Henry
I'll throw my 2 cents in here.
$20B should be an upper limit for spaceplane/launch vehicle development. My
estimate is $14B to $17B. A reusable orbital launch vehicle may or not be an
SSTO but it needs to be 100% reusable. My rational for the estimate is Boeing
spent $1 Billion to develop the 747 with first flight in 1969. Today, that's
roughly $7B. Rough order of magnitude is double Boeing's cost; than add 20%
for cost overruns. I can see why some people might argue $20B to $40B; Boeing
Dreamliner is reported to have cost $30B to develop. However, SpaceX could hit
100% reusable with a reusable upper stage.
On Monday afternoon, I spoke to freshman mechanical and aerospace engineering
students at the University of Dayton on the subject of the Engineering
Profession. In my "lessons learned" section, I discussed bias. Yep, we all
got them. As an example, I discussed my bias about what a reusable orbital
launch vehicle would like. My long held view was a reusable launch vehicle
would be "aircraft like": wings, landing gear, etc, and of course a pilot.
(full disclosure, I hold a commercial pilot rating and am engineer). In
preparing for the talk, I realize this bias when as far back as my childhood
looking at Pratt & Coggins book "By Spaceship to the Moon". It's 1950
technology but the science is solid for the time. In it, there is a nice
drawing of a large winged vehicle, they called it a supply ship. The vehicle
was taking off horizontally with a rocket powered sled. My five year old self
looked at that and thought, "that's neat". I now understand the technical,
developmental, political, and financial issues with these sorts of system
configurations but the bias was implanted. Now Space X comes along and shows
how recovering an intact undamaged first stage can return a profit. Biases
do die hard, but it's hard to argue with success.
Take Care and Be Safe,
Rick Wills
Still waiting for Buck Rogers
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Henry Vanderbilt
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 1:54 PM
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: SSTO fuels (was Re: SSTO)
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.