james_davis_nicoll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2007-07-14 02:42 pm
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2007-07-14 02:42 pm
Thinking out loud: cheap space flight
The price elasticity of demand for space flight is fairly low, about 0.6. This means, for example, that if the price drops by a factor of four, the demand only goes up by about 2.4. From the point of view of the guys selling rocket services, cheap rockets might be a disaster since total revenues drop if prices go down.
This is the same kind of problem farmers face: it's possible to produce a lot more food less expensively than a century ago but past a certain point, people don't react to cheaper food prices by buying more of it in proportion to the drop in price. The effect on the farmer is that economic survival requires large enterprises. That is, Archer Daniels Midland becomes a viable model and the small family farm stops being one.
This is the same kind of problem farmers face: it's possible to produce a lot more food less expensively than a century ago but past a certain point, people don't react to cheaper food prices by buying more of it in proportion to the drop in price. The effect on the farmer is that economic survival requires large enterprises. That is, Archer Daniels Midland becomes a viable model and the small family farm stops being one.
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It's a good thing when spaceflight advocates get beyond "we'll do it because it's so freakin cool" to think about return on investment at all. (Many never do.)
It would be better if they did not then stop at "the more we launch the less it will cost per launch, and presto! a virtuous circle of expansion will kick in." The first clause is globally true but almost useless, because it tells you nothing about the local first and second derivatives of the cost/volume, price/volume and profit/volume curves.
Those are what investors (other than enthusiast angels like Allen, Bezos, Branson and Musk) care about. If there's too wide and deep a pool of red ink between here and the "knee" where expansion becomes economically self-sustaining, it doesn't matter how pretty the numbers become on the other side.
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The killfile is still churning away. I'll check back later.
2200 articles
Re: 2200 articles
61 articles on impeaching George Bush.
Both Guth and Chomko have new addresses and seem to be getting through the KF. Let me update it. Yeah, there goes another hundred articles.
400 articles left.
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Yes, I'm thinking about the implications of a cheap-ish (read: $200M per launch) commercial launcher in the size range of the Ares-V (120 tons to LEO, 80-90 tons to GEO, 30 tons to low Mars orbit). The price per ton would be low compared to anything else on the market, but there's a fixed minimum cost of entry. Would we end up seeing really big comsat or navsat clusters? TV satellites with hundred kilowatt transmitters, Just Because? Or would it flop, as everyone goes back to their EUR 100M Ariane-5/ECA launches (15 tons to LEO, 8 tons to GEO)?
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I have a dim memory, though, that large launchers may be less suited to the current market than smaller ones.
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Mythbusters in SPAAAACE!
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It would help to set the Wayback Machine for 1997 or so, when bandwidth demand was obviously infinite and growing fast.
Failing that, it would help to send out backhoes and dredges to get rid of the big overhang of dark fiber out there, which TTBOMK is still substantial.
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But it seems like this particular curve would be nigh-impossible to extrapolate from current conditions, if for no other reason than there are currently external limitations which drastically affect the inputs which aren't directly related to the cost of the service. Not only is the curve not linear, I don't know that its higher-order properties can realistically be estimated very far from known values.
For instance, if I wished up an induction launcher out on the desert plains tomorrow, the FAA would STILL tie me in knots for years, limiting my launching ability, running up gazillions in legal bills, etc, etc.
I do agree, however, that the end of the curve that's in the black for anything eminently practical (say, REAL space tourism or long-term habitat) is currently on the far shore of a metaphorical Red Sea. Which makes me sad, because I do not wish to die down here in the smog and the crowds. What we *really* need is really, really cheap power to run lasers to launch external-combustion launch vehicles.
*ducking*
That *would* be a novel thing to run past the FAA, though. "It doesn't HAVE an engine. It just goes up when I flip this here switch. It's magic."
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