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The only way to get a company in a free market economy to reduce cost of access to space is to increase flight volume. We need more frequent flights. How do you pay for a high flight frequency? More government programs will reduce the per flight cost somewhat, but not to the point it becomes affordable for average people. Many here are already complaining about the cost of worth of the International Space Station, so another such NASA project to increase flight rate would get even greater criticism. We need a hotel in LEO, asteroid mining, and other commercially profitable destinations.
That’s what I think were going to have to do to get any more than flag planting missions off the ground, mass production. Of rockets, of habs, ect.
I think what we need to do is get contractors and governments together to develop a "kit" consisting of the surface, orbital, and transit habs, surface operations equipment(rovers, mini-refineries, ect) and the transit craft with the LEO facilities to support it, and all the launchers to send it up. In other words, everything needed to send 12-18 people to the surface (be it Luna or Mars) and once there use local resources to build a permanent, self-sufficient base, and then swap out the crews every couple years (for a Mars mission anyways).
Now that first mission might cost $50b to develop, and another $50b to build and launch, but when the mission is accomplished, you've got a proven "system of systems" that can then be mass produced, with interchangeable parts that can operate from mission to mission and support one and other. And as more of these kits are built, construction methods will be refined and cost will go down because of both that, and simple volume. The first kit might cost $50b, but the third might cost $30b, the sixth $20b, and so on, until even the smaller countries of Europe might be able to swing it. To the point were a group of large companies could get together and buy one.
By that time hundreds of launchers, rovers, and habs will have been constructed, and the cost of each one individually will plummet, making missions outside of main effort, missions as mundane as simple communications satellite launch, very cheap. Relatively speaking.
Kits of that type of habitat might be good for laboratory work or scientific work or for proofing a design for small numbers of people and even for some industries, but ultimately it comes down to government building massive infrastructures for a common good. If we go with just those types of habitats we will have a dysfunctional collection of structure that can't be supported and will ultimately be too expensive to maintain. The first habitat might be OK, but then we need to concentrate on the basic infrastructure like air ports, trains, subway, road system on earth. It generally the state, City and National government that build most of that infrastructure. so we need to be thinking of some form or quasi form of government that can fill that roll or group people that can serve in that roll.
Larry,
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Now that first mission might cost $50b to develop, and another $50b to build and launch, but when the mission is accomplished, you've got a proven "system of systems" that can then be mass produced, with interchangeable parts that can operate from mission to mission and support one and other. And as more of these kits are built, construction methods will be refined and cost will go down because of both that, and simple volume. The first kit might cost $50b, but the third might cost $30b, the sixth $20b, and so on, until even the smaller countries of Europe might be able to swing it. To the point were a group of large companies could get together and buy one.
You're going to have to keep cost lower than that. Congress is still scared the price will end up being the full $450 billion estimate from the 90-day report. Cost creep before we even start to develop hardware will only convince them that'll happen. Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct mission plan was estimated at $30 billion for 7 manned missions to Mars; that's $20 billion for development plus construction, launch and operation of the first mission, then $10 billion for all the costs of the following 6 missions. Increasing the first mission from $20 billion to $100 billion will only result in it being cancelled. If you want private industry to pay for it instead of NASA, cost will have to be lower yet.
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Now that first mission might cost $50b to develop, and another $50b to build and launch, but when the mission is accomplished, you've got a proven "system of systems" that can then be mass produced, with interchangeable parts that can operate from mission to mission and support one and other. And as more of these kits are built, construction methods will be refined and cost will go down because of both that, and simple volume. The first kit might cost $50b, but the third might cost $30b, the sixth $20b, and so on, until even the smaller countries of Europe might be able to swing it. To the point were a group of large companies could get together and buy one.
You're going to have to keep cost lower than that. Congress is still scared the price will end up being the full $450 billion estimate from the 90-day report. Cost creep before we even start to develop hardware will only convince them that'll happen. Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct mission plan was estimated at $30 billion for 7 manned missions to Mars; that's $20 billion for development plus construction, launch and operation of the first mission, then $10 billion for all the costs of the following 6 missions. Increasing the first mission from $20 billion to $100 billion will only result in it being cancelled. If you want private industry to pay for it instead of NASA, cost will have to be lower yet.
The problem is, it wouldn't make any difference if it creaped the other even. Let take the ISS as an example:
We need a hundred build the ISS.
It takes three people to maintain it.
It take about five billion dollars to supply it from Earth use both the space shuttle and to run the ISS.
That assuming that we have six people on the ISS as it was originally intended.
Using this as our standard or some reasonable fact simallly or some kind of a standard. We going to be sending twelve people to either the Moon or Mars.
Even assuming that we only spend fifty billion dollars for it and we build ten of them at that price, that five hundred billion dollars. Even if it goes down to twenty billion dollars a habitate for the next ninty we will still be spending one triillion and eight hundred billion.
We will still have three people maintaining each of those one hundred habitates or we will have three hundred people just doing maintaince. You would also have to duplicate everything ten time or even a hundred times for everything you do vs having one big complex. You would have a thousand space suit instead of a few hundred. A hundred air locks instead of maybe just ten, etc.
Even if our resupply drop down from five billion to 2.5 billion it would still cost 250 billion dollars a year to just maintain the supplies from Earth. Even if the need to either resupply the moon or Mars drop to 1/5 of the ISS with three people vs 12 people for either the moon or mars it would still be one billion a year per habitate or one hundred billion dollars for about 1,200 people.
Larry,
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Uh, MR, you know that $50Bn round figure is mostly development costs, right? Each copy will probobly cost only like 1/5th of that.
The scale that you keep talking about is silly too. No way will we be throwing away ~100 HAB modules for crew transport nor tend farms of them on the surface, only a few HABs will be needed to build the initial base and a few more years to deploy REAL reuseable vehicles.
A base with a large perminant volumes and few large pieces of machinery can be tended by a reasonable number of people, instead of having dozens of HABs strung together or hundreds of expendable rockets or somthing.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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