[ExI] Gold

[Dan]

On Wednesday, May 29, 2013 5:30 PM spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:43 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>>….Not necessarily.  They may have a large ratio, but
>> let us say it costs $10,000 to lift a human and tools
>> to do a job, but only $1 to lift a robot and tools…
>
> I don’t think the ratio is 1000 to 1, but it is big.  Any
> time you build a payload for a non-man-rated launcher,
> you only need to be as careful as the value of the payload
> and rocket.  If you design anything that is going into the
> bay of a space shuttle, it is a paaaainnn in the aaaaaasssss.
>  All the hoops you need to jump thru, all the safety reviews,
> oy, not worth it.  Control systems are getting sophisticated
> enough now that manned space flight doesn’t make much sense
> anymore.

There's manned or peopled spaceflight for tourism and settlement. Those are different balls of wax.

Also, one thing that has happened here, especially with the demise of the ridic Shuttle, is separating, for the most part, people and cargo on missions. Then, even let's say there's law of nature that prevents human spaceflight from ever coming down in price ever, this might mean that cargo can still keep coming down in price, which makes it fair easier to put stuff on orbit or, more generally, in space for humans to use when they fly up in the more expensive boosters. By more robustly separating humans and cargo, this can happen, depending on what it is. (Also, by getting resources from off Earth and putting some or all of the fabrication there too, the same result: it means it gets cheaper to build silly things like space habitats for those overpriced humans to use -- even if the lion's share of the effort is devoted to other things, such as building a Dyson thingy.:)
 

Regards,


Dan
 See my SF short story "Residue":
http://www.amazon.com/Residue-ebook/dp/B00BS3T0RM/ -- US
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BS3T0RM -- UK
http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00BS3T0RM -- Canada 
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