Markets for lower-cost transportation can be forced, if you have deep
pockets (or some other way to stay solvent) to survive a few years of
lag while the market catches up to your newly available lower-cost
capability.
Elon's already doing this, and Bezos is well on his way - kudos to both
- for the first big expansion in the access market, the one CSTS
predicted happens around a (mid-nineties dollars) $600/lb.
That's $1000/lb in 2018 by the official CPI. I'd guess actually 1.5X or
so higher, as aerospace dollars seem to inflate faster than CPI.
Sounds from your musings here as if your hypothetical SSTO sponsor may
be looking at where the next big space transport market breakpoint after
this will happen, then.
I would not be surprised if another major round of new & interesting
things starts happening in space somewhere between one and two hundred
(2018 dollars) per pound to orbit.
That's an educated guess at the next breakpoint being roughly a tenth of
the current breakpoint, which in turn was roughly a tenth of the going
1990's-dollars rate at the time of the CSTS study.
People who wait for "in a century or so" will be left in the dust by
someone who plans effectively to make it start happening in a decade or
so, is my view.
Henry V
On 2/14/2018 6:15 PM, William Claybaugh wrote:
I find myself wondering what an advisor would have said if Henry II (of England) had asked for an iPhone: is SSTO a technology that is more economic in future rather than today?
Because multiple analyses show SSTO at a limit price around $50 per Kg., it seems likely to be the preferred answer in a century or so when demand has reached levels that justify that solution. The question I’m—in part—trying to answer is whether a significant investment today can move forward the time when SSTO flight rates are justified.