Space Travel and Economies of Scale

amphibulous

Banned
Whoa, you read half a sentence of my reply, and then you post your own reply, replying to half a sentence.

Again, bad logic. I read all of your reply, and merely explaining the silliness of your first half sentence - i.e. that you had ignored source expert comment from an expert on the platinum market and the astronut's insane response - was adequate debunking of your lunacy.

I'm done "debating" with you, this isn't the first time you resort to such dishonest methods.

What's dishonest about debunking just one of the silly things you say? Why am I only honest if I point out the ALL failures of logic you commit every half dozen words? Do you know how much time it would take to do that?

Reading my posts, I realize I might seem a bit schitzoprenic... .

Must... not... take... easy... shot.
 
Last edited:
This really is silly. There all sorts of estimates and experiments you can do before spending tens of billions of dollars.

Like they did when they estimated the one week or so turn time the space shuttle were supposed to have. Okaaay....

..But none of this stuff comes up in Star Trek, so it doesn't matter to you. You really have the belief that reality has to conform to teevee, just like the equally benighted viewers of cop shows and hospital dramas, or children who think that Rambo is a documentary.

Your efforts to rile me up are charming. I hope you are a girl so I can fall in love with you.
---

To summarize my view on space exploration and space industry:

Q: 3He!!!!!!
A: No, I already explained why 3He is extremely unlikely to become our salvation. I even included a colorful, pretty little graph!

Q: Platinum group metals (PGM)
A: "Market saturation", the platinum market price would plummed at the mere possibility that a theoretically endless supply could start being exploited. The infrastructure (chemicals, processing, recycling chemicals) needed to extract the PGM is also not to be underestimated.

Q: Space tourism!
A: A, easily saturated niche market that might contribute to cheaper launch costs. How far this would work I have no idea.

Q: Scramjets to orbit!
A: If it is at all possible, it is difficult as f*ck. I'm not going to say either because I'm not an aerospace engineer specializing in the things, apparently as opposed to others in this thread.

Q: Space solar power!
A: In a few decades, if launch costs drop low enough through other means. Compared to all the other markets mentioned earlier, this one is potentially immense, but we need to get off the rock substantially cheaper first.

Q: Big government prestige debacles! Space race!!!
A: Very unlikely, but since this thread is located in the 20th century subforum, where we discuss what might have happened during the 1900s, this is the only option that remains.

As you can all see, these are totally the views of a Star Trek fanboy deluxe. I should drop out of university and do conventions full time. Who know, I might look cute in pointy ears... Or a red shirt. Chick-magnetry outweighs an academic career and a steady income.
 
^ This I second.

Like I alluded to before, within the 20thC there is not many things that would justify a launch vehicle production line because there isn't much out there in LEO that would be considered economically exploitable.

Even then, in the situation the Space Race is put on steroids you only have still a fairly 'specialised' space economy...essentially a pissing contest between superpowers for how many men, and how many rocks they can put into space. Non of this requires mass launch vehicle production requirements as the rocket that goes to the moon, will be vastly different to the rocket that goes to Mars because of the simple fact that no two missions will be the same, indeed even with all the moon missions equipment changed on every flight pretty much.

Even today like Maxwell points out, there isn't yet a good commercial market (nor might their likely be one) in the near future.

I would put my money on the fact that until a (semi) permanent Lunar base exists, 'Economic Space Exploration' won't really exist, and everything will be more 'proof of concept' missions.

I would say I'm an optimist...but one of those physicist kinds....the one who rains on most of the parade but never (quite) says never.
 
I disagree on two points, first the PGMs, secondly space-tourism.
PGMs: How on earth do you get a plummeting price on a material which in some cases is very necessary, and will be in ever higher demand when any new source will take years to bring to production?
Space Tourism: Depends how you mean 'easily saturated', there are at least 3 grades of space tourism, the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital grade, which gives you weightless for a few minutes, the Space Adventures space-station stopover, and in between some sort of orbital flight lasting a couple of hours. As each stage gets profitable, companies will have the money to look for new ways of reducing costs.
 
There is another side to the problem perhaps, one very rarely brought around here.

Ecologicaly, how are space travel operations? it was claimed they are kind of wastefull or poluating, all that carburant used up, the CO2 production... and the possible use of nuclear power up the sky.... As well, rare-er elements used up, never recycled...

Can something to be done about those possible issues?

You can rest assured that spaceflight has a negligible ecological impact. There are a small number of flights per year, so they don't consume all that much propellant in the first place, and many of those (eg., Japan's H-2, Europe's Ariane V, America's Delta IV) use hydrogen even for the first stage, which of course is theoretically non-polluting (although the environment of a rocket engine means that certain pollutants, eg. nitrogen oxides, will be produced regardless).

The total amount of material permanently launched into space over the entire history of the space program is probably on the order of a few hundred tons, certainly less than ten thousand. By comparison, at its peak Fresh Kills Landfill--a single landfill servicing part of the garbage output of a single city (albeit a very large one)--was disposing of 13000 tons of waste. So every day a single city more or less irrecoverably disposes of more material than has been launched into space over our entire history. Now, it's not a perfect correspondence because of differences in materials and so on, but as with the usage of hydrocarbons in launch vehicles, space is just not large enough to matter as far as pollution goes, except locally.

The use of nuclear power in space is nothing to be particularly concerned about. RTGs are pretty safe as far as Earth impact is concerned (the Apollo 13 RTGs don't appear to be leaking, for instance, despite being a '60s era design and hitting the atmosphere quite hard), and nuclear reactors are not presently in use by anyone. Most concepts for nuclear reactor use presently envision them being used to power surface stations on the Moon (where, of course, they would not need energy storage as a solar plant away from the poles would) or Mars, where they would obviously pose no risk to Earth in the event of an accident, and moreover envision actually fueling/starting the reactor after it is safely away from Earth. There are concepts for using nuclear reactors to power scientific probes as well, mostly to allow the use of ion propulsion through the outer solar system or to particularly challenging targets, but these are too expensive to develop on their own.

It would be different if there were dozens of spaceports around the world seeing dozens or hundreds of launches per day, of course, then space might have an impact closer to or exceeding that of air travel. But that is improbable in any vaguely near-term sort of scenario.

This really is silly. There all sorts of estimates and experiments you can do before spending tens of billions of dollars. In the case of scramjet launchers, there are very good reasons why they haven't been taken seriously as launch vehicles by people with functioning brains. Like most Captain Kirk wannabes, you don't see to know anything about actual engineering (most of you people seem to work from Microsoft, telling people to use Word...) In reality, scramjets have a thrust to weight ratio of about 2 - compared to 100 for a rocket. This 50 to 1 difference is highly problematic!

Thrust-to-weight is an important figure, but it's not the only figure of merit. For example, ion thrusters have practically zero thrust-to-weight, but are very, very practical for deep-space missions because they have an ISP so much larger than any chemical rocket. Of course, increased thrust is useful there, too, but you can often decrease the necessary mass significantly by switching to ion thrusters despite the decreased thrust and increased complexity of manuevers (besides space probes, virtually all modern communications satellites use ion thrusters for part of their manuevering capability).

Where this matters for scramjets is that scramjets have a higher ISP than rockets, because they don't rely purely on their own, onboard propellant supplies for propulsion; they use the external atmosphere. Given that scramjet-propelled launch vehicles invariably are horizontal-takeoff vehicles that have wings to provide lift, the thrust-to-weight just doesn't matter as much as for a vertical-takeoff vehicle. This doesn't mean that scramjets will actually provide benefits--the wings, after all, weigh a lot, maybe enough to cancel out any reduction in propellant use--but it means that they aren't obviously detrimental, the way you would have them. Otherwise the concept wouldn't keep popping up every decade or so in the minds of people with functioning brains.

Another difficulty is that - as the Shuttle showed - reusable doesn't equal cheap in launchers. Reusable is always heavier, and payload fraction is very marginal - it can dives enormously with very slight increases in airframe or engine weight.

Doesn't necessarily equal cheap. I agree that Shuttle was totally unsuccessful in demonstrating cheap reusable launchers, but that partially stems from decisions which were poor in hindsight (for instance, jumping straight to the "fully operational" vehicle without an experimental program to determine the best form and operational profile for said vehicle) and decisions which were known at the time to promise increased operational costs (for instance, the switch to a partially reusable vehicle), but which would decrease development costs. As such, it simply cannot be used as a proof that cheap reusable launchers are impossible, given that they both had no prior experience with the type and that they were undertaking decisions which they believed would increase operational costs, and which did, in fact, play major roles in the high operational costs of the program.

Then you have the problem that inspecting and rebuilding an engine for re-use may well cost more than throwing a one-shot off a production line. ***There is no reason at all to think that this cost will be lower for scramjets.***

And no particular reason to think that it would be the same or greater, since no one has ever built a reusable scramjet. Ever. That is probably the biggest obstacle to the use of scramjets in space vehicles, or for that matter any other kind of vehicle--they don't exist (or didn't, until the last decade or so). That means lots of expensive R&D to develop them, with no guarantee that you'll actually get anything worthwhile. Of course, the military (mostly) has decided to go ahead and do that a couple of times, which is why we have actually got working scramjets today (although still not reusable ones).

Really: take a look at some textbooks on metallurgy, materials science and biochemistry. There are no longing references to zero gee there - NASA couldn't even drum up interest in the ISS. Exotic zero gee super materials are a wank dream of aerospace manufacturers and their volunteer shills.

Did you know that in the 1880s physicists hardly had the first idea what matrix algebra was, let alone what linear algebra was? Mathematicians did, of course, but the age of the mathematician-physicist was, at this point, dying if not already dead. Indeed, as late as the 1920s Heisenberg had to have Born explain to him that he had basically reinvented matrix algebra for quantum mechanics, and Dirac thought it worthwhile to include an introduction to linear algebra at the front of his book on quantum mechanics (since his approach relies heavily on the subject). By now, the subject is so fundamental to physics that undergraduates learn it before they even learn about solving, say, ODEs (which would have been considered much more important in the early 20th century). The point is that often some topic which would be of interest to another field of study is unknown in that field of study, whether because it is the province of another, quite distant field which has few contacts with the field of interest, or because the applications are not obvious, and older methods and approaches seem to work well. However, some change--like the development of quantum mechanics in physics, or a drastic fall in launch costs for space development--may lead to those fields suddenly discovering the "new" technique, method, or topic and finding that they can actually do quite a lot with it after all. If textbooks of metallurgy or materials science do not mention zero-gravity, it may simply be because the writers of the textbooks, having to pick and choose from a diverse set of topics to fit in available space and having their own, limited knowledge to work with in writing, choose not to mention a marginal field of no commercial importance.

As it happens, I know some people who I know to have worked on material science projects in space. I haven't asked them about it because I'm actually not particularly interested and only know these people casually, but it is certainly not a field with no interest whatsoever in it, as you imply.

You also seem to have forgotten the 1980s, when there was actually quite a lot of interest in using space for manufacturing and the like, largely because of the low launch prices that were supposedly going to be achieved with Shuttle. Obviously 3M et. al. would be more wary this time, but there's no particular reason to suppose that there would be less interest if you could actually demonstrate such performance.

Realistically, anyone who believes in a bootstrap space tourism industry is out to lunch. Most rich people aren't interested even before you tell them the odds of death - which are still pretty high for orbit. What's the BANG! rate of the most successful launcher? Something like 1 in 100 flights?

Statistically, no, I don't believe there are any vehicles which exceed 99% reliability in a significant way. However, there are a non-trivial number of launch vehicles, including the Atlas V and Delta IV, which have never suffered a catastrophic failure, ie. one that could kill people, and a rocket exploding does not necessarily mean people will be killed (as Soyuz 18a and Soyuz T-10-1 prove).

And, again, many rich people are not interested because of the cost. When it cots $30 million to go into orbit, only people with more than $30 million--usually a lot more, because you don't get to have $30 million without being smart with your money--can go. If, say, it costs $1 million, then obviously more people can be/would be willing to go, and so on.

Amusingly, the most important US launcher engine is actually a Russian engine designed in this era - the RD170. It's much better than any NASA/Boeing/etc tech.

This is false in several ways. There is the trivial way in which you are clearly referring to the RD-180, which is derived from the RD-170 but not the same; and there is the non-trivial way in which you call it "the most important US launcher engine". What about the RS-68, which is American and powers the Delta IV? The Delta IV has undertaken 21 missions since its introduction compared to the Atlas V's 33, surely comparable if nothing else. For that matter, there are several other major launch vehicles, like the Minotaur and Taurus, which again use nothing but

if we consider upper stages--which are surely as important as first stages in a staged booster, given that nothing will be going anywhere without both working--then there's no contest that the RL-10--a purely American design--is the most important US engine (in fact, personally I consider it the greatest rocket engine design of all time). This is used by both the Atlas and the Delta, meaning that it has had some fifty flights since the introduction of the Delta IV and Atlas V, making it overwhelmingly the most-used upper stage engine for US launches.

I also have to point out that the main reason the RD-180 is used is not because it's "much better" than any "NASA/Boeing/etc." technology, but because it's cheap due to Russian labor and cost standards. The possibility of producing RD-180s in the United States or developing replacements and similar engines (similar in respect of being closed-cycle hydrocarbon engines) has been extensively studied since the 1990s, but it's just more expensive than buying the engines from Russia, and if Russia decides to stop producing them...well, that's what the Delta IV and maybe in the future the Falcon 9/Heavy are for.

Furthermore, if you really knew all that much about space launch technology, you would know that the biggest single difference between Russian and American (also European and Japanese, to a lesser extent) technology in this field is that beginning in the 1970s the United States began focusing primarily on solids and hydrolox as the way forwards, whereas the Soviets were simply not as comfortable with hydrolox and less skilled with solids (no surprise--we literally invented modern solid rockets at JPL in the late '30s and early '40s), so they focused on squeezing every last bit of performance out of hydrocarbon and storable rockets. It's not that the Russians have "much better" technology, it's that they have different technology. We, equally, have much better hydrolox engines and solid rockets than they do.

Yes: that's the point. There is nothing on the moon that anyone wants. This a fanboi fantasy. And asteroid mining is just as silly:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/24/planetary_resources/
Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

- basically the silly sods forgot to take into account price elasticity in their business plan.

The problem with that is that Planetary Resources doesn't actually plan on mining until something like step 10 or 11 of their business plan. Right now, all they want to do is launch telescopes. Thus, you're calling them idiots for not taking into account something that won't actually matter for a few decades. When you're planning that far out, being a bit sketchy is kind of expected.

I also have to kind of point out that since they have financing it really doesn't matter whether some mining expert in London would provide finance...

Seriously: in reality ***no one who actually makes drugs has ever expressed an interest in zero-g manufacturing.*** Gravity just isn't an important actor in organic chemistry. The only people who come up with this bs are ones looking for excuses to spend other people's money on their polyester leisuresuit fantasies.

The interest in zero-gravity for drugs is, from what I recall, primarily for very high-quality crystals, which are affected by gravity. I'm also pretty sure there was interest expressed in the 1980s, as I mentioned earlier. Certainly there was interest from purely materials companies in space flight.

And could you please not just go around throwing off insults? Not only does it make people hostile, defensive, and unwilling to listen to you, people have been banned for similar behavior in the past.

2. To send the same manned package to Mars requires a lot more MASS than to the moon. You need more food, and you can no longer aim for safe spells in solar weather, so you need heavy shielding. (This never gets discussed in astronut fantasies, but without the chances are your astronauts will come back as walking carcinomas.) You can't think of sending "equal" manned packages to the moon and Mars - a package that would deliver live passengers to Mars would be 100 times overkill for a lunar mission!

Actually, GCR shielding is a much greater concern than proton shielding in pretty much everyone's eyes nowadays. The reason is that protons are pretty low energy, and come from a single source, so you can do things like, say, interpose your rocket and propellant tanks between the sun and you to provide a huge effective shielding capability. GCRs, on the other hand, come in from all around and are very high energy, therefore very hard to shield against. And GCR...if you go during solar minimum (highest GCR flux) and use pretty much slightly modified ISS elements, you would be exposed to about 450 mSv in a year, in deep space (less on Mars surface). Which is not great--worst case, you're a 35-year old female, you have a 2.5% higher risk of cancer--but hardly "walking carcinoma". That sort of talk is like saying "global warming will turn Earth into the next Venus," it's just nonsense that vastly exaggerates a real risk and makes people take it unseriously.

The answer is actually very simple: there is no real reason to invest in cheaper launches, because commercial demand is **inelastic.** Adolescent SF fantasies aside, no one has much use for space other than GPS and communications satellites. NASA exists as pork for Florida and the aerospace industry. The first means that a high operations cost must be maintained.

If you want cheaper space flight, lobby to cut funding for NASA.

All demand is elastic. It might not be very elastic, but if you drop prices low enough or increase them high enough, then demand will grow (or shrink). Most aerospace economics experts agree that demand is not very elastic at the moment, but they also think that if you could drop prices considerably below $1000/kilogram, demonstrated, then things would be more interesting. The interest that appeared in the Space Shuttle when it was thought to provide such prices certainly tends to support them.

Your guess is as good as mine at how to get there, though.
 
You could have a private group with exceptional resources contract out for some sort of large, very private space habitat with the thought of developing a particular society there. They develop some sort of high-value merchandise as a means of sustaining themselves and keeping trade going, as a result a new market (or two?) is found and exploited. Other people see this and get into the space game because of the possible profits. Sort of like Oneida but instead of silverware maybe materials manufacturing or pharmaceuticals research. Also, they might go way into space or even the moon for exotic research, like certain proposed modes of gene therapy or stem cell investigation that would be frowned on here.
 
Yep. People are crying out fer grey rocks!

I don't know about you, but I plan on melting those rocks down and building a big dome to tent a crater with. After that, it's a homesteading I will go.

When it comes down to it, I think Luna is a much stabler environment (I use the word loosely here) than Earth. Inside a habitat, you have better control over the climate, whereas on Earth, we're the ones being held hostage by climate.
 
Top