[AR] Re: SSTO fuels (was Re: SSTO)
- From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 11:54:08 -0700
On 2/13/2018 7:14 PM, William Claybaugh wrote:
I have seen that paper. For something as technically (much less
economically) difficult as SSTO it seems a little light: even much more
detailed analysis doesn’t often lead to much confidence that I ought to
recommend dropping $20 or $40 billion on one solution over another.
My two cents worth: If fielding a useful SSTO space transport is costing
you $20 to $40 billion, you're doing something very wrong.
That's the sort of price tag you get by farming it out to the existing
cost-plus government aerospace houses, supervised by an existing
high-overhead government R&D bureaucracy.
At the end of that process you may or may not get a useful space
transport, but lots of people will have had decades of low-stress
white-collar job security. Fine if that's your objective - typically if
you're a Congressman and they're your constituents - if you actually
care about building useful space transportation, not so much.
Done as previously described, build your own private team up doing
methodical risk-reduction then development (as with SpaceX and Blue) it
should be perhaps a tenth of that.
Henry V
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