Rick:
Productivity gains in the aerospace sector have pretty much matched
inflation over the period since the 747 was developed; accordingly, a large
passenger aircraft should cost—in today’s dollars—pretty much the same as a
747 cost in then dollars. $1 Billion by your estimate.
The other glaring issue here is that a subsonic aircraft is not comparable
to a Mach 25 spaceship; trying to use the one to estimate the cost of the
other guarantees underestimating.
Bill
On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 1:42 PM Rick Wills <willsrw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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 lessanother.
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
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