[ExI] new heavy lifter

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Keith Henson
Subject: Re: [ExI] new heavy lifter

2011/4/5 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
>
>> This caught my attention because I have long thought of this approach as
compelling:
>
>>
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/04/6409132-spacex-shoots-for-ne
xt-big-thing


>...They are saying $1000 per pound, $2200 per kg to LEO...Keith


Oh my, goooood luck SpaceX, I do hope you make it.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/04/05/powerful-rocket-world-ready-2012-s
pacex-says/?test=faces

If they manage to achieve 1000 bucks a pound to LEO, it will be a new day
for space, and perhaps give us a new take on how we live our lives.  A
breakthrough of that magnitude would enable vast constellations of
communications satellites, so that much if not most travel would be
obviated.  Meeting with colleagues in an office would by an uncompetitive
thing to do: the opportunity cost of spending half an hour each way in a car
to get to an office would be far too high.  With far better information
technology, our needs would be far better met by staying close to our homes.
Energy would be used far differently from how it is used today.

Imagine for instance we re-examine many of our most basic assumptions.  I
already mentioned our daily trip to the office, but imagine we had
sufficient secure bandwidth to have all our business meetings right in our
own homes.  Imagine instead of going shopping for groceries for instance, we
make a list of items that are running low on the computer, visible in some
form, and by some mysterious process several sources which has that
particular item or product compete with each other to supply it to you.  You
choose the best deal, the item or product appears at your home perhaps
within minutes, possibly from a source over on the adjacent street, hand
carried by the person who lives there.  

Imagine your finding no further use for some household item of value, and
you list it somehow for a certain price.  At some unspecified time, a person
shows up at your door to collect the item and pay you, and carry it
somewhere else to where some other person has purchased the item for enough
profit to cover the local who picked it up.  Bricks and mortar stores, gone
with the wind, poof.  Shopping malls, poof.  Most offices, gone.  Most
traffic, gone.  Farms, still there, still producing food in much the same
way as always, still using energy, but a lot more of them, a lot smaller, a
wildly efficient market coming from nearby to take away the food as it
ripens, allowing small farms and small food value-added operations to exist,
with information flow allowing everyone to buy exactly what they need or
want, and everyone to sell exactly what they don't need or don't want, or
can make.

Look at what we already have, stuff which popped into existence just in the
past couple decades: the internet has enabled Craig's List, eBay, and their
many variations.  So much of what used to cost us money is now really free:
information we used to extract from books can now be accessed much more
easily.  Eventually our other needs will be filled the same way.  As energy
costs go up, we will find ways to move around less, and do everything much
more efficiently.

Cheaper access to space will allow information to move better, even if it
doesn't move us more effectively.

spike