January 13, 2004
Space thoughts 2
Wretchard writes:
....Whether Europe, Asia or America will first find the key technology necessary to make interplanetary travel an economical reality cannot be foreseen. Yet history suggests that the answers will be found by those who are looking for them...."to mount the first real breeze for the distant shore". Yes.... Maybe the challenge is not to put men on Mars by a date certain, but the subtly different one of making investments to ensure that any technological breakthrough can be exploited rapidly and without hesitation. Clearly the day will come when nations will expand beyond the confines of the planet and our task is to be ready to mount the first real breeze for the distant shore....
One of the points of his post was that there is no way that there is going to be reasonably priced space travel anytime soon:
....Rocketman points out that no available engine technology can boost payloads into space in economical quantities. Current launch costs are on the order of $8,000/lb, a number that will have to be reduced by a factor of ten for the habitation of the moon, the establishment of La Grange transfer stations or flights to Mars to be feasible. This will require technology, and perhaps even basic physics that does not even exist. Simply building bigger versions of the Saturn V will not work....I would respectfully suggest that maybe, just maybe, that isn't true. One thing that is overlooked is that neither launch vehicles nor the launch process itself has ever been subject to the ruthless cost-cutting of mass production! In the manufacturing sector, reducing costs by a factor of 10 is routine. Happens when things go from small scale production to large scale. Launch vehicles have always been produced in small batches, and most of their components are produced in small batches. And they are built by companies that are totally geared to produced small quantities of expensive planes and rockets for government agencies rather than the marketplace.
No only is manufacturing in small lots very expensive, but development costs must be amortized over a small number of units. (It LOOKS like we are spending a lot on developing our spacecraft, but in fact I suspect spacecraft research is on a starvation diet. If we were producing any spacecraft in large quantities, management would instantly decide that more R&D would be a good investment.)
Think of those "factor of ten" objections. Imagine that (yes, I know this is visionary and won't happen—don't bother to chide, it's just a thought experiment), imagine that a certain size of launch vehicle could reasonably be built and launched for $50 million each. Imagine that our government, (or some other entity with deep pockets) offered to buy vehicles+launches for only $5 million each. BUT, with a commitment to buy 400 launches a year for 10 years....I wonder if they would have any takers?
Most people have no idea of the cost-cutting that goes on behind the scenes in, say, the automotive industry. Every nut and bolt is scrutinized for possible cost savings. Every supplier is ruthlessly squeezed to lower prices and then lower them again. And they in turn squeeze their suppliers. Robots replace ever more workers. Software schedules the ordering and movement of every part, so they arrive at the factory just hours before they are due to be used.
I have a "hunch bordering on a certainty" that that "factor of ten" problem one hears of so often could be quickly solved by pure brute force. Won't happen of course.
Posted by John Weidner at January 13, 2004 12:55 PM | TrackBackI think the cost problem with launch vehicles will be solved by mass flights, not necessarly by mass production. Large airplanes are not really mass produced, but their cost per flight is low because they are in the air almost all the time.
Posted by: Rocket Man Blog at January 13, 2004 04:55 PMYou're right,of course. (Call it mass production of take-offs...)
Posted by: John Weidner at January 13, 2004 06:17 PMThe relationship between widespread usage and mass production is an interesting one, because they influence each other. Consider rockets to Mars. They would become cheaper if mass produced, but would be mass produced only if there was widespread demand for Martian journeys because the trip was cheap.
The chicken and egg problem eventually solves itself by spiraling things in the right direction. The cost of Ariane, Delta and Atlas boosters has declined as demand for commercial earth orbit satellites has increased. It looks to decline some more if a startup called SpaceX, I think, is to be believed.
Yet one cannot make space travel to Mars cheaper a priori without using some revolutionary new technology or biding one's time until the buildup of demand for products based on what essentially current technology lowers the price. Deep space travel will become cheaper in the long run via either route. But we are not there yet.
Posted by: wretchard at January 13, 2004 07:24 PMThe point, to the extant that there was one, of my two rambling posts, was that we could break that egg. Not wait for the slow spiral, but just buy a lot of launches at a low price. Assuming that companies are willing to bid, then space travel would be cheaper right now.
There are lots of reasons why that won't happen— it would put a lot of existing companies out of business, for one.
But we ought to be thinking of ways to break the log-jam.
In the 1920's and 30's we subsidized airlines by paying a high rate for airmail contracts. The result was airlines profitable enough to demand larger and faster planes, planes eventually big enough to be profitable on their own. (Another spin-off was a large aircraft industry just in time for WWII)
That's how we ought to be thinking...
Posted by: John Weidner at January 14, 2004 07:36 AMAll excellent points. Another approach to the chicken and egg problem is to create demand for Mars flights by establishing a colony right away. This could serve the same role as San Francisco did for justifying the cost of the Transcontinental railroad. The plan would be for the first mission to have the ability to return to Earth but only to actually return if resources couldn't be found. If water and a few other things are located then the base becomes a settlement and the word goes out that all are welcome if you can get there.
Posted by: Kelly Parks at January 15, 2004 02:34 PMVery devious! Might work. Though my preference is not to make "top-down" decisions about what our goals in space should be. I'd tend to try to provide cheap access for lots of people to earth orbit--that's the hardest part of getting to space. then let things develop...
Posted by: John Weidner at January 16, 2004 05:45 PM
