larger ships didn't start to appear until less than 200 years ago.



All X-33 proved is that a badly conceived and managed engineering project has the capability of wasting enormous piles of money. That's not exactly news. It didn't prove anything about RLVs in general, or even about SSTOs.