[ExI] An Elegy for the Age of Space

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 1:51 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sad piece, lamenting the end of Mankind's leap into space.

Also bullshit.

The end of NASA, or government programs in general, as the sole and
only means of entry into space?  Yeah, good riddance to that.

Meanwhile I'm talking up the accomplishments of my friends at XCOR,
looking forward to when they go orbital, and I'm looking into taking a
crack at this Nanosat Centennial Challenge in a way that can lay the
infrastructure for affordable tickets for ordinary people to go into space.

> So, it basically comes down to the fact that unless a new source of
> cheap, concentrated energy becomes available, our civilization has to
> drastically scale back the dreams of the future.

Pff.  Cost of entry into space has a lot less to do with the actual rocket
technology than is commonly believed.

Instead you've got the launch ranges - they see maybe one or two
launches a year, so they need to tag a few $M onto the launch costs:
that's most of their budget.  And the satellite makers, who want to
customize each rocket for their particular satellite - they're paying the
bills, so they get to jack the price they pay up.  Oh, and how about
that massive lack of automation in prepping & testing the rockets,
because of course the cost is so high there aren't that many launches
(thus, little ability to amortize automation) so the cost has to be high
(to cover the rocket makers' budget).  And so on.

Get all of those down to airliner-grade operations, and you could slash
costs to less than 10%, probably (with a lot of effort) less than 1%, of
the current cost without changing what fuel the rocket uses.  Of course,
this is not sustainable without a lot more customers, which is
impossible without lower prices - chicken and the egg, and most current
operators are satisfied with how things are.

Not that it would hurt if, say, you had a within-mass-budget way to keep
a fusion reaction going and use the plasma for exhaust for about 10
minutes, which might give you enough thrust per weight to make fully
reusable space planes viable.  Main problem there, until we have fusion
reactors that make more energy than they use, is storing enough power
on board to keep the reaction going: batteries, as fuel, are heavy.