Victor_D
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It's a conspiracy! :shifty:
Lords of Kobol, give me strength...
Let me quote Zubrin, OK?
Yet modern-day launch costs make no sense. (...) [L]et's assume that rockets provide the only viable launch technology. Current-day rockets , such as the kerosene/oxygen fuelled Atlas, can deliver about 1 percent of their takeoff mass to orbit--most (about 90 percent) of the remaining pass is propellant.
The cost of of a kerosene/oxygen propellant mixture (at 3:1 oxygen/kerosene mixture ratio) is about $0.20/kg. Since the propellant consumed during launch has 90 times the mass of the payload delivered, the propellant cost of sending a mass to orbit is about $18/kg. Assuming a total system operating cost of six times the propellant cost (about double the total cost/fuel ratio of airlines), the resulting price of a rocket ride to orbit would be in the neighbourhood of $100/kg, or $10,000 for a 100-kg passenger. There is no fundamental reason why space-launch prices in this range cannot be achieved.
Thus, we see that the reason it costs so much today to do anything in space has little to do with the laws of physics and engineering.
Then he goes on describing how the lack of competition among the large US aerospace companies and government restrictions keep the prices artificially high.
I didn't check his numbers, but I assume he knows what he's talking about, he worked for one of those large aerospace companies after all. Anyway, he made a lot of assumptions. So, let's say he was wrong by an order of magnitude - then the price should be $1000/kg, still about 5-10 times lower than it is today.
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And we're talking about space launch technology that is 60 years old now, it's not as if we were developing new engines all the time and needed to spread the costs. Yet we've moved nowhere. No wait, I take it back. If you take a good look at the prices, you can see that the last time prices fell was when the Eastern launchers began competing with the Western ones for commercial launches. Imagine what would happen if the market was deregulated - if the US government allowed US companies to launch all their satellites on Russian or Chinese launchers and the other governments did the same, and if even the defence industry was allowed to launch their spy sats on the cheapest available launchers. Maybe then we'd have prices in the neighbourhood of $1000/kg instead of $10,000/kg. In a situation where the U.S. Air Force is willing to pay $20,000/kg or more just to have their payloads launched by a U.S. company, there's little wonder the prices are stubbornly refusing to go down.
So, anybody can scoff and mock others with funny smileys and derisive comments screaming bloody conspiracy. Personally, I don't see any reason to believe that the current-day launch prices are the best the market can provide. There are multiple factors which clearly distort the market and contribute to the discrepancy, and pointing them out is perfectly legitimate. If you're too lazy to actually think about the problem, then you better keep quiet.
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