[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Tue Aug 21 12:26:11 UTC 2012


On 19 August 2012 17:58, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm delighted that the long sought goal of getting into space cheaply has
> been found at last and eagerly await you actually launching something,
> being so cheap I don't expect I will need to wait long.
>

I see the irony, but even taking that seriously I suspect that there are
anyway a few details such as scale economies, engineering, funding,
socio-economic inertia... Many things that *would* work, and be cheaper or
more efficient than the alternatives, never get implemented.

There is much faith around in the Market, but markets, same as evolution,
can well get stuck with sub-optimal solutions because there is no
lower-energy path from stage A to stage B. This does not really tell us
anything on whether something would be possible or convenient.

Huge engineering projects NEVER go according to plan
>

Yes. But in most circumstances even failures have large fallouts.

Having said that, I am no especial stance for one recipe or another, also
given that I am very little conversant with the technical and economic
details and I have no patience to educate myself enough on the several
subjects involved.

I am simply biased, for sheer ideological reasons, in favour of high-tech,
large-scale, breakthrough
alleged solutions rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel with
State-sponsored programmes aimed at energy saving or at the incremental
exploitment of diluted, structurally limited and environmentally expensive
"renewable" resources.

Not so biased however to be blind to argument... :-)

--
Stefano Vaj
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