I like the way you think. You vehemently defend super-low prices and SSTOs for several posts, then you immediately shift over to low prices and Big Dumb Boosters.
Look, I was also a kind of... Big Dumb Booster proponent, person... thing. But again, you have limits. You can't make your booster too
dumb, or the thing will blow up a good portion of the time* and that will be a bad thing. You do, just like with the maintainance and refurbishment of an SSTO, put effort and cost into inspections and quality. The way you crack down on failure rates- at least the way failure rates have been cracked down on historically, is by having tight tolerances and intensive quality control. That of course costs money.
The SpaceX vehicles are not BDBs. They are also made of advanced materials, they use advanced construction techniques, and presumably quite a bit of money and effort is put into their inspection and quality. Maybe they have some aspects which are BDB-like, but there is no reason to believe that they will suddenly super-revolutionise spaceflight (sounds a lot like the argument against Skylon).
Maybe you can reduce launch costs, if you go for pressure fed stuff, simple engines, perhaps if you make use of solids... but you will always have to have high quality on the vehicle, more intensively in some places than others, but it'll still be there, and you'll still have to fork up a good amount of money to prevent your launcher from regularly blowing up.
And you won't help with large payloads, because while larger vehicles might have lower cost/kg, the first problem is that nobody wants to (forseeably) launch huge payloads, and the second problem is that the low flight rates are undesirable in terms of economies of scale.
Ah, Sea Dragon was a lovely idea. No more pads or crawlers of VABs... and then you realise that the thing has to be put together in a lagoon, towed out to sea and launched in the waves... I went through a phase when I was fascinated with Sea Dragon, and I couldn't avoid thinking about these problems even then.
In the end the ideal "BDB" wouldn't be very big, and it probably wouldn't be very dumb, either. It would be a complex attempt to reduce simplicity. It is very easy to make something complex, but
very difficult to make something simple and elegant.
And even then, you might not achieve magic-low costs.
*This was the concept behind the Aquarius launch vehicle, sea-launched, pressure-fed SSTO... one in three launches was predicted to fail, but this was seen as acceptable. Of course, payloads were bulk goods such as food, clothing, or propellant, so the loss of a payload was not deemed to be a severe problem.
This argument could have held some water 50 years ago. It doesn't now. We've been launching things to space for many decades, building big dumb rockets isn't anything new.
The fact that we've been launching stuff into space for 50 years doesn't stop the physical challenge of doing so from existing.
In any case, as I said - even if Zubrin's estimate was an order of magnitude off, it would still result in a price of about $1000/kg. Interestingly, that's the price Musk plans to achieve once his big dumb rockets start flying in sufficient numbers.
And a four-fold to five-fold cost reduction is far more plausible than a ten-fold one.
That's a strawman. My argument is simply that there is no justification for today's prices per kilogram to LEO. I contend that the prices are high not because of any physical or engineering limits, but because the environment in which the launch companies operate discourages cost reduction - it actually motivates these companies to make their launch vehicles costlier because that way they can get more money from government contracts.
Of course there is justification for (a good portion of) the costs of today's launch vehicles! It is very technologically difficult to launch stuff into orbit.
Now, I agree with you that the
prices are higher than they would otherwise be due to the launch environment. What I don't agree with is the idea that most of these costs are entirely purposeless and engineered for profit, without any regard to the technical difficulty of spaceflight.
Maybe for example if you change your technological stance, you could get things cheaper... but there are limits, and this of course is also a new avenue that cannot be pursued instantly and cheaply via magic.
There is nothing about that that warrants accusations of spreading conspiracy theories - it's simple self-interest.
And I can say it is in the self interest of the US government to hide the truth about aliens from the public... :uhh:
