Why We're Still Stuck On Earth 304
Once&FutureRocketman writes: "The latest newsletter from the Space Access Society contains an insightful article (the first one after the introduction) on why it still costs so damn much to get into orbit. The reasons are, quite unsurprisingly, much more political and economic than technical."
Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
Basically it was a tall skinny triangular rocket that could takeoff vertically, hover, move horizontally while still upright, and then land. They distributed an mpeg of the flight and called it a dramatic success....unfortunately that was the last I ever saw of this technology. Does anyone have a better long term memory than me? (Yes, I googled a bit but didn't find it)
SuperID
'Back in the nineties' (Score:3)
Salvation lies outside the US (Score:2)
Already we see China, Japan and Brazil expanding their space activities, with India planning a mission to the moon. More and more companies, too, are getting in on the act; I believe the Roton [rotaryrocket.com] was mentioned here before.
The more countries and/or companies there are involved, the more incentive there is to lower the prices to something reasonable.
Of course, if we had a space elevator [spaceelevator.com], it'd be far, far cheaper. And faster. And better.
Everybody knows why... (Score:3)
The only reason the New World Order doesn't want us in space is because then we'd see all the UFO's trying to make contact with us, all the spy satellites, the secret bases on the dark side of the moon, and we'd be able to get a clear view of the face on Mars from space... They don't want us to be able to look down on Area 51 and intercept the MIND BEAMS they use to control earth's population!
</CONSPIRACY>Restructuring space flight (Score:5)
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Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Space Costs (Score:4)
The Delta V, I think.... (Score:2)
At least they managed to get it working in application. Now if onl they'd get some sort of railgin going that could lift passengers into orbit via magnetics- launch it to the east near the equator [finally, a use for the Andes- a launch tube ramp!] and you're in business.
As much as I loath advertising, if that's what it takes to get us back up there, i'm all for it!
Sooo.... (Score:3)
The Solution: Increase the demand in some way other than reducing price. Add value to space travel. Or advertise the value you already have.
Specific ideas: Make a deal with Hollywood to make a space epic actually shot in space ("On location...from the moon!"). Hype some medical device/technique that came from space research ("the defrobbinator, developed by NASA for the Mars mission, saved Joe Schmoe's life today...").
And don't try to tell me this is already going on. I'm not talking about John Glenn commemorative plates. I'm talking about touching Joe Sixpack. Get him to realize that satellite cable depends on satellites which depends on rockets and he will whip his checkbook out so fast it'll make your head spin.
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Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
The real issue ........ (Score:5)
We are incapable of training our kids to resist the gravitational pull of a McDonalds.
We are also incapable of producing policemen who can resist the gravitational pull of a doughnut.
By the time we colonise another planet, if ever, KFC will have already sold franchises there. Mark my words
Screw Politics! (Score:2)
All non-corporate scientists would work for a section of the UN. Their research would be funded by each government putting X, Y, or Z percent of their budget into the project, depending on the economic status of their country, and all the scientists would be able to draw from that pool. This would mean that the scientists would be unaffected by politics. There would, of course, be a governing group, it would be made up of one representative from each government, who would make decisions regarding the government.
I realize that my idea might sound very strange, but it could work, if implemented properly.
Of Course (Score:2)
Some Picket Signs for this one:
"If you can't trust your citizens who can you trust?"
"Come on, this is rocketry not brain surgery."
"Heinz, Hunts, who cares?"
Devil Ducky
good thing (Score:2)
i mean, sure, space exploration sounds exciting, but have you ever thought why it is exciting? consider nasa. nasa has a recent history of losing things in space and/or crashing them into distant planets. do you want these people making your flight arrangements? I can just hear it now: "We're going to fly you past the moon, and then... uh... you're gonna just keep going... maybe"
Next, space isn't known for it's friendly environments. if you want to know what a human being in space feels like, stick a marshmallow into a vacuum chamber. Add to that the fact that the temperature of other planets is either really, really hot or really, really cold, but never even close to being habitable. And then there's atmospheric pressure, gravity, and food and water, and all these other things you'd have to think of when nasa accidentally shoots you at the wrong planet and loses contact with you until you were Lost in Space
Old News (Score:2)
American indifference to space (Score:4)
Why are we still on Earth? Because nobody really cares about space any more. Back at the time of the Moon landings people cared, it was a matter of national pride to Americans to get there before the Russians did, and because of that the Americans were able to spend a rediculuous amount of their national budget on a trophy project with no real value.
But now you can't even get funding for NASA to buy extra pencils without Congress screaming bloody murder, and the public are so jaded by "yet another shuttle launch" that they'd rather watch "Armageddon" than anything happening in the real world. The current generation of Americans seem to have lost their fire; without the Red threat there is no real motivational force in the American psyche.
Of course American is now just one of several players in the space market. Whilst its vast body of experiance languishes, becoming more and more obsolete, other nations are still expanding their space programs.
Who'll be the next on the Moon? The Chinese is my guess. And they'll be doing a lot more than putting a Red flag there, because their space program is still on the up.
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Jon E. Erikson
I'm glad it's hard to leave the ground (Score:2)
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
It lost out in the X-33 funding selection stage to the Venturestar, which is probably going to fold becuase the composite fueltanks leak. (I believe the Delta Clipper was also going to have composite fuel tanks, so it would have faced the same problems).
There was a third proposal, a sort of single stage Shuttle-2.
All these proposals aimed at achieving a single stage to orbit by use of lighter matrials, slightly exotic engine/fuel combinations, and different landing approaches to achieve the necessary mass fraction to get to orbit: more than 90% of the launch weight must be fuel. This is
difficult at best, and means that you need a huge vehiicle for even quite a modest payload.
I don't think this will ever be done cheaply. The alternatives are not carrying all your fuel: e.g. air-breathing, magnetic launchers, and staging. Currently staging is the only approach which is not science fiction.
In other words, I disagree with the paper. I think the reasons are largely technical.
Re:Everybody knows why... (Score:3)
Would this "Area 51" be on Microsoft Way, Redmond by any chsnce ?
Re:good thing (Score:2)
Re:Space Costs (Score:4)
Shurely you mean "encourage qbasic science in this country".
Yeah that's the problem, nobody programs in qbasic anymore
The cost of lowering costs (Score:3)
The major established launch contractors have no incentive to invest in lower space launch costs, beyond minor investments aimed at minor cost reductions that show up in higher profits on existing traffic. Large investments aimed at major cost reductions would tend to have the effect of significantly reducing their launch business cashflow, as their largest single customer, the government, would insist on having the savings passed along.
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
When polystyrene was invented as part of the space program ages ago, it cost millions of dollars per cubic meter. (Sorry I don't speak imperial well, but that's something like a cube with 3.3 foot edges.) It wouldn't have cost anything to produce, but that didn't mean they made a huge loss on development. It was completely justified to put that price on it until the research and development was paid off.
In any case, even if it costs the government some sort of reward or bonus to the launch companies to make this investment, it would pay off big time for all sorts of business that it would generate when the launch costs come down (eventually) as a result.
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Why competition is dangerous (Score:3)
I'm as die hard a capitalist as the next guy, but Earth Orbit can not be the free-for-all that relying on the free market would dictate. The problem is, quite simply, what you stated above. Without a national (global?) agency to control what goes in what orbit, the resulting chaos of independent launches could actually reduce the usefulness of satellites. Plus the free-market is not exactly known for its environmental concern. There's enough junk up there now, wait until Microsoft starts launching rockets......
Re:Everybody knows why... (Score:3)
Excuse me, I must go buy a software upgrade I don't need.
Re:good thing (Score:2)
Make up your own mind.
Useful links (Score:3)
Space planes (X-33) [venturestar.com]
SSTO articles [genastro.com]
HOTOL [easynet.co.uk]
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:3)
Bean counters again (Score:2)
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
Good article - general flow of science and life (Score:5)
Democracy will always have inefficiencies like pork barrel projects - people do not see 'national' benefits, they see local benefits. This is not a human flaw, this is a sort of information filter. The entire economic state of the nation, PLUS one's normal daily routines would be impossible, so we filter it down to the important issues - the local ones. So, if you want the *people* to govern themselves (and don't even think of doing a true democracy... nothing would get done) you split the country up into multiple sections (states, in our case) and let representatives from each one of those states do the governing. It makes sense - there isn't really a better alternative. However, your problem, flat out, is if you want the body of representatives to deal with the money allocation of the nation, you're going to have pork barrel projects, because in order to stay in office, they need to be noticed. In order to be noticed, they absolutely have to do something that their constituents will see.
That's government for you - but what's causing the capitalist companies to do what they're doing? The same thing - individual short-sightedness. Look at history - history has shown that any time one company starts to make a run at a new market, another one will start chasing after it, and they'll innovate, innovate, and innovate. However, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing et al. aren't chasing after the cheap end of launches. Why? Because there's no guarantee they'll win. It's not safe. Not only that, it's extremely risky. The better method for them is to attempt to slowly cut costs here and there (not showing the dropping cost to the consumer, of course... a price war would be bad. You might not win) and quietly funding research here and there, possibly.
Price wars are bad for the big players in a market - a lot of times they lose. Look at Intel and AMD, Amazon and (insert anyone), Apple and (any of the PC manufacturers nowadays). In each case, a price war started, and suddenly the original big player (Intel, anyone in the book selling business, and Apple) lost out - in some cases almost catastrophically. Price wars are good for upstarts - not necessarily in government spending (sometimes, though) but in the consumer market definitely.
What I take from this lesson in economics and politics is this: if we want to get cheap launches into space, we need to realize two things: don't look to politics, first off. Politics is propaganda, because with a nation of 300 some odd million people, it has to be. And second off, you need an upstart. Someone needs to found a cheap-space-launch business that works. It might not have the highest volume of Lockheed-Martin, or Boeing, but it would make government contracters ask LM and Boeing why their estimates aren't lower. And since LM and Boeing and others will simply buy out the first few upstarts, you need to keep founding them (if you're smart, you'd be one person, founding multiples of them with the same money that the major players give you
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well, and we can again see that upstarts coming in were the major players in shaking up industries (first Dell/Gateway/Compaq/Packard Bell, now Emachines).
NASA is also funding a program besides the SLI program - the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, which is designed to very much so overcome the problems in spaceflight by poking at the holes in science currently.
If anyone out there is a student looking for an area of physics to study, look carefully at the BPP page, and follow my advice - find the 'holes' in physics which were found by EXPERIMENT, rather than by theory, and stab at them several thousand times over until they pop. My personal best bet? Anomalous weight changes over a superconducting surface, and the Casimir effect. Try everything. Literally. Chances are, at some point, you'll get something that makes people go "Huh?" - and at that point, you've hit on something, and go at it like crazy.
(BPP project: http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm)
(I don't use HTML tags because I'm lazy. Sorry. Chalk it up to humanity.)
One way to cut costs (Score:5)
Fact: Most of the weight of the first stage is in the oxidizer. (liquid oxygen).
Question: Why are we carrying oxygen around in the atmosphere?
It seems to me that jet engines do a good job of handling the 0 to the speed of sound part of the speed range. Using jets in the first stage has a number of advantages:
Jets are much safer than Rockets.
Jet engines are available off the shelf.
Jet engines have a much higher specific impulse than rockets (Isp = pounds of thrust / pounds of fuel burned per sec)
Jet engines are reusable.
A Beowulf cluster of Jet engines (sorry, I couldn't resist the Joke) would generate large amounts of thrust.
A launch with hybrid Jet engine first stage would be much less expensive than a pure rocket launch.
I suspect that the first stage of boosters use rockets because "That's the way we've always done it".
Comments from veterans at NASA or other space agencies would be appreciated.
ET phone home? (Score:2)
But has anyone read "The Big Book of the Unexplained"? It's a graphic novel-type book dealing with bizarre phenomena. One of the many things mentioned is the curious silence that astronauts usually have regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Also, with Apollo 13, there's the infamous "Houston, we've just been told Santa Claus exists" quote.
To make a long story short, one of the reasons postulated by the author for a lack of return flights to the moon or longer-term (out of orbit) missions is extraterrestrtial warning. Forgive me if I sound conspiracy-minded, but it's a possibiltity. Maybe a tad far-fetched, but a sound possibility nonetheless.
Yes, but how? (Score:2)
What are the alternatives?
I don't know enough about the subject to comment very intelligently, but it must be dependent on what the major costs are. Can anyone fill us in on this? Of the $10k that it costs NASA to put a pound of matter into orbit, how much goes where?
For example, if a major cost is fuels, then the way to go must surely be a more efficient propulsion system - yup, nuclear unless anyone's got a better idea. Actually, I think that more efficient propulsion has to be the answer for another reason - that then we can drop the costs of carting all that fuel around for the first few minutes of the flight. Presumably the fuel for a putative nuclear drive would have negligible mass compared with all that liquid oxygen.
So where else are the costs?
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Re:Everybody knows why... (Score:2)
Re:Bean counters again (Score:4)
Let me put it this way. If everyone on Slashdot donated $500 to NASA for BPP research, that would be a serious hell of a lot of money - probably close to $50 million dollars - definitely not paltry research money! Everyone on Slashdot could afford $500 - really. You might have to tack it onto a credit card bill, or eat a little lightly for the remainder of the year, but you could afford it. But this won't happen. No matter how much I would yell and scream, it won't happen - because, unfortunately, it will not directly have an affect on you. Some of you might do it - those who the $500 is nothing at all - but most probably wouldn't (including me), because the effect is not tangible.
In my regard, this makes sense. You cannot estimate the financial benefits of space research. Period. The estimated benefits to humanity are actually somewhere between 0 and 6 times the cost of it. Note I included zero - it is entirely possible that the research would find nothing.
Has this happened? Oh yes. Tons of people are staring at general relativity, and have been staring at general relativity for dozens of years, trying to find the 'Holy Grail' - a metric which allows FTL travel with normal matter. It isn't going to happen - it doesn't exist. Sometimes we have to accept that life doesn't provide us with an easy way out. (That, and theory has never done much to revolutionize normal people's lives
- it's all experiment).
Research, unfortunately, cannot be looked at logically. It is a potential benefit, rather than a guaranteed benefit.
On a side note, I don't think the US Government is failing. It's working exactly as it always has, and was intended to - media tends to put it in everyone's face more, and so, eh, public opinion is kinda down, but public opinion isn't exactly a 'national health indicator'. I don't know why exactly you think the government is failing (there has always been corruption, immorality in office, and short-term benefits rather than long-term planning) but to me, it just seems running perfectly fine. I don't let a dream of a perfect world (or even a 'better world') get in the way of my view of reality. Fact is, you start dealing with 300 million some odd people, and the government's not going to be great. Especially when (by all standard indicators) the country is exceptionally wealthy.
Re:Restructuring space flight (Score:3)
Re:Space Costs (Score:2)
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
The thrust of the paper wasn't that there are no technical issues. The paper was claiming that economic/political issues are preventing the technical issues from being worked on.
In particular the big two launch componies don't want to do research on air-breating launchers because all it will do is cut the price it can charge NASA for launches (unless they get a 20x price reduction it will not signifagantly increse number of launches). The smaller componies that are trying air-breathing launchers (like RLV -- they have a prototype that can lift off and land, but not reach orbit) are going bankrupt.
The technical problems won't get attention until someone with money thinks it is worth the risk of investing in research that might not pay off. Expensave research.
If you follow the two links in the article there are some more details. And a lot of blame on the failure of Irdium, and not-so-steller profits of Globalstar, which were the "big new market" that fueled many of the aerospace startups.
Mass fraction at fault (Score:4)
"Mass Fraction" means you're lucky to get a couple of percent productive payload because you're using a newtonian reaction drive. Unfortunately that's all we know how to do at the moment. But it means you throw 95% of yourself away to get to mars, and then 95% of what's left away to get back.
Clearly the corolory here is you have to start with a lot of stuff, and that's what makes space expensive.
The fault isn't with government or big business, it's with our current state of ignorance of useful physics. What NASA needs to do is more of what it's doing a tiny bit of right now, and that's finance radical new propulsion concepts.
Check out NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics [nasa.gov] program.
Yeah, sure it sounds like star-trek, but remember that landing on the moon sounded exactly like the most fanciful science fiction only a few decades before. Get over reaction drive limitations, and then we're going places! . Keep throwing yourself away to go somewhere, and you're staying firmly at home.
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
www.space-access.org [space-access.org]
These guys were following the selection process between Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas pretty closely.
As I remember, they lobbied for McDonnell-Douglas for a variety of reasons: small launchpad team, quick turnaround time, focused program that would have gone far if it hadn't been so strapped for cash. Perhaps they wouldn't have been so innovative and scrappy if they could have been more relaxed about the money. As I remember, there was a running situation where Congress had approved ~$40 million, but some bureaucrat at the Pentagon refused to release it.
So, Lockheed won the bid for the X-33, though, b/c they were better at schmoozing the bidding process. (Make a kitchen-sink type rocket, so every senator has a part of it built in his district...) Unfortunately, this rocket lost a lot of the advantages of the small, closely-knit, highly-focused team for McDonell-Douglas.
So from this point of view, it was again politics that won out over technical issues.
The Space Access guys don't have a full archive up of their updates, so you can only read about the tail-end of the selection process there, but it's a start.
Re:Yes, but how? (Score:2)
Magnetism. Launch cargo from big-assed hypervelocity rail guns built up the sides of the Andes down 'round the equator. It won't work for people, but it would be great for anything that can handle the acceleration. Couldn't hurt Chile's economy either.
The problem with nuclear is that you still need reaction mass that has the sames drawbacks, ie weight, as standard fuels.
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
What people are trying to point out is demonstrated in the small with DC-X. NASA loads up these type of programs with advanced technologies as soon as they get their hands on them. Consequently, they go over budget and past schedule and are cancelled (which is about to happen to the X-33 that Lockheed-Martin is building, except that they are afraid to do it before the election). What's needed is to take existing well developed technology and build some operational vehicles. If you canceled 2 shuttle flights (at an estimated $500M each), you could probably do just that. But NASA would never do it because it would endanger their entrenched bureaucracy.
OK, I feel better now having that out of my system....
Payload Redistribution (Score:2)
Re:Bean counters again (Score:2)
No real value? (Score:2)
How about that small, yet extremely powerful computer you used to post that message?
I used to work at a Home Healthcare company, and lots of the really cool things, such as ultra-light sports-wheelchairs, are directly related to technology derived from the space program.
Re:Everybody knows why... (Score:2)
For as long as humanity has existed, the motivation of societies has been as the saying goes, "Sex, Money, Power." In this new millennium, if humanity is to venture forth into the unexplored recesses of space, than it is obvious that the motivators currently in place cannot co-exist with the survival of the human race. How many times has the well-being of humanity and its environment been forsaken for wealth and power?
Just look at the electric car, which could have gone mainstream decades ago in an effort to lessen damage to the environment. Many suspect that Oil-drilling interests, who had too much to lose with the advent of electric motoring, used their influence to bribe car manufacturers into avoiding and dragging on it's development in order to preserve the status quo.
The same applies with space exploration. Humanity, in its currently divided (politically and ethically), and competitive (economically) state is ill-suited for space exploration and the encountering of any alien life. The current ruling interests realise that space exploration and any consequences of encountering alien life would give societies around the world the reasoning to unilaterally unite and abandon the motivations of Money and Power and hence undermine the foundations of which their influence is built upon.
IMHO, Space exploration and intergalactic diplomacy requires a different set of motivation: racial unity and curiosity. This theme in itself has been expressed many times in science fiction, most notably Star Trek where after "First Contact" humanity unites and abandons the pettiness of power and wealth in order to survive, long and prosper as a race. I believe that the sooner the New World Order is toppled, the sooner the human race will unite and achieve its destiny by fulfilling its instinct of curiosity reaching out through the universe.
Re:One way to cut costs (Score:5)
Might the environmentalists cause an increase? (Score:3)
Maybe we should join with the ultra-extreme-environmentalists in an effort to raise the cost of mining on earth :-)
Re:Of Course (Score:2)
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
The basic design is as safe or safer than winged designs like X-33. Also, you don't need a 3-mile runway, and you don't have to haul those useless wings into space and back every time. Multiple engines give you protection against engine failure, as landing weight of an operational SSTO would be between 5 and 10% of the takeoff weight. I.E. you only need to light 2 or 3 of your 10 engines to land safely.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood (Score:3)
Our read of Lockheed-Martin is that they've reacted to this by a dual-track strategy of, to date, soaking up most available government cheap-launch R&D money so none of their competitors (competitor, now) could get the jump on their existing high-cost launch business, while pursuing government financing for their own "Venturestar" concept in the hope of using other people's money to get the jump on their remaining competitor.
The only remarkable thing about the US government creating a duopoly, IMHO, is that they left a competitor. Anyway, now it seems we're stuck in the middle. Problem with being stuck in the middle is, everybody knows you've got to go somewhere, but they can't agree on which way.
The authors continue to insist that the government must be the investor of last resort in pushing launch costs down to "radically" lower levels - the country and the world would benefit hugely, but getting past the break-point in the demand curve has so far taken too much money and time for private investors in the current climate.
And that's the problem with government involvement in the market; a little is never enough. The author(s) must surely have seen the other road: cut government R&D money. Level the playing field by removing the artificial barrier to entry for private investors. Let the market set the price, rather than expecting the price to create the market.
Now that's a risk. To apply the article's words in a different context, the potential payoff may be huge, but it's a long-term and speculative payoff; the new markets can't be straight-line projected from current markets, and they won't spring into being overnight.
Maybe the barrier to entry will still be too high; maybe government funding to date has made this duopoly too tough to crack. Maybe the lack of support would lead to even worse stagnation than the present "flat demand curve".
On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't. $600/lb. is just a best-guess critical point for spurring enterprise; maybe smaller companies would find cunning paths through the level field; maybe revolutionary growth in the space economy is closer than we think.
I don't know; I'm a libertarian, not an economist. But before anyone goes criticizing the big companies (which these guys don't) for not taking visionary risks with their money, consider how brave you feel taking visionary risks with your vote.
I can certainly see why these guys would be leery of such a scheme. I worked with a small company which created a nifty little program, and the time came when some of us proposed GPL-ing it. Our poor boss, much as he loved the free software movement, underwent visible anguish over the prospect; this was his baby. And I understood; I couldn't promise that freeing the software wouldn't kill the company.
We didn't take the risk. The company's doing... okay.
Re:American indifference to space (Score:5)
Apollo was, in my opinion, somewhat of a mistake. We went there to Get There (tm). It served no practical purpose whatsoever, and once we got there, the public was basically done with it. Why? Because our job was to Get There (tm) - and when we did, well, that was that. Good job. Now go home.
Take a good look at the Human Genome Project. It got funding, it still has funding, and it completed (mostly) recently. It'll still get funding for a while, because it can genuinely and completely claim legitimate viable commercial interests.
Take a look at the NASA programs which get funding (and there are quite a few) - Hubble, for instance. Why? Because the public likes Hubble - it generates a commercial product (pretty images). This sounds quite stupid, but it's true, strangely enough!
Personally, if the Chinese get to the moon, I think all they will do is put a Red flag there, then come back. Why? Because we don't have anything else to do there yet that will make the cost viable.
America is definitely not languishing when it comes to space science - it's the entire world. The nations with developing space programs simply have not reached the plateau where 'getting to space' has been accomplished, and 'doing something there' hasn't had to be examined yet.
Re:Everybody knows why... (Score:2)
Are you implying that an agency formed for the good of humanity would rise above petty politics and economics and take us to the stars? It's called NASA, and it's done just about the opposite.
I know that no one can predict the effect alien contact / real space travel will have with humanity, but I do know that it won't be a panacea. I can see everyone becoming united to hate aliens (the same way groups of whites suddenly forgot the differences between Italian, Irish and French when the Asians started immigrating...), but human nature can't change.
Anyone motivated by anything other that a desire to preserve / better themselves is extremely scary to me, unpredictable and dangerous. (Extremely religious people fall into this category.)
On the other hand, such a display of optimism and hope for the future gives me a warm fuzzy on the inside.
-grendel drago
Re:Bean counters again (Score:2)
It's sad to say, but $50m isn't a huge research budget, particularly when it comes to space research. It's enough to get some work done, but not enough to sustain a decent research program.
Re:NO price reduction anytime soon (Score:2)
Why do you think Boeing uses a Russian rocket for its Sealaunch programme?
Re:Space Costs (Score:2)
I'm sorry... I generally oppose violence... but if ever there were a good reason to assassinate an elected official, it would be for encouraging qbasic.
Re:Of Course (Score:2)
I can't belive it took this long for this to get into print. I bet most people believed (or at least suspected) that the government is using their "monopolistic" hold on the space program to charge high prices. If they can't make any money on it, why should you ?
Some Picket Signs for this one:
"If you can't trust your citizens who can you trust?"
They don't trust anyone, why else have they become so pervasive in our lives (v-chips so parents don't have to monitor their children's TV habits like all of our parents did, the welfare system...)
"Come on, this is rocketry not brain surgery."
I see someone watches a little "Emeril Live!"
Re:Bean counters again (Score:2)
Our best bets for cheap propulsion right now are still in the 'theoretical' stage - theory's cheap. I wasn't talking about experimental space research - THAT'S expensive. But theory's damn cheap. Take a look at the recent Solar Sail studies that NASA has been working on. I'm not sure of the costs, but somehow I doubt they were prohibitively high.
Even so, amend my previous statement to $500 a year. $50M a year is enough to make any researcher (or several researchers!) jump and crawl over each other to get at it.
(Common grants for space research (theory/design - not construction) typically are in the $50K-$150K range.)
Re:NO price reduction anytime soon (Score:2)
because russian "proton" (i believe its their name) rockets are currently most advanced/can get most kg's into space. there is nothing that can be compared to them.
The Internation Space Station (Score:3)
Re:Screw Politics! (Score:2)
Generally governments are involved because the science they fund is perceived to be good for the country in some fashion. For instance, a cure for AIDS would be good business for whoever comes up with it. Likewise, fusion power plants would be good business. Nuclear reactor research is both good business and also good for defense. (Nuclear reactors for energy, nuclear subs, breeder reactors to manufacture plutonium, etc). Rocket science was initially developed in the U.S. to allow Corona to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War--again, something perceived to be good for the national defense and, eventually, good for business. States often have a good reason to support much of the research that they do, and unfortunately finding innovative, inexpensive ways to launch stuff into orbit isn't terribly compelling to most nations. It is doubtful that this research would get much more support under the "world scientific foundation" banner if the majority of its constituents consider the problem to be of low priority.
All non-corporate scientists would work for a section of the UN. Their research would be funded by each government putting X, Y, or Z percent of their budget into the project, depending on the economic status of their country, and all the scientists would be able to draw from that pool.
Many dangers lurk in turning over the responsibility for science leadership and funding to a completely autonomous agency. Perhaps foremost among these is that public funds would still be required for such a body. It would likely be even harder to drum up support for science when a nation could opt to let the other nations carry the burden for them. (Witness how difficult it is now to get the U.S. to pay what it owes to the U.N.) The incentive to contribute would be even lower if the spending of the agency didn't match the priorities of a nation. For example, India may place a high value on fusion energy research, given its economic situation, whereas the U.S. may love cheap oil and place a low value on fusion energy research.
This would mean that the scientists would be unaffected by politics.
In my experience, the process of evaluating and distributing research grants is itself a very political process; to consolidate all this into one central agency may give too much power to small factions of grant reviewers whose agendas may not necessarily coincide with the advancement of good science.
These are just a few difficulties I have with your agency. Don't get me wrong--yours is an interesting idea, however I will need some convincing before I believe that it is an improvement on the present system.
Re:Bean counters again (Score:2)
(Not only that - but if you did try, you'd have one hell of a boring life.)
Strangely enough, a dictatorship would most likely be much better in a situation like this, as dictatorships have long shown that they can very efficiently build huge, completely inefficient, prohibitively expensive monuments to the size of their [ego].
I'm sure if a dictatorship ran the US, we'd have several bases on the moon. Most of them would be royal palaces.
As for the financial benefits, these are all side benefits, which, unfortunately, are more attributable to the companies who actually did them, rather than the space launch program.
An old adage says "Necessity is the mother of invention," and I'm inclined to believe that it's completely true, rather than mostly true. Humans don't innovate without need - period - because, well, we're lazy.
As for whether or not this is a problem, I don't know. If an asteroid strikes us before we're able to deal with it, yup, it was a problem. Other than that, eh...
Re:American indifference to space (Score:2)
Re:American indifference to space (Score:2)
In the age of jets flying overhead all the time, I'm afraid that one moving dot in the sky will do little to stir public interest.
FYI, Mir is commonly visible at magnitudes of somewhere around 0-1 (rather bright - about as bright as Vega, basically) over much of the Earth.
Re:Space Costs (Score:2)
Re:American indifference to space (Score:2)
Re:Everybody knows why... (Score:2)
AFAIK, most extremely religious people are trying to preserve / better themselves.
Similarly, AFAIK, most "squishy leftist" people are also trying to preserve / better themselves (though perhaps less directly, e.g. by preserving / bettering the society they live in).
The sad fact is... everyone is scary, unpredictable, and (potentially) dangerous. Not least because it isn't possible to know in advance what they deem important to their own preservation / betterment.
Even people with only the most direct notions of self preservation / betterment are pretty scary, if they recognize no bounds on what's fair in preservation and betterment.
ps - love your name, be it real or otherwise.
--
Re:The cost of lowering costs (Score:4)
Unfortunately, that is the current financial situation "enjoyed" by government contractors today. This sort of ass-backwards thinking has been true for the last twenty years or so.
The idea used to be that the government would simply buy a product from government contractors, and it was up to the goverment contractors to figure out the cheapest way to fulfill their end of the contract. If a government contractor could make a huge profit by figuring out a cheaper way to do things, then they got to pocket the profits as a reward for innovation.
As far as the government was concerned, this created two "problems." First, bureaucrats were uncomfortable with the notion that a contractor would use it's profits from a prior assignment to perform R&D on a future assignment in order to maximize profits. (Yes, I know--this is how the private sector works. But from a government bureaucrat's point of view, this is the same as stealing from Peter to pay Paul.)
The second problem was that the public (read: politicians) disliked the notion of people getting rich off doing government work. Something to do with class envy or some such bullshit. At any rate, the notion that several companies could make billions by providing the government inexpensive state of the art products ahead of the and under budget is evil to many politicians.
So now modern government contracts have built-in profit margins, and are required to pass on savings back to the government or being penalized by lower contractually mandated profit margins.
That is, the government in essence requires the savings to be passed back to the government. That's why no-one cares that we're one mega-merger away from a monopoly in the airospace market--because government contract work is so heavily regulated it makes the electric company regulations of a half-dozen years ago seem like Lassie-Faire Capitalism by comparason.
The upshot of this is that it is in the best interest of Lockheed to keep launch costs at the top of the inelasticity plateau, because it maximizes their profits given the current regulatory environment.
Personally I think it's stupid--and it's why we see things like $8,000 toilets and $600 wrenches. It's also why we see an absolute lack of interest on the part of Lockheed to innovate except in the more esoteric areas of DoD spending--because all financial incentives for Lockheed to do anything other than what Congress directly mandates has been stripped from it.
That, combined with the "spend it or lose it" mentality of the Federal government's budget spending process, explains in large part why we can have so much waste while we simultaneously shackle some of the brightest minds on the planet.
Re:economic rather than economical? (Score:2)
Re:Somebody's been reading too much Carl Sagan (Score:2)
Re:One way to cut costs (Score:2)
More recent info on Roton (Rotary Rocket Company) (Score:2)
People who knew anything about the company had high hopes to be watching manned commercial space launches and landings at the Mojave Airport.
The company is currently looking for enough investment money to build and fly the space flight version of Roton, which was esitmated to run $1000/lb on a 7000lb payload capacity to low-Earth orbit. The Space Access Newsletter that this Slashdot article refers to mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...
Picking a few nits (Score:2)
--
Thank heavens (Score:3)
Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Stuck On Earth?
Posted by Hemos on 07:15 AM July 11th, 2000
from the wanna-go-to-mars dept.
Anonymous Coward writes: "Me and my friends were sitting around and we started wondering, hey! Why can't we go and live on Mars?! I wanna live on Mars. Don't you? Does anyone here have any experience with living on planets other than earth and maybe can give us some pointers?" Anonymous Coward raises some important points. Maybe someone working at Transmeta can steal some tech from work and help us along?
ISS as stopover (Score:2)
We launch from Canavaral because it's reasonably close to the equator, and can take advantage of the Earth's rotational speed as a fraction of orbital velocity. Don't forget, as someone else mentioned, of the importance of that first thousand MPH, in terms of fuel.
A high inclination orbit throws away several hundred of that first thousand MPH, diminishing launch capacity and shortening the launch window. The launch window to ISS is on the order of 10 minutes, and it's HARD to get big payloads up there.
Re:American indifference to space (Score:2)
Re:Whatever Happened To..... (Score:2)
Re:Not buying it (Score:2)
As to curing world hunger or promoting global peace, these are fundamentally political problems which cannot be cured with money. The best you can do with money is to create a band-aid, but world hunger will only be cured and global peace achieved when regional politicians put the good of the people and the good of local partnerships that create infrastructure and distribution centers above their own petty parochial squabbling.
But just because there is AIDS in the world and madmen who would blow you up rather than listen to your words, and just because politicians would rather allow the wondering nomadic people of northern Africa starve to death because it suits their political aims does not mean we should halt all other socio-economic activities cold until we can all come together and sing cumbya.
For example, have you sold your house and car, packed your bags, and moved to Somalia to feed the starving children? Should I? Should we dismantle
To anyone who suggests we should solve the problems of earth before we reach the stars, I suggest that it is this very attitude that is creating the problems on earth in the first place. That is, it is the presumption that your own parochial desires (such as owning a house, having a Mercedes, or a seat in the corporate boardroom of Ted Turner's conglomerate) takes precedence over the "starving children", while my desires (such as making space tourism economically viable in my lifetime) should be set aside as "wasteful foolishness" until we achieve world peace.
It's this fundamental lack of respect for other people which cause the lack of world peace, and which cause politicians to act selfishly and prevent the infrastructure construction necessary to feed people through the world.
Bah. I have little patience with patently stupid crap like this.
(Yes, I know: you weren't advocating that we should cure AIDS before we spend money on a better orbital launch vehicle--only pointing out the argument made by others. I just had to get that rant out of my system.)
Flaky conspiracy theories (OT) (Score:2)
- Electric cars were once more popular than gasoline cars. They are undeniably simpler, quieter, and smoother than primitive autos like the Model T, and they sold quite well.
- The electric car lost its popularity before the rise of Big Oil, while Edison (the beneficiary of electric-car "fuel" sales) was enjoying his heyday. Hell, Edison was winning the competition for the domestic lighting market, beating out kerosene.
- The petroleum-powered car beat the electric because it was technically superior, especially in range. When cars and roads became better and people wanted to go longer distances, batteries were unable to provide sufficient energy. A battery takes hours to recharge, a gas tank takes minutes to refill (and a gas can is a lot lighter to carry than a battery if you run out in an inconvenient place). What would you rather drive?
Similar dissection skewers your claims with regard to space exploration. Yeah, the discovery of microbes on Mars would really threaten the entire World Order... NOT! I'm afraid it really is all down to economics and coalition politics; "human social development" has nothing at all to do with it.--
Re:American indifference to space (Score:4)
I'm (obviously!) very very for pure science. However, what I'm trying to say, is we will never capture the mass media's attention. Ever. We never have - and we never will. I didn't say I didn't see any value in pure science - in fact, ALL I see is value - but I don't see any economic value. And economic value is what puts bread on the table for people. Literally. People will not sacrifice their livelihood for the possible massive gains of the future. Not even scientists.
On a side note, I've begun to notice in people two qualities - first, a 'Golden Age' idea, which is that there must have been a time when things were better, and a 'hero' idea, which was that there were visionaries and heroes who somehow saw beyond the immediate moment. The funny part is both are wrong.
I've got a guess on the first - people's memory degrades rather drastically over time, so I'm figuring that people simply don't remember the bad parts, and only see a happy haze in the past. Note that as people get older, they get much more conservative and "When I was your age..." ish, though this is very anecdotal.
I don't know about the second. The fact is is that there were no visionaries, or heroes, ever - not the way that we see it. So many of history's 'heroes' are created by history itself - by media placing people in far higher lights than they themselves were. Einstein was raised to far higher levels in death than in life, as were people like Washington, Lincoln, FDR, (insert president name here).
Then again, as Star Trek said, "Don't try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own decisions." (paraphrased - I must be getting old too)
Columbus Syndrome (Score:2)
For thousands of years people had been bobbing about in fat wooden boats with canvas sails, and they were generally slow. Those boats handled all of the boating jobs pretty well, though. After 1500AD Europeans decided that there was some really valuable stuff that was at the limit of where they could go in their boats. They started working real hard to get across the ocean faster with more cargo capacity.
Within decades there were entirely new classes of ships to deal with the various ocean-crossing needs that had arisen. By 1807 we had steam ships. 52 years later the internal combustion engine appeared, and a few decades later useful aircraft were developed. All because there were a lot of business reasons for them to exist. An interesting point here is that until WWII most airplanes were built from the same materials as Columbus's ships.
Now we need the same thing for space. We know we can do the technology, but there is just not enough motivation - an earlier post referred to the "killer app" for space. When someone finally discovers that motiviator we'll all be astounded by the changes that will occur almost overnight.
Rocket Science (Score:2)
It turns out that what is left at the end is about 13% of your starting weight (the other 87% was fuel). Making a vehicle that weighs 15% of total takeoff weight is reasonable, and one that weighs 10% of total takeoff weight is really hard. So you've got somewhere in the range of -2% to +3% left over for cargo.
The traditional approach to the small payload problem is to not take the whole vehicle to orbit. Since you lose so much weight between takeoff and orbit, you don't need to take all your engines and tanks all the way. This is called staging. The other thing that helps is that loadbearing structure you only use once can be built lighter than stuff you want to use many times (a factor of 10 reduction in fatigue life buys you about 10% in weight savings).
Of course, having to put your rocket back together after a flight, and having it last only a few or one flight makes things expensive. That's how we got in the fix we're in.
There are several ways to work the problem. One is to use more advanced structural materials. So for the same weight as you used to build a throwaway structure, you build one that lasts hundreds of uses. Unfortunately, the attempt at making a lightweight composite tank for the X-33 didn't work out, but the general idea of using lighter, stronger materials is a good one.
Using an air-breathing engine at the start helps because the effective energy content of the fuel you carry is higher. You can give the vehicle a head start with some sort of ground accelerator, or by starting from the top of a tall tower. You can lower the destination with an orbital tether. You can feed energy to your vehicle with a laser.
There isn't any one 'best' answer. Which one makes the most economic sense depends on what you want to fly, how often, when you want to start (technology progresses), how much you can afford to spend to push technology faster, and how much risk you want to take.
Daniel
Re:American indifference to space (Score:2)
On a side note, I am not some golden age theory moron who thinks that things were great way back when. However, to say that there have never been heroes or visionaries is to fall victim to a rather pernicious form of modernism, one that tells us that there were never any great heroes, that humanity would have got there anyway, it was all inevitable. If you are looking for those who saw beyond their time, look to Thomas Paine, look to Da Vinci. Lincoln? Definitely revised to a higher standard, the Emancipation Proclamtion was after all an attempt to undermine the economic viability of the south, not the to reach the noble goal of equality often ascribed to it, but he did hold the nation together through one of its worse storms. Washington? Without his leadership as a general, his innovative use of guerilla warefare, and his Christmas attack, the revolution would have failed. FDR? A damn good diplomat, and managed to get America to do the right thing, even if it took a little manipulation, and a little dragging. No, there are not mythic, perfect men. There are, however, those who stand head and shoulders above much of the rest of their era. They are still flawed human beings, but without them dragging the rest of humanity kicking and screaming into the future we likely would still be a few thousand years back technologically and scientifically.
The day when it does happen. (Score:3)
It will be called the Federal Air and Space Administration....
Also known as FASA.
(next they'll be designing the next generation of ground transport with large armored walking units....)
-Julius X
Re:Picking a few nits (Score:2)
The $70M people discuss covered the DC-X. The
DC-Y was pitched as a candidate for the X-33 project, with the Delta Clipper being the SSTO candidate after that.
Arianespace (Score:2)
Space dock (Score:3)
J. Storrs-Hall, until recently the moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup, wrote an interesting proposal [imm.org] for what he calls a space dock. It's a platform 300 km long, at a height of 100 km above sea level, where air drag is much smaller. Your spaceship would ride an elevator to get up to the platform, and once there, a linear motor would accelerate it (at 10 G's for 80 seconds, survivable for humans) into circular orbit (8 km/sec), from which it's relatively easy to hit escape velocity.
This does not require nanotechnology. It would be possible (albeit initially expensive) to do it with existing materials and techniques. Once the construction is amortized, the total energy cost of putting a kilogram in orbit (elevator plus linear motor) is 43 cents. With hourly launches, it would be possible to amortize the cost of construction by charging about a dollar per kilogram.
In estimating cost of construction, JoSH writes: The wildcard is the cost of the diamond (and the ability to fabricate it into structural beams). Diamond is a bit expensive today! If an Apollo style (and -cost) project could do for diamond what the original one did for electronics, we could build the tower in the next decade or so, and with regard to near-term feasibility he writes: Even commercially available polycrystalline synthetic diamond with advertised strengths of 5 GPa would work.
Re:Surprise Surprise!! (Score:2)
Re:Sooo.... (Score:2)
What restrictions?
If you want to launch a satellite today, just scrounge up $50 million and call up Boeing. They will sign a contract with you and launch your satellite. Government approval isn't needed unless you are doing something weird like launching a personal death-ray battle station.
If you are developing a new launch vehicle, you will have to convince the government that you can keep flaming wreckage from landing on nearby cities before they let you launch a rocket.
SR-71 fun fact (Score:2)
The DC-X (Score:2)
It was paid for (and was over budget IIRC, but on a remarkably cheap budget) by the ballistic missile defense people, who flew it twice in one day (by comparison, each shuttle might fly twice in one year). The program was turned over to NASA, who promptly crashed it and didn't want to build any more.
Where are the Applications? (Score:2)
As the article pointed out, when you are launching a $100 million satellite, cheaper launch services would be nice but they wouldn't make much of a difference in your decision to launch a satellite. You would be more concerned about the reliability of the launch vehicle. Nobody wants to be the pioneer with a new or redesigned launch vehicle. More often than not, something goes wrong and your satellite is lost.
Re:The Internation Space Station (Score:2)
New moderation topic required! (Score:3)
Wrong! (Score:2)
The first problem we have to solve, before we can do anything at all useful in space, is getting to orbit efficiently. Until we do that, the best we can do for interplanetary stuff is "photos and footprints", like we did with Apollo.
If you're talking about getting to orbit cheaply, your mass fraction needs to be good enough to lift a worthwhile payload. And obviously the more you can lift, the better off you are.
However the primary cost driver of current launch systems is not the fuel: Liquid O2 (which is most of the propellant mass) is about $.05/lb. That's still $10Ks for a full propellant load, but that's not where the real expenses come into play.
The real expense in current launch systems is in the operational nature of the vehicle. Most launchers are expendable, remember. And most of those vehicles are based on ICBM designs, which sacrificed economic efficiency for the sake of getting every last bit of performance out of the system. This does not make for a cheap vehicle. Beal [bealaerospace.com] is tackling the problem from this direction by building an expendable launcher that is designed to be CHEAP. And you know what, they're probably going to succeed (although they may not make much money, because it's not clear that they can break the $600/lb price barrier with this approach).
As far as reusable vehicles go: The Space Shuttle requires practically a full refit between each flight. They have to -- no shit -- deweld parts of the engines in order to replace internal components EVERY TIME they fly. Then they have to put them back together, test them, etc, etc. Something like 30,000 people put their hands on the vehicles between each flight, and thousands more are needed at the actual launch. This is not the way to fly cheaply!
Cheap reusable vehicles are possible with current technology, but they require a level of systems engineering that has not been present in most recent NASA designs (it's certainly not there on the X-33). For various reasons, single stage vehicles would be much cheaper to operate, but making a reusable SSTO launcher requires a very high degree of optimization, and some difficult engineering trades. Throw in the need to please 15 different bureaucrats and politicians, and the job becomes impossible.
Your point about advanced propulsion technologies is well taken: for interplantary work, mass fraction is all-important (because you have to lift not only the vehicle but also all the damn fuel). But most of those systems are not suitable for launch, and those that are, are very far out. We don't need fancy new technologies to make that first step, getting to orbit cheaply. We just need some money (not very much, maybe $100-200M) and a good engineering team.
We'll never go to Mars, period. (Score:2)
Re:Bean counters again (Score:2)
One wonders. Many of NASA's claimed "space spinoffs" are minor, and some are outright phony. Teflon, for example, is a spinoff of the A-bomb program; it was originally used for seals in gaseous diffusion plants. Transistorized computers are a spinoff of the ICBM program; the Atlas Guidance Computer now in the Smithsonian was the first. Many of the exotic materials NASA talks about were used in the SR-71 program, which was secret at the time. The Hubble cost more than all proposed ground-based telescopes put together; the repair job alone cost far more than the biggest proposed telescope today. One non-NASA study concluded that the single most useful spinoff of Apollo was NASTRAN [nastran.com], the first good finite-element analysis program.
Government vs Boomers and Empires vs Tribes (Score:2)
The demand for launches isn't flat with respect to cost. The cost of launches just hasn't fallen much since the 1970s. This is because the political powers found the prospect of the boomer generation breaking out into space more threatening than the prospect of them becoming earth-bound basket cases -- even if it meant a neo-Guttenberg revolution via computer networking.
The threatening-but-far-less-so information technology revolution occured because Moore's law was already unleashed by 1970 [uci.edu]. By the time the bulk of the boomers were hitting the age where they were making career committments (1975) the network revolution was inevitable. The "market analysis" by a "government sponsored industry group" upon which the Space Access Society relies is reminiscent of when, in the early computer industry of the 1950's, IBM president Thomas J. Watson's market analysts provided a similarly flawed estimate of the demand for computers: six. That's right -- their cost demand calculations "flattened out" at six computers total -- no more computers would be built because the demand wouldn't justify it. Of course, it didn't take the transistor, let alone the integrated circuit and Moore, to show that estimate to be nonsense. Reality was that the cost demand curve wasn't as "flat" as the industry-dominating IBM would have liked and there simply wasn't as much perception that political power would be lost by expanding the access to computing as there was that, at the height of the Apollo program, power would be decentralized by expanding access to space for the boomer generation.
The historic analogue of the current situation is to be found in the fact that Leif Erikson not only mapped the first routes to the new world --he provided (under duress of the christian King of Norway) Iceland with its first Bishop of the Roman church -- which probably provided Rome with crucial information, if not maps, of potential new trade routes. But like all empires, they have to keep things "manageable". What followed was a similar "flat demand curve" for new world exploration as Mediterranean theocratic nepotism ("Is the Pope Italian?" used to be rhetorical question.) over potential trade-routes excluded northern european peoples until the Sephardic Jews, expelled by the theocratic Spanish Inquisition, teamed up with the Dutch and then, via Cromwell, with the British. This created the Protestant reformation which broke the Mediterranean monopoly on the trade routes (although it didn't allow the reestablishment of real mythic independence as would have the mass printing of the Eddas and Sagas) -- thus unleashing the age of exploration and establishment of the protestant colonies of north and west Europe.
Who are the Sephardim and potential "protestants" of the modern era? I tend to believe we should belooking for hysterical inquisitions against more genetically dominant cultures by the current theocracy of "political correctness" as it realizes African tribes, for example, are far from "politically correct". What will happen if more traditional African tribes team up with rural Americans, Russians, Australians, etc.? Certainly no one expected the combination of Guttenberg and Sephardic-edited Masoretic texts to unleash the old germanics from their domination to Rome's monopoly on trade routes.
This is the main reason why I recently spent a month travelling in Africa.
As I've said repeatedly in the past:
Promotion of politics exterminates apolitical genes in the population.
Promotion of frontiers gives apolitical genes a route to survival.
Change the tools and you change the rules.
Re:Flaky conspiracy theories (OT) (Score:2)
--
bad example (Score:2)
Not a bit. Everybody who has worked with computers always wants more speed, more memory, more software, more everything. There's always one more thing you could do with a bit faster computer or a bit more storage.
From the very first fully automatic programmable computer, there has always been more demand than supply. At first it was "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could calculate these vital military trajectories" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could use it to run our accounting" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could have one at home for games and schoolwork" then "if only it was a bit cheaper, we could put it in our appliance/toy/greeting card". From the first real computer, there has always been an economic motive to make it just a bit better because there were always people lining up to put the chips in something else (or put a few more chips in, or replace one of the chips with a better one).
That's why sitting still isn't and never was feasible for computer companies (and most big companies are bound to falter sooner or later, and get some idiot manager who thinks he can squeeze for a bit more profit if he slows down progress). Anyone can come in, make an incremental improvement based on the works of the establishment, and expand the marketplace instead of trying to wrest the established company's market away from it.
This is not the case for rocketry. An upstart launch company would have a very hard time luring customers away from the establishment. After all, satellites are very expensive things, and nobody wants to take a chance on a no-name rocket, even if it's 30% less expensive, not to mention the incredible red tape they'd have to cut through to be allowed to launch. The reason "Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM" didn't kill the competition was the potential for expanding the market, which doesn't exist in the field of rocketry.
Re:One way to cut costs (Score:2)
Given that you're right about getting to Mach 1, we can get some interesting things done about that. What would happen given a large catapult?
I'm not talking about a medieval rock-thrower, I'm talking about something more like an aircraft carrier cat, on a huge scale. Several flat, straight miles of catapult (the middle of a Plains state, anyone?) should get something to mach 1 in just under 30 seconds, pulling at a somewhat comfortable one gee. All this, and you haven't had to lift one ounce of fuel or engine--all the power is ground-bound and thus relatively cheap.
From mach 1, you can light up a ramjet--an engine simpler than today's turbofans that doesn't need impellors to scoop up air. You launch around (or a bit beyond) the sound barrier, horizontally, and your first stage carries nothing but hydrogen. When you get high enough to starge the ramjets, you drop that stage and go to a conventional rocket--probably at speed and altitude exceeding an SR-71.
Nobody's ever gotten a cat up to those speeds, but I suspect that's because nobody cares to. Electromagnets could do that, given some mighty big capacitors and your favorite ground-bound power source. Ramjets are a known technology--we launch them from under bomber wings, because their problem is that they cannot go from a standing start.