Space Travel and Economies of Scale

[SAVORYapple]

SpaceX has a $3 billion flight manifest, which is about double what they spent over the last decade. If necessary, they could reduce schedule pressure on Dragon and other elements of their dev program, cutting back from working on three things at once to maybe one, and focus on flying their manifest minus COTS, and they'd still be pretty well off. They might need an IPO or some additional angel money to ensure cash-on-hand while they refocus on operations, but I think they could do it.

what about industrial sabotage? Send in a boeing/lockmart spy, and have him sabotage the upcoming COTS dragon launch.


Or could the ULA massively reduce cost on the EELV by basically paying for it themselves, outcompete spaceX, then when SpaceX is filing for Bankruptcy, raise the EELV prices again?

These are all underhanded business techniques

 

[Archibald]

Space travel costs too much. I think we can all agree on this.

An argument I've seen around the internet is that a big part of the problem with space access costs is scale: there's just not enough demand for launch services to generate economies of scale, either by mass-producing cheap launch vehicles or by building larger launch vehicles (like Sea Dragon) or some combination of the two. What we really need, the argument runs, to bring the cost down is some organization - presumably the government - with the need to send a lot of payload into orbit, enough to justify cranking out launch vehicles like sausages.

Lacking the expertise to evaluate this idea myself, I thought I'd ask y'all: do you think this would actually work? And, if it would, what missions would both require enough launches to do the job, but would still be even theoretically politically feasible? Some kind of gold-plated orbital ABM system is the only thing that comes to mind, but maybe someone else has a better idea.

Both USSR and NASA launched thousands of satellites along the years, the issue being that their launchers were scattered families - Saturn, Titan, Delta Atlas, Scout Vs Proton, Soyuz and Tsyklon.

The Soyuz booster was actually launched 1700 times+, yet economies of scale remains to be found. Perhaps because it is an old, clunky design with V-2 engines ?
Saturn I / IB was another missed opportunity, in the early 60's. It failed to become an american Soyuz.
The Titan could have done it - had there been no shuttle.

Titan III to replace both shuttle and saturn IB.
Smaller Titan IIs to replace Atlas and Delta, and perhaps the Scout.

And for the large numbers of payloads needed: what about SDI and satellite constellations like Iridium ? we are talking about thousands of satellites each.
Should boost launch market well enough.

 

[MattII]

I'm surprised that Lockeed Martin and Boeing are BOTH not lobbying Congress to shut down the COTS program and bankrupt SpaceX. After all, the Falcon 9 is going to take away business from the EELVs once they are proven to work.

SpaceX is run by Elon Musk, who happens to be very good at viral marketing, so they can't really afford to move too openly against the company.

But why is there no demand? Because there is nothing there to motivate demand. Mars is not like earth, so you can't colonize it. The moon is likewise useless. The best bet would be other solar systems, but you'd need something like a warp engine from Star Trek to reach them. So there won't be demand until someone invents the warp drive.

Some people are prepared to pay space-agency money to experience a week of weightlessness.

Modern private space companies are free-riders, piggybacking off decades of work and trillions of dollars (inflation adjusted) invested by governments in building the systems, technology and infrastructure necessary to make space flight a reasonable proposition.

That's a very cynical view to take, I think I'm going to have to ask for proof that it was all just 'piggybacking'. And even if it's true, the technology was sold off legally, it wasn't gained by espionage.

And after a decade of development in private spaceflight, it still is overwhelmingly oriented around giving millionaire tourists a few orbits, and a state-subsidized picking up of the slack for commercial satellite launching.

Oh hey, guess where most of the market is these days.

 

[Aelita]

That's a very cynical view to take, I think I'm going to have to ask for proof that it was all just 'piggybacking'. And even if it's true, the technology was sold off legally, it wasn't gained by espionage.

Oh hey, guess where most of the market is these days.

All of that technology, technical expertise and the infrastructure necessary to launch, track, and safely dispose of rockets wasn't just willed into existence. It was a long process, where the governments of the US and USSR sunk huge mountains of cash into research and development, building better and more reliable rockets, and researching and teaching the technical skills necessary to make space flight happen.

Tens of billions were spent before the first satellite made it into orbit. And because of that huge expense, towards expertise, technology and capital resources, space is only now getting to the point where the technology is developed enough that private investors can make acceptable returns on the whole process. So yes, in that sense, it piggybacked off development in the state sector. Just like computers did.

If this had been a private venture from the start, it would have never happened at all. No entity besides a state, and a world power level state at that, had the resources to develop the technology. Not even a conglomerate of the largest corporations in the world could have taken that kind of a loss for that long.

Private competition would have done precisely zilch for the historical space program.

No, most of the market is still in boring nuts and bolts telecom and weather satellites, along with publicly funded research projects. Space tourism is new, but it's a tiny percentage of all launches. And even the companies that do space tourism are using it primarily as a means of building capital for larger projects.

Fundamentally, to make the economies of scale ramp up to the point where space becomes less expensive, there's going to have to be some reason to send people and large amounts of cargo into space. And that just isn't there in the mean time, and probably won't be without major state initiatives for space development.

 

[Kaptin Kurk]

The only reason to colonize space beyond Earth

is political, outside of science fiction. In the end, the first space colonist will be deviants. Yeah, how horrible, but it's true. It'll be the people, 1,000 years from now, who like to smoke drugs, molest children, kill the Jews and 'niggers', behead infedels, whatever the powerful states on Earth deem deviant. They are the only ones who'll think hey, terraforming mars and living at subsistance levels on 1,000 square miles of alien planet when we could (if law abiding) live pretty well on Earth makes sense.

 

[Michel Van]

SpaceX has a $3 billion flight manifest, which is about double what they spent over the last decade. If necessary, they could reduce schedule pressure on Dragon and other elements of their dev program, cutting back from working on three things at once to maybe one, and focus on flying their manifest minus COTS, and they'd still be pretty well off. They might need an IPO or some additional angel money to ensure cash-on-hand while they refocus on operations, but I think they could do it.

the Problem with SpaceX is: they have to prove that there Concept work
for the moment the balance sheet not look good:

Falcon 1
5 flight, only 2 a success and next scheduled launch is one year overtime
I wonder wenn customer SpaceDev to be tired of it and change to ESA Vega to launch TBD

Falcon 9
2 flight, 2 successful
but the launch schedule is delay over year because problem with Dragon Capsule electrical system with his autopilot computer.

why the delay on Falcon 1,Falcon 9 and Dragon ?
SpaceX has around 200 employees, means they can only work at one project or fix problem at time !
But they have to launch rocket 4 time per year, to be a success in low cost space flight

 

[MattII]

Tens of billions were spent before the first satellite made it into orbit. And because of that huge expense, towards expertise, technology and capital resources, space is only now getting to the point where the technology is developed enough that private investors can make acceptable returns on the whole process. So yes, in that sense, it piggybacked off development in the state sector. Just like computers did.

Did you read the link I posted? The US government backed their own monopoly until 1984.

If this had been a private venture from the start, it would have never happened at all. No entity besides a state, and a world power level state at that, had the resources to develop the technology. Not even a conglomerate of the largest corporations in the world could have taken that kind of a loss for that long.

Well sure, if it was tried back in the 60s, in the late 70s though, things might have been different. Come to think of it, back in the 70s things 'were' different, who do you think built the space-shuttle? NASA?

No, most of the market is still in boring nuts and bolts telecom and weather satellites, along with publicly funded research projects.

Oh, and who owns the telecommunication satellites? I'm damned sure it's not the government.

Fundamentally, to make the economies of scale ramp up to the point where space becomes less expensive, there's going to have to be some reason to send people and large amounts of cargo into space. And that just isn't there in the mean time, and probably won't be without major state initiatives for space development.

Or billionaires with eccentric dreams, have you had a look at what Bigelow Aerospace has planned?

the Problem with SpaceX is: they have to prove that there Concept work
for the moment the balance sheet not look good:

Neither do NASA's early ones. Take a look at the Pioneer program, the first one was lost when the first stage exploded, the second one missed its trajectory due to a third-stage failure (but managed to bring back quite a bit of data), the third failed due to - again - a third stage failure, the fourth rocket exploded on the pad (the satellite wasn't atop it), and the fifth failed when the payload shroud broke away earlier than expected. Out of 4 launches (and 5 rockets) that's 4 total failures, with only 1 doing anything useful at all.

 

[jkay]

Ma Nature turns out to hate space, making it a harder problem than expected to reach space cheaply enough to exploit than expected. First, rockets' (private has no exemption) problem is that you need lots and lots of fuel per launch, even with Sea Dragon. Ramjets / rocketplanes turn out to have major extra heating problems. And nuclear engines have a pollution problem.

I think a space elevator'll probably be built sometime in the next century. It's just becoming feasible via carbon fiber. And that'll probably solve it, though it'll be way, way expensive to build. WAY expensive.

Sea Dragon still costs alot. It does its thing by needing a huge cargo per launch to be cost effective. But, that's still trouble, because markets like to grow slowly and incrementally.

 

[Archibald]

Bringing this back to life

Space travel costs too much. I think we can all agree on this.

An argument I've seen around the internet is that a big part of the problem with space access costs is scale: there's just not enough demand for launch services to generate economies of scale, either by mass-producing cheap launch vehicles or by building larger launch vehicles (like Sea Dragon) or some combination of the two. What we really need, the argument runs, to bring the cost down is some organization - presumably the government - with the need to send a lot of payload into orbit, enough to justify cranking out launch vehicles like sausages.

Lacking the expertise to evaluate this idea myself, I thought I'd ask y'all: do you think this would actually work? And, if it would, what missions would both require enough launches to do the job, but would still be even theoretically politically feasible? Some kind of gold-plated orbital ABM system is the only thing that comes to mind, but maybe someone else has a better idea.

4000 Brilliant Pebbles may help dropping cost of space transportation.
(small space ABM satellites)

Then was the big flop of satellites phones. They were killed by a) ground based phones, notably the GSM standard that got started in 1982 and b) the fact they can't work indoors (although it seems Thuraya corrected that issue ) Before they bombed, satellites phones were seen as the killer app that would help slash costs of space transporation via mass production of rockets. Because GEO sat phones would have suffered a 0.1 second delay, the satellites had to be in low earth orbit... and coverage took a hit, so dozens to hundred were needed. Teledesic was that kind of project - 840 satellites (!)

4000 Brilliant Pebbles and 840 Teledesic = 4840 satellites. As much as everything launched into space since Sputnik ! It should help.

 

[Garrison]

Some progress is being made on plans to reduce costs with the Skylon project making important progress:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510112

Bear in mind this was the one exotic technology involved in the design, the rest is existing engineering.

 

[Athelstane]

Hello Michel,

Economies was never a option on Saturn rocket program
it had to bring 3 men to moon, no matter how much it costs: it has to work !
so was run the entire Apollo program with result budget overrun

I get what you're saying, but for the goal at hand - it *did* work. NASA achieved the short term, high priority objective that the Kennedy-Johnson administrations gave it, which, when you really look at what they did, is barely short of a miracle.

LBJ spread the work around to as many congressional districts as he could manage, and that gave him the political support for Apollo.

And NASA, in turn, had a tight deadline, and was told cost was no bar. So *how* they did it ended up being terribly inefficient - cost plus contracts out the wazoo, geographically fragmented subcontract, minimal budget oversight, no thought for sustainable infrastructure...it all worked out in the end, because NASA was gifted with administrators who could accomplish the goal at hand and all the necessary technological know-how (barely).

In the long run, of course, it created a horribly inefficient organization built for a political and budget environment that vanished almost as soon as it Neil Armstrong put his feet in the lunar dust.

If I have hope for the future, it's in initiatives like COTS - begun by Bush, continued and furthered by Obama (there is credit to go around here). That will do more to assure increasingly low cost access to space than all the white elephants NASA has on its drawing boards at MSFC.

 

[Michel Van]

Hello Michel,

I get what you're saying, but for the goal at hand - it *did* work. NASA achieved the short term, high priority objective that the Kennedy-Johnson administrations gave it, which, when you really look at what they did, is barely short of a miracle.

LBJ spread the work around to as many congressional districts as he could manage, and that gave him the political support for Apollo.

And NASA, in turn, had a tight deadline, and was told cost was no bar. So *how* they did it ended up being terribly inefficient - cost plus contracts out the wazoo, geographically fragmented subcontract, minimal budget oversight, no thought for sustainable infrastructure...it all worked out in the end, because NASA was gifted with administrators who could accomplish the goal at hand and all the necessary technological know-how (barely).

In the long run, of course, it created a horribly inefficient organization built for a political and budget environment that vanished almost as soon as it Neil Armstrong put his feet in the lunar dust.

If I have hope for the future, it's in initiatives like COTS - begun by Bush, continued and furthered by Obama (there is credit to go around here). That will do more to assure increasingly low cost access to space than all the white elephants NASA has on its drawing boards at MSFC.

your words in god ear, Athelstane

since i wrote the lines in post #8 here, 8 months have past.

SpaceX COTS flight CRS-1, show several malfunction:
lost of one engine as it nozzle rupture from the burning chamber.
the secondary Orbcomm-2 satellite payload was released into a lower-than-intended orbit.
next to that are claims that Dragon the Flight computer had serous problem at return to earth and seawater leak into capsule.
SpaceX will not launch a Falcon 1e rocket until 2017 !
those payloads in waiting line will fly as secondary payload on CRS missions on Falcon 9.
Falcon 9 undergoes overwork to version 1.1
what the Work on Falcon 9 Air hinders, the rocket for Stratolaunch system


Back to Saturn family and it death
It made it fantastic job by bringing US astronaut in space.
but its main problem were the high cost, special the Saturn IB cost (first stage build with modular tanks from discontinued MRBMs)
Also high cost (build and Launch) on Saturn V of US$ 1.17 billion in 2012 value,
Original around 25 units had to be build, but in 1966 things change while construction of Unit SA-516 and SA-517,
the NASA budget reach record high of US$ 30 billion in 2012 value. while in middle of Vietnam war and Social change in USA.
The proposal by NASA for there budget of 1968, got shot down by US Congress as they try to balance the US budget.
To make things worst, Johnson needed money for his social projects and he finds it by taking it away from NASA: by stop the Saturn production.
1968 Unit SA-516 and SA-517 who needed only the engine, are cut up with welding torch. Apollo program will now end at mission 20.

ironical in 1969, Boeing publish as study about improvement Of Saturn V, what include cost reduction by Hardware simplification.
on 30 units build SA-518 to SA-548 (to build in 1978) would drop the cost of US$ 1.17 billion to US$ 920 million US Dollars

more on that and Saturn V cost, you can find here

 

[Genmotty]

From the economics side of the post, what space projects would create a high(er) demards for launch vehicles than our current capacity, thus fueling a need for a cheap, production line, launch vehicle?


Supprisingly there isn't many.

Perminant space station or moon base operations could create such a demard, but only if rather large scale. However just like the 'island community' issue, it is much more cost effective to hire the big boat with all the equipment for limited self-sustainability at the beginning than rely on the constant resupply boat would quickly eat into that plan.

Likewise we don't need 'a ton' of satilites for global communications, particularly now internet fibre optic is being rolled out across the industrialised world.

Which really leaves mankind in the situation of; 'oh bother, we just don't have enough customers to buy the model-T-ford-rocket'.

Which is the clincher.

Hence the development model will likely follow the helicopter; providing easy on demard access to space, with highly efficent launch vehicles, rather than the railway route of moving a ton of stuff out to the middle of nowhere by a fixed transport method.

Having said all this, if we ever decided to terraform Mars or establish a rocket base on the Moon, we would seriously set up that space railway.

 

[Athelstane]

Hello Genmotty,

Ay - there's the rub.

Right now, the only profitable uses of space are in 1) communications, 2) Earth observation and monitoring, or 3) government projects. We may now have a fourth area emerging - space tourism.

But with the possible exception of (3), that's all LEO, and it's all fairly limited. Except perhaps for space tourism stations like Bigelow's, none of it requires lots of launches or heavy lift capability.

That would change if some resource can be exploited at reasonable cost in outer space - think solar microwave stations, helium 3 mining on the moon, or mining of NEO asteroids with rare minerals. But even here, the launch costs would have to come way down for private enterprise to find it worth doing.

 

[Athelstane]

Hello Michel,

Sure - Spacex is having its teething problems.

But they run a very small, tight operation. Their footprint is a tiny fraction of NASA's. I'm impressed thatthey have accomplished as much as they have because, frankly, I didn't think they could do it at all.

But we'll see how they fare going forward.

I don't disagree with anything you say about Saturn. I think we are both agreed that its most viable way forward was what's traced in Eyes Turned Skywards - phasing out the expensive Saturn 1B for something like the Saturn 1C, replacing the cluster with a single F1A engine.

 

[tchizek]

Hello Genmotty,

Ay - there's the rub.

Right now, the only profitable uses of space are in 1) communications, 2) Earth observation and monitoring, or 3) government projects. We may now have a fourth area emerging - space tourism.

But with the possible exception of (3), that's all LEO, and it's all fairly limited. Except perhaps for space tourism stations like Bigelow's, none of it requires lots of launches or heavy lift capability.

That would change if some resource can be exploited at reasonable cost in outer space - think solar microwave stations, helium 3 mining on the moon, or mining of NEO asteroids with rare minerals. But even here, the launch costs would have to come way down for private enterprise to find it worth doing.

This is like saying in the 1640's "The only use for sailing across the Atlantic is to find a route to China and India". Those are the only uses that anyone can see RIGHT NOW because of the costs involved. Lower the costs and things change. Think of current space exploration as the early 1600's of sea exploration from Europe.

 

[Genmotty]

This is like saying in the 1640's "The only use for sailing across the Atlantic is to find a route to China and India". Those are the only uses that anyone can see RIGHT NOW because of the costs involved. Lower the costs and things change. Think of current space exploration as the early 1600's of sea exploration from Europe.

Not really, the difference is like saying after Columbus came back going; 'lookie there be land here' and the King going out their discovering that all Columbus found was a sandbar with a few trees.

Space predominately is empty space...it isn't anything. If you can think of a use for that much nothing then its a great resource! Otherwise there isn't a lot of work with.

In the case of solar power it would be quite a bit more efficient to land on the moon and build there because you have all the raw materials and the low gravity makes it fairly easy to move stuff around.



It's not being 'closed minding' rather than being pragmatic. Given there isn't any need we can see, or foresee, then their isn't any precedent to assume in the future that there will be a need here. I could make the analogy of visiting the Marina Trench, I doubt you personally would argue that by lowering the cost of deep sea diving we are going to see large amounts of equipment and personal being shipped to the deepest place on Earth.

Sometime you go somewhere, find jack-sh*t, and decide its not all that useful except to the few people who have a use for that place. In such a case while the biologists and naturalists might rave over the Galapagos Islands, I don't see the masses queuing up to develop the islands as the next Costa del Sol for your Joe Public.

My point being somethings are fairly specialist and might not constituent a global market, even if the costs change.

 

[Athelstane]

This is like saying in the 1640's "The only use for sailing across the Atlantic is to find a route to China and India". Those are the only uses that anyone can see RIGHT NOW because of the costs involved. Lower the costs and things change. Think of current space exploration as the early 1600's of sea exploration from Europe.

I'd echo what Genmotty says.

Look, I think it's quite possible that 100 years hence, we'll be doing Helium 3 mining on the Moon, and deriving a good deal of our energy resources from it, especially if we can work out the kinks out of magnetic confinement fusion. But for it to really work, government would have to do the initial spade work - set the objective, fund the energy research, do the exploratory work on the lunar surface, set up initial infrastructure, and contract out launches, fuel depots, and and the actual mineral exploitation more and more as it goes.

But that's all decades off right now. All I was talking about is there here and now, in 2012.

So there's a role for the state, no question. But for it to succeed in the long term, it will really have to be done in large part by private enterprise.

 

[Maxwell Edison II]

Interplanetary space has everything human civilization needs, raw materials and power abound. It certainly isn't "void".

"Is it easy to go there?"

No.

"Is it easy to extract or use those resources?"

No.

"Has human the progress of civilization always been about finding ways around obstacles, gradually making things who were difficult yesterday much simpler today?"

Yes!

 

[tchizek]

Not really, the difference is like saying after Columbus came back going; 'lookie there be land here' and the King going out their discovering that all Columbus found was a sandbar with a few trees.

Space predominately is empty space...it isn't anything. If you can think of a use for that much nothing then its a great resource! Otherwise there isn't a lot of work with.

In the case of solar power it would be quite a bit more efficient to land on the moon and build there because you have all the raw materials and the low gravity makes it fairly easy to move stuff around.



It's not being 'closed minding' rather than being pragmatic. Given there isn't any need we can see, or foresee, then their isn't any precedent to assume in the future that there will be a need here. I could make the analogy of visiting the Marina Trench, I doubt you personally would argue that by lowering the cost of deep sea diving we are going to see large amounts of equipment and personal being shipped to the deepest place on Earth.

Sometime you go somewhere, find jack-sh*t, and decide its not all that useful except to the few people who have a use for that place. In such a case while the biologists and naturalists might rave over the Galapagos Islands, I don't see the masses queuing up to develop the islands as the next Costa del Sol for your Joe Public.

My point being somethings are fairly specialist and might not constituent a global market, even if the costs change.

Sigh, solar power that we have just have to figure out how to get from up there to now here at 10-15x the rate that is produced by the best solar farms on earth. With no night time black outs.

Asteroids that contain 10x the metals that are currently mined on earth.

Protecting the planet from destruction.

Yes if you look at LEO then you can say "it's empty what's the use?". That's like looking at the first 200 feet off the shore and saying "what use is the ocean?" or walking on a beach and saying "This is no use it's all sand."

On a more survival oriented argument. If the human race is going to be anything more than a foot note in somebody else's archaeological dig we HAVE to get off this planet. Just like we had to get out of the first valley that our ancestors first evolved in. If we don't then we are just fooling ourselves, we know that things hit the planet. Hell we have had things hit the planet hard in the last 150 years (Tunguska event). This should be a good enough argument for anyone - except the probability for any given year or decade is small, but the probability over time is 100%.

Yes there should be government involvement my argument is that government should not be the gate keeper. They don't try to do more than regulate air-craft and water-craft why should they do more than regulate space-craft?