Subject:
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Re: Some good news for a change, maybe?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:21:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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1290 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Scott Arthur wrote:
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This is interesting.
“The Saturn 5 was also not cheap to operate... the launch cost
of a single Saturn 5 at $431 million in 1967, or over $2.4
billion a launch in 2004 dollars... ...It’s not inconceivable that a
new heavy-lift vehicle would cost on the order of $15 billion to
develop and perhaps $1 billion per launch—more expensive than the
shuttle but still heavily discounting the perhaps anomalously high
Saturn 5 cost estimate.”
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Yes, exactly! What’s the point of developing a single-capacity heavy-launch
system that’s so prohibitively expensive as to restrict the range of customers
to just Washington D.C.? I love the concept of strapping three D4’s together to
get a single heavy-lift launch (and if they can do 3, they should be able to do
5, 7, or 9). Modular capacity with a single size booster makes much more sense
than building bigger rockets for bigger payloads. When train companies have a
load that requires twice the pulling power of their current model, they don’t
scramble to design a new engine just to pull that one load. They combine two or
three of their current engines together. Does it cost more to run that single
load with three engines than it would to run it with one mega-engine? Probably,
but not enough to offset the cost of developing that mega-engine.
As it is, the existing array of launch systems are over-powered to the point of
not being affordable enough for large-scale privatized space-flight. What we
need is cheaper, not bigger. What we need is to use up more than a mere
fraction of the existing supply capacity so mass-production can reduce costs to
a more affordable range. In a funny sort of way, the more hands-free launch
capacity NASA needs, the more they’ll end up supporting privatized spaceflight.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Some good news for a change, maybe?
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| (...) (URL) This> is interesting. "The Saturn 5 was also not cheap to operate... the launch cost of a single Saturn 5 at $431 million in 1967, or over $2.4 billion a launch in 2004 dollars... ...It’s not inconceivable that a new heavy-lift vehicle (...) (20 years ago, 23-Jun-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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