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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Dave Schuler wrote:
> Out of curiosity, would the 12B figure include the terrestrial launch vehicle,
> or just the construction of the base?
I'm not sure you need to develop a new launch vehicle per se, remember the
assumption that the person heading this had just won the X prize.... but
certainly some of the 12B cost figure is for launching things...
Now the X prize vehicle doesn't give you manrated orbit capability per se, it's
a suborbital vehicle, at least at the 3 person payload that you needed to win
the prize. But I'm assuming (big assumption) some stretchability with loss of
payload so that instead of 3 people to suborbital, you stretch the vehicle a bit
with what you learned and can get it to get one person in LEO instead.(1)
Everything else that you need, you launch on cheap non manrated big dumb
boosters... buy the launches in the open market. Boeing Deltas, the SeaLaunch
guys, ESA, whoever. Heck, buy them from the Chinese or the Russians if they are
still selling below cost, for that matter.
And "everything" hopefully isn't that much, mass wise. 5 Delta payloads to LEO
worth of stuff ought to do nicely. (that's less payload to the moon of course)
As you allude, you don't send people first, you send machines, lots of them,
with redundancy and teleoperation and some robotic capability. They do the
initial mining and refining and etc.
1 - The problem here is that I'm playing totally fast and loose with reentry.
Suborbital reentry is a lot easier than orbital because suborbital means you're
going slower! It's not clear to me that SSOne could do a reentry from orbital
speeds. Maybe it could, maybe not. So buy a Soyuz, then. Whatever you do, DON'T
develop a brand new terrestrial vehicle, that misses the point.
++Lar
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: We're here to go
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| (...) I don't have any problem with pursuing that end of the discussion, but I wasn't trying to kick of a debate with my original question. If it winds up there, though, I say groovy! I enjoyed that previous debate re: cost-value of space (...) (20 years ago, 20-Jan-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek, lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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