Pentagon Study: Power From Space

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Post by Rye »

After reading this, I have to ask, do you have a proper feasibility study to show space power generation is reasonable and economically viable in the way you're coming across? Because, honestly, it really looks like you're ignoring people with actual expertise and knowledge in the field in favour of "armchair generaling."
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Post by Rye »

Shit, that was aimed at Nitram, btw, it was a bit ambiguous.
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Re: Pentagon Study: Power From Space

Post by Commander 598 »

Jadeite wrote:
Xisiqomelir wrote:Gerard O'Neill, will you yet be vindicated?
I will not die happy unless "The High Frontier" becomes reality, or is on its way to it. What people don't realize is that while launch costs may be massive, they can be dramatically reduced with an efficient system (Sea Dragon, for example), or by simply putting the manufacturing facilities into orbit and extracting the resources required from NEAs.

While the set-up costs would still be quite large, the amount of resources and energy available would make it seem like a pittance in comparison. The first nation to get a permanent presence into orbit that can exploit these resources will be like the Spanish in the New World; incredible wealth at their fingertips and they won't even need to slaughter any natives for it.
I concur with this line of thinking.
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Post by General Trelane (Retired) »

Zuul wrote:[Sniping at Nitram]After reading this, I have to ask, do you have a proper feasibility study to show space power generation is reasonable and economically viable in the way you're coming across? Because, honestly, it really looks like you're ignoring people with actual expertise and knowledge in the field in favour of "armchair generaling."
Try reading again, because Nitram's first post opened with:
SirNitram wrote:Of course it's not feasible currently.
What is with these dragon fanboys? First Crown misrepresents Nitram's entire argument based on one single word ("immediate") taken out of context. Now you're trying this?
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Post by dragon »

I think several people in the post misinterpreted a few things. Hell I know I f@#$#$ things up with a few of my posts. I had some serious holes in both my argument and debating skills. Whats really weird is I love space and anything related to space. Hell I must have spent 500 dollars on space related books this year. All I know is I had none of my meds and was having some serious crap going on. Even though I gotta say cold turkey withdrawal from a long term high dosage med is a interesting experience.


But for the person that was requesting some info on sps here you go.

freemars

spacereview

And a good one my intoduction to astronautics professor showed me for a
introduction.
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Post by General Trelane (Retired) »

dragon wrote:I think several people in the post misinterpreted a few things.
There I agree with you.

BTW, I do see that you weren't trying to be a nay-sayer, but your first post really came across that way, which is what triggered the ensuing conflagration.

Thanks for the links.
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Post by Crown »

General Trelane (Retired) wrote:What is with these dragon fanboys? First Crown misrepresents Nitram's entire argument based on one single word ("immediate") taken out of context.
Would you like a straw with that? :roll:
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Post by Rye »

General Trelane (Retired) wrote:
Zuul wrote:[Sniping at Nitram]After reading this, I have to ask, do you have a proper feasibility study to show space power generation is reasonable and economically viable in the way you're coming across? Because, honestly, it really looks like you're ignoring people with actual expertise and knowledge in the field in favour of "armchair generaling."
Try reading again, because Nitram's first post opened with:
SirNitram wrote:Of course it's not feasible currently.
What is with these dragon fanboys? First Crown misrepresents Nitram's entire argument based on one single word ("immediate") taken out of context. Now you're trying this?
What? It sounds like Nitram's saying that dragon's sources are false and he knows better, presumably, based on something authoritative, but I suspect, as I said, that's armchair generaling on his part and he acted all lame in this thread for no reason. I have no idea who dragon is beyond the inward annoyance I have at his name not being capitalised, but his argument is more convincing than Nitram's.
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Post by SirNitram »

While I've conceded the points against me when actually shown evidence and not childish grandstanding(And oh my, is there alot of that; apparently, the new 'in' thing is to rush in after concession and make challenges. Must be a Middle School meme), I don't quite grasp what's 'all lame' about demanding Dragon show his sources, where I was asking him for DR6 to be obeyed. And the same of Crown.

Then again, I've passed puberty, so 'all lame' is no longer part of my vocabulary.

Back to the cough meds for me.
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Post by dragon »

SirNitram wrote:While I've conceded the points against me when actually shown evidence and not childish grandstanding(And oh my, is there alot of that; apparently, the new 'in' thing is to rush in after concession and make challenges. Must be a Middle School meme), I don't quite grasp what's 'all lame' about demanding Dragon show his sources, where I was asking him for DR6 to be obeyed. And the same of Crown.

Then again, I've passed puberty, so 'all lame' is no longer part of my vocabulary.

Back to the cough meds for me.
And you were completely right in your demands, I serious forgot to post evidence per DR6. Even though I agreed with you so I have no idea why I was even arguing :?: Oh well shit happens.
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Post by dragon »

I have no idea who dragon is beyond the inward annoyance I have at his name not being capitalised, but his argument is more convincing than Nitram's.
You are the first person that has ever mentioned that, so since I am usally such a nice guy :D I'll change it.
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Post by Rye »

SirNitram wrote:While I've conceded the points against me when actually shown evidence and not childish grandstanding (And oh my, is there alot of that; apparently, the new 'in' thing is to rush in after concession and make challenges. Must be a Middle School meme)
Hell, I didn't even notice your concession due to the nigh-impenetrable amounts of childish grandstanding you do. I'll admit that error on my part. Fair enough, I'm guessing this means I was correct that you were "armchair generaling" and not speaking from any equivalent sources since you conceded the points raised against you.
I don't quite grasp what's 'all lame' about demanding Dragon show his sources, where I was asking him for DR6 to be obeyed. And the same of Crown.
If I thought that asking for clarification/sources was "all lame" I wouldn't have done it myself. Having contempt for relentless and obvious attempts to shout down and swamp with demands for sources (while providing none yourself) for emotional cripple ego trips is a separate issue.
Then again, I've passed puberty, so 'all lame' is no longer part of my vocabulary.
Well, whatever. When I come across a better term for some jobless geek feeling manly for acting like a cock to protect their arguments founded in personal ignorance, maybe I'll use that.
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Post by SirNitram »

Zuul wrote:Hell, I didn't even notice your concession due to the nigh-impenetrable amounts of childish grandstanding you do. I'll admit that error on my part. Fair enough, I'm guessing this means I was correct that you were "armchair generaling" and not speaking from any equivalent sources since you conceded the points raised against you.
Very nice attempt to turn you not bothering to actually read the posts. It doesn't buy you any points and makes you look like a retard trying to earn points, but it was worth the effort.
If I thought that asking for clarification/sources was "all lame" I wouldn't have done it myself. Having contempt for relentless and obvious attempts to shout down and swamp with demands for sources (while providing none yourself) for emotional cripple ego trips is a separate issue.
Wow. Projection much, kiddo? You stride in here grandstanding against me when I've conceded, fail to read and comprehend my posts before your tirade, and then accuse me of 'shouting down' people. Oh, and these pathetic personal attacks of 'emotional cripple'.
Well, whatever. When I come across a better term for some jobless geek feeling manly for acting like a cock to protect their arguments founded in personal ignorance, maybe I'll use that.
You do know I'm employed, married, and living quite comfortably on my own, right, kid? You do know you just took up grandstanding after failing to read my posts, yet accused me of the same? This level of hypocrisy is truly staggering.
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Post by General Trelane (Retired) »

Crown wrote:
General Trelane (Retired) wrote:What is with these dragon fanboys? First Crown misrepresents Nitram's entire argument based on one single word ("immediate") taken out of context.
Would you like a straw with that? :roll:
Yes, please. And make it quick--my slurpee is melting!

Zuul wrote:What? It sounds like Nitram's saying that dragon's sources are false and he knows better, presumably, based on something authoritative, but I suspect, as I said, that's armchair generaling on his part and he acted all lame in this thread for no reason. I have no idea who dragon is beyond the inward annoyance I have at his name not being capitalised, but his argument is more convincing than Nitram's.
Obviously, I interpreted the exchange rather differently. Here is what it sounds like to me--dragon's first post seemed to be naysaying the idea, and Nitram rebutted that. Dragons countered with a number of appeals to authority, and that's what Nitram was hounding him over. And eventually dragon got it (at the least, he clarified his position such that I have more respect than I had earlier).
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Post by Crown »

General Trelane (Retired) wrote:Obviously, I interpreted the exchange rather differently. Here is what it sounds like to me--dragon's first post seemed to be naysaying the idea, and Nitram rebutted that.
Of course he was naysaing the idea, it's a fucking dream to even think about it. At $10k per kilo, at a launch this should be obvious to anyone with a fucking brain. It takes more than just launching the solar panels in orbit and leaving them there, trusting that everything will be a-o-k you realise? The complexities of this proposal, are so far beyond anything we are actually truely capable of at this time, that anyone with even a fucking basic familiarity with the launch industry would know that this was unfeasible. dragon did nothing wrong with saying that. He certainly didn't deserve SirNitram's err ... post? Arguement? What ever the fuck you want to call it, in reply.
General Trelane (Retired) wrote:Dragons countered with a number of appeals to authority, and that's what Nitram was hounding him over. And eventually dragon got it (at the least, he clarified his position such that I have more respect than I had earlier).
Yeah apparently pointing out something that should be evident to a highschooler requires evidence by our resident TROLLHUNTER ROAR!, but him justifying that this alternative energy source is actually desperately needed in the immediate future (I take it you're having problems with the English language definition of the word too?), isn't neccessary? Puh-lease.

It seems to me that if people expect an intelligent, and evidence based thread, they should, you know, anti up first. Notice that no where did SirNitram justify any of his assumptions/opinions; he put them out there and expected others to refute them with evidence, but oh boy, if you do the same thing, DR6 people! DR6!

Anyway, fuck it. The argument is over, this is nothing more than post game face saving, mud slinging, no point, ego stroking, eye poking bullshit, and yes, I'm just as guilty of that as everyone else, it's over as far as I'm concerned.
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Post by Crown »

Ghetto Edit ::
Crown wrote:Anyway, fuck it. The argument is over, this is nothing more than post game face saving, mud slinging, no point, ego stroking, eye poking bullshit, and yes, I'm just as guilty of that as everyone else, it's over as far as I'm concerned.
I actually do mean that you know, 9 times out of 10, I'll agree with SirNitram 100%, and I'm sure he'll repay the favor in correcting my assholery in the future, in fact I'd wage money on that.
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Post by General Trelane (Retired) »

Crown wrote:Of course he was naysaing the idea, it's a fucking dream to even think about it.
Ah, I see. We shouldn't be allowed to dream. Personally, I like to dream, and fucking dreams are the best.

Crown wrote:At $10k per kilo, at a launch this should be obvious to anyone with a fucking brain.
Yes. Yes it is. Did anyone imply the contrary?

Crown wrote:It takes more than just launching the solar panels in orbit and leaving them there, trusting that everything will be a-o-k you realise?
Still not seeing a point of contention.

Crown wrote:The complexities of this proposal, are so far beyond anything we are actually truely capable of at this time, that anyone with even a fucking basic familiarity with the launch industry would know that this was unfeasible. dragon did nothing wrong with saying that. He certainly didn't deserve SirNitram's err ... post? Arguement? What ever the fuck you want to call it, in reply.
The problem with dragon's post is that he wrote:
dragon wrote:Yeah but there has been studies done that say its current not feasible to do this. I see if I can find them.
That's all he had to offer, and it came right after the OP.

Now let's look at the article itself.
msnbc wrote:The 75-page report, released Wednesday, says new economic incentives would have to be put in place to “close the business case” for space-based solar power systems — but it suggests that the technology could be tested in orbit by as early as 2012.
Clearly, the article is saying that there are technical as well as economic hurdles that need to be addressed. In other words, it's not feasible.
msnbc wrote:But a representative of the solar-power industry was doubtful that space solar power would move from the realm of science fiction into reality anytime soon.

"You've got a lot of technology breakthroughs that you have to make," Mike Taylor, technical services manager for the Solar Electric Power Association, told msnbc.com.
Again, the article is saying that it's not feasible.
msnbc wrote:Charles Miller, president of Space Policy Consulting as well as president and chief executive officer of Constellation Services International, said the key to the plan's success has more to do with economics than physics.
Here it is identifying that economics is the major hurdle.
msnbc wrote:"The issue here is not technology, OK?" said Miller, who was a contributor to the study. "You could figure out how to do space solar power in the '70s. [But] you couldn't close the business case in the '70s. You couldn't close it in the '90s. How do you close the business case? That is the No. 1 question to be answered."
Again with the economics.
msnbc wrote:"The technology has advanced vastly, and the security situation has changed quite a bit, as well as the economic situation," Marine Lt. Col. Paul Damphousse, who took over the study from Smith last month, told msnbc.com. "Those things warranted another look."

Those factors still don't make space solar power attractive for commercial users, but a better case could be made for the Defense Department.
Economics yet again.
msnbc wrote:Even then, the economic equation still doesn't add up, due primarily to the high cost of launching payloads to orbit.
Hmmm, this sounds familiar. I think I heard it somewhere else. . .where was that?

msnbc wrote:But in the near future, the U.S. military could become a potential "anchor tenant customer" for space-generated power, the report says.

"The business case may close in the near future with appropriate technology investment and risk-reduction efforts by the U.S. government, and with appropriate financial incentives to industry," the report says.
I'm beginning to see a recurring pattern here.
msnbc wrote:The report's roadmap calls for ground-based technology development over the next few years, leading up to a demonstration in low Earth orbit in the 2012-2013 time frame, and in geosynchronous orbit by 2017.
Ahh, this must be the fucking dream.
msnbc wrote:Damphousse said the program could use an "incremental approach," starting with experiments to transmit power wirelessly between ground stations placed miles apart. "If you can do that, then you're well on your way to proving you can do it from space," he said.
Wait a minute. . .did he just identify a technological hurdle?
msnbc wrote:A follow-up experiment could try transmitting power from the international space station to Earth.
Oh the audacity to actually suggest a stepwise development program to overcome the technological hurdles. I wonder how much that will cost.
msnbc wrote:Damphousse said the geosynchronous system would require an investment on the order of $10 billion, but would serve as a proof of concept for commercial space power systems.
$10 billion? Just for a proof of concept? That's pretty steep.
msnbc wrote:It appears that technological challenges are closing rapidly and the business case for creating SBSP is improving with each passing year," Rouge said in his foreword to the report. "Still absent, however, is an appropriate catalyst to stimulate the various interested parties toward actually developing a SBSP capability."
So what he's saying is that we don't yet have the technology, it's not economically feasible, and there's a lack of political will.
msnbc wrote:Smith agreed that the hurdles were high. "You put the study out, you spend a couple of weeks getting comments, you step back and take a breath, then you get busy," he said. "We didn't try to candy-coat this. This is going to be a hard, hard, hard, hard problem."
What does he mean by 'hard, hard, hard, hard problem'?
msnbc wrote:No. 1 on his list was reducing the cost of sending payloads into geosynchronous orbit — a cost that is currently estimated at $10,000 per pound or more. "We have got to solve the reusable rocket and space plane problems immediately," Smith said. "It's time to stop just talking about it."
You know, I'm beginning to think it's expensive to launch things into orbit.

When I read the article, it thought it was pretty clear that it wasn't feasible yet but that it was advocating a stepwise approach to address the feasibility issue. And then dragon offers his stunning insight.
dragon wrote:"Yeah but there has been studies done that say its current not feasible to do this. I see if I can find them."
What a gem! My personal reaction was probably very much like Nitram's. Next time, dragon, please wait until you find the studies and then actually present information about the difficulties.

Crown wrote:Yeah apparently pointing out something that should be evident to a highschooler requires evidence by our resident TROLLHUNTER ROAR!, but him justifying that this alternative energy source is actually desperately needed in the immediate future (I take it you're having problems with the English language definition of the word too?), isn't neccessary? Puh-lease.
I do know what immediate means. I also know how to read in context. That was part of a bigger post, and snipping it out to the exclusion of the rest of the post most certainly was a misrepresentation of the argument.
SirNitram wrote:Of course it's not feasible currently. No one's tried to build one!
[. . .]
The feasibility of doing it currently comes from one, simple, fact. You need to get the engineers to work to hammer away at the problem. No technology will ever be feasible without getting some brainy guys together and telling them to put their shoulder into it. It takes prototypes, failed attempts, and effort to make these things feasible.

But no. The idiot brigades ignore these beautiful chances because it's space, and apparently, sitting on Earth with our thumbs up our asses is smarter. Nevermind arrays like this could solve the energy crisis for the immediate future.
Clearly, in the context of the rest of the post, immediate future does not mean tomorrow. Or even a year or two from now. He may have meant near future, but even that is subject to nitpicking.

That he was insulting in his post doesn't change the point he was making.

Crown wrote:Anyway, fuck it. The argument is over, this is nothing more than post game face saving, mud slinging, no point, ego stroking, eye poking bullshit, and yes, I'm just as guilty of that as everyone else, it's over as far as I'm concerned.
That's almost. . .siggable.
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Post by Commander 598 »

I think "unfeasable" is the wrong term to be using. It insinuates that it's a complete and utter pipe dream that will never ever have even the slightest chance of happening, when in fact it's really only a matter of money, actually proving that the pretty damn rock solid theory/calculations/whatever work, and getting an HLV that can lift a decent amount. Least that's the way I read it.

I seem to recall that Japan was working on SPS's at one point...
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology ... 11029.html

Had a plan to put a prototype up by about now, don't know what happened to it though...
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Post by Crown »

General Trelane (Retired) wrote:I do know what immediate means. I also know how to read in context. That was part of a bigger post, and snipping it out to the exclusion of the rest of the post most certainly was a misrepresentation of the argument.
I agree.
SirNitram wrote:Of course it's not feasible currently. No one's tried to build one!
[. . .]
The feasibility of doing it currently comes from one, simple, fact. You need to get the engineers to work to hammer away at the problem. No technology will ever be feasible without getting some brainy guys together and telling them to put their shoulder into it. It takes prototypes, failed attempts, and effort to make these things feasible.

But no. The idiot brigades ignore these beautiful chances because it's space, and apparently, sitting on Earth with our thumbs up our asses is smarter. Nevermind arrays like this could solve the energy crisis for the immediate future.
And what is this 'energy crisis' of which SirNitram refers that will happen in the 'immediate future'? And how could 'arrays like this [possibly] save' us from this 'energy crisis'? (see, I can play the highlight game too)
General Trelane (Retired) wrote:Clearly, in the context of the rest of the post, immediate future does not mean tomorrow. Or even a year or two from now. He may have meant near future, but even that is subject to nitpicking.

That he was insulting in his post doesn't change the point he was making.
What point? That this could save us from the 'energy crisis' set to hit us in the 'immediate future', which energy crisis? And how long? Oil? Well, by yours and SirNitram's own statements, this won't be ready for decades, and that's for a proof of concept. So since we are set to run out of oil in 'decades' and this won't be ready to go in 'decades' as a test phase, how will this 'solve the energy crisis'? Oh yeah, it wont.

What can Bob? Glad you asked Tim, fission. For proof, see my posts.

Or are you saying SirNitram's 'point' was a more verbose exercise than dragon's 'not feasible right now' plus we should still invest in it, because it will be something which we will need sooner or later? If so, how the fuck do you reconcile the highlighted sentence with that? Tell me, I'd really like to know.

And unless you're too idiotic to realise; that was all my and SirNitram's exchange was about; fission will pick up the slack (plus renewables) for many centuries to come. He asked for proof (after accusing me of strawmaning him), I provided, he conceded ... where do you fit in, in all of this again? :wtf:
General Trelane (Retired) wrote:That's almost. . .siggable.
Why? You think me too proud to call a duck a duck? This debate is over, SirNitram conceeded, and hasn't felt like continuing it, the only person interested in doing a post mortem is you, and by my demonstrable inability to let this die, me. So I'm just as guilty as you, but am honest enough to admit it.
General Trelane (Retired) wrote:What a gem! My personal reaction was probably very much like Nitram's. Next time, dragon, please wait until you find the studies and then actually present information about the difficulties.
He provided the said studies he promised (offered freely prior to being 'challenged to do so' by anyone else, for the record), so your point would be .... what? You're not seriously trying to imply that this scenario has never happened on this board before are you; Person X says IIRC 'blah blah, blah' but I don't have the references on me, I'll get them up when I get home/get my books back/etc?

So what rule did he violate? That he was challenged to provide evidence in accordance with DR6 :?: How is that possible? How can you challenge some one to provide evidence when they already said; 'Yeah but there has been studies done that say its current not feasible to do this. I see if I can find them'.

Disconnect much?
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Post by Sikon »

dragon wrote:
The cost of delivering payloads to GEO, however, is about four times that of LEO, running the range of $40,000/kg. So just the launch cost of the SPS would be about $3,300/W or about $3.3 trillion for a 1,000 megawatt (MW) unit suitable for providing the power needs of a city the size of Denver. And that’s just is the launch cost.
Combined with salaries, maintenance, insurance and others the cost could raise as $6 trillion a year.
Which is about 3000 times as much as a nuclear power plant providing the same amount of power.At this give it would give the user a price of $1.14 per kilowatt hour (assuming that nothing is added for profit), over 2000 time the $0.05 per kilowatt-hour that currently prevails in the United State.
So in order for SPS to become competitive, the price of space lift needs to drop by a factor of more than 2000 to 4$.03/kg to LEO or $17/kg to GEO. That’s impossible. The reason I say this is the cost for propellant alone is greater than this.
By Dr. Robert Zubrin (2000) Entering Space, Penguin Puntam INC.
Not everybody is unbiased ...

Zubrin has written good papers on using solar or nuclear power to synthesize fuel using carbon dioxide removed from the Martian atmosphere as the primary feedstock. However, he is utterly a hardline Mars proponent as a priority over using resources elsewhere, perhaps willing to be intentionally misleading to the public.

He imagines $3.3 trillion launch expense for a 1 GW space solar power satellite, apparently assuming it to be 82500 metric tons, assuming $40000/kg to GEO. Considering that is an order of magnitude more mass per GW than some proposals, probably he found a mass figure for some SSPS design intended to be built primarily from cheap extraterrestrial material.

Such might be analogous to the NASA 1975 space station study with its 5500 tons of mass drivers powered by 10800 tons of nuclear power plants launching 10000000 tons of lunar material over 10 years of operation for various purposes, after development of $750/kg (converted to 2006 dollars) space launch.

Under no circumstances would $3 trillion be spent on launching material to GEO, as the launch cost can be reduced vastly below $40000/kg for a relatively tiny portion of that. He puts inapplicable figures out of context under inappropriate, absurd hidden assumptions.

A better estimate for SSPS expense with an appropriate program would be a moderate number of billions of dollars for the launch system and for the power satellite manufacture and launch.

Here's one proposal, as shown by figure 4 within a 1997 NASA study:

Image

The above estimates $6 to $8 billion commercial cost-to-first-power for this space solar power system itself (after a new launch system of not more than a few billion dollars development cost) ... quite different from the three orders of magnitude greater multi-trillion-dollar figures talked about by Zubrin.

Why do the NASA authors estimate $400/kg launch cost as obtainable in the above figure when the Space Shuttle today is two orders of magnitude more expensive at $57000/kg cost to LEO [1], when even the cheapest current launch vehicles such as the Proton are ~ $3000/kg if to LEO ([2], [3])? It is because drastic order-of-magnitude(s) reduction below current launch cost is obtainable if a properly funded and implemented primary goal ... a basic point which will be shown in more detail throughout this post.

Note how $400/kg obtainable cost for massive launch is so utterly different than inappropriately assuming current figures like $40000/kg for sending a handful of small satellites to GEO. It's literally a 100x cost reduction, and it is obtainable.

Current launch vehicles are able to cost figures such as $40000/kg to GEO because there's almost zero launch mass compared to hypothetical large-scale use of space. The current launch market is almost non-existent in absolute terms, being a significant industry in dollar terms solely because of the extreme expense per unit mass. It is merely just a small number of tons per year. In terrestrial terms, the whole annual space transportation market today is like several commercial truckloads.

As an analogy, imagine the expense per unit mass if one built a multi-billion-dollar highway system and truck factories and then just transported several truckloads per year ... more money than that the truckloads' weight in gold could have to be charged to amortize the expense for the whole industry.

In that regard, there is no surprise that the current situation has not led to the development of a large-scale transportation system like airline transport. It has not financially supported the development of radically different launch vehicles.

But a scenario in which many thousands of tons are launched per year would be different by orders of magnitude, and that does support more progress in launch systems.

A more suitable launch system makes the cost to LEO orders of magnitude below $40000/kg, such as more like the hundreds of dollars per kilogram possible with development of the Sea Dragon. Meanwhile, high-Isp solar-powered orbital transport vehicles can make GEO delivery only moderately more expensive than LEO. Such have been considered in various studies over the decades (Boeing's SOTV proposal, etc).

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Here are cost projections for a second concept in the 1997 NASA study:

Image

Again, they consider for launch cost reduction to $400/kg. The implied SSPS mass for a 30 GW system is definitely under 375000 tons, not more than 10000 tons per GW and perhaps much less. But it would be a lot different situation by multiple orders of magnitude than NASA currently sending up at most several shuttle launches a year, each with a payload carried of no more than 23 metric tons at most.

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Crown wrote:This isn't a problem whereby Carter/McKay can 'rewrite an algorithm to boost the Hyperdrive speed by 400%' in a 38min episode. At a $10k per Kilo cost of a launch, this isn't a simple problem, and proposals that could potentially cut this down by an order of magnitude (the first crucial step in even beginning to think we can make this feasible) aren't even on the horizon.
What is required to reduce launch costs per kilo by one to multiple orders of magnitude is very conceivable.

Here's one proposal:

Image
Astronautix wrote:The [Sea Dragon] concept was to achieve minimum launch costs through lower development and production costs. This meant accepting a larger booster with a lower performance propulsion system and higher stage dead weight then traditional NASA and USAF designs. [...] The complete vehicle was 23 m in diameter and 150 m long. [...] The launch vehicle would be fueled with RP-1 kerosene in port, then towed horizontally to a launch point in the open ocean [being rather large for land launch]. [...] After fueling, the tanks at the launcher base would be flooded, and the vehicle would reach a vertical position in the open ocean. Launch would follow. The concept was proven with tests of the earlier Sea Bee and Sea Horse vehicles. [...]

Costs to low earth orbit were estimated to be between $60/kg and $600/kg [depending on factors such as the number of vehicles and launches over which development costs would be amortized] [...]

At burnout the [first] stage had reached a velocity of 1.8 km/second at an altitude of 40 km and a range of 33 km. After separation the stage would impact the ocean 290 km downrange (one alternate was recovery and reuse of the stage). Losses due to gravity and drag were minimized by the high 2:1 thrust-to-weight ratio and low drag losses (deceleration at max q was about 0.2 G’s ) resulting from the large size of the booster.

Stage two had a burn time of 260 seconds and a low constant combustion chamber pressure of 7 atmospheres. The stage achieved a total delta V of 5.8 km/second, shutting down at orbital velocity at an altitude of 230 km and 940 km downrange from the launch point. A significant feature of the concept was the use of an expandable nozzle exit cone. This increased the area ratio of the nozzle from 7:1 to 27:1 when deployed. Initial tests showed considerable promise, but development ceased because of lack of in-house funding. [...]

The design was reviewed with Todd Shipyards, who concluded that it was well within their capabilities, and not too unlike making a submarine hull. 8 mm thick maraging steel was used, similar to the Aerojet 260 inch solid motor of the time. NASA Marshall gave the Aerojet designs to TRW for evaluation. TRW fully confirmed Aerojet's costs and engineering [...]

But this came just as Apollo was being cut back and the Vietnam war was eating an ever greater amount of the US budget. NASA dissolved their Future Projects Branch (dropping almost all the manned Mars landing work). Prospects for Sea Dragon essentially disappeared, and Aerojet could no longer fund it on IR&D.
From here.

If there were a very large number of Sea Dragon launches, with its reusable variant, carried out on a huge enough scale, the result becomes particularly good ... $80 billion total annual operations expense while launching an enormous one million tons per year, for a cost per unit mass delivered to orbit of just $90 per kilogram (converted to 2006 dollars). But even the cost figures for an operation of not quite as huge scale in the above quote are good enough to be a vast, vast improvement over current launch costs, and notice the mention of NASA through TRW (STL) confirming Aerojet's cost estimates there.

It is possible to reduce costs by orders of magnitude below $10000 per kilogram.
Uraniun235 wrote:Barring an unforeseeable revolution in rocket technology, lifting material into Earth orbit will cost thousands of dollars per kilogram, regardless of whether we're chucking five or fifty or five hundred tons per launch.
In general, economy of scale does matter here. In addition to the above discussion, consider the following:

Have $1 billion engineering cost for a new car design and factory spread over a million cars, and it can be a $1000 per vehicle component of the expense. If an entirely new car design was developed and then only a tiny number were produced, the vehicles could cost on the million-dollar level each instead of being inexpensive.

Have $1 billion engineering cost for a new rocket spread over 10 launches, and it can be $100 million per rocket. If instead it was spread over 1000 launches, it could be just a $1 million per rocket component of the total expense.

A situation of low engineering development cost per kilogram launched can apply if the rockets are mass-produced, if the rockets are huge enough for the expense to be amortized over enough mass of payload, if the same rocket is reusable with truly rapid refurbishment allowing it to be launched hundreds or thousands of times like a reusable aircraft, or if there are various variants and combinations of the preceding scenarios. Similar economy of scale can also apply if a multi-billion-dollar accelerator sitting on earth fires many thousands or even millions of projectiles over a period of years, at escape velocity or at nearly orbital velocity.

Of course, the preceding round-number figures are just random examples, not exact for particular systems. But they illustrate one general idea. Scale matters. The preceding is one of multiple factors involved in why current rockets are like throwing a 747 after one flight, exceeding their fuel cost by up to several orders of magnitude, unlike every other form of transportation.

Observe that the economics of the current space program with thousands of dollars cost per kilogram aren't great? Imagine what they would have been if the goal had instead been just to send 100 kg into space per decade instead of a handful of astronauts and a few tons per year. It still would have tended to involve billions of dollars development expense for the whole program, but the result then would tend to be millions of dollars expense per kilogram when the large development costs were amortized over the tiny number of kilograms launched.

Of course, there are not just development costs but also other expenses, such as operations cost with a standing army of ground personnel preparing launches, but some of the same factors apply there.

What is needed is to design vehicles to launch many thousands of tons per year, do it, and make the total cost no longer be hundreds to thousands of times the actual fuel expense.
The Sea Dragon was a launch vehicle of stupendous proportions that Truax had designed back when he was director of advanced development at Aerojet General. The best perk of that high office was the $1 million budget that he could spend any way he wanted to. Truax used it to test his pet theory that the cost of a rocket had [almost] nothing to do with how big the rocket was [if not unnecessarily excessively increasing complexity when designing the larger rocket]. You could make a given rocket just as big as you pleased, and it would cost about the same as one that was about half the size, or even smaller.

This went against conventional wisdom and common sense, but at Aerojet Truax collected enough facts and figures to prove its truth beyond a doubt. Indeed, he'd been assembling the necessary data from the time he'd been in the navy, where he'd had access to all sorts of cost information.

Take Agena versus Thor, for example. These two rockets were identical in every way: each had one engine, one set of propellant tanks, and so forth; the only significant difference between them was size. The Thor was far bigger than the Agena, but the surprise was that the *bigger* rocket had cost *less* to develop.

"I was shocked to discover the Agena cost more than the Thor," Truax said later. "The Thor was between five and ten times as big!"

[...] The same anomaly cropped up again in the case of the two-stage Titan I launch vehicle: the upper stage was *smaller*, a miniature version of the lower stage, yet the smaller stage cost *more* to make.

It seemed irrational, but all of it made sense once you went through the costs item by item. Engineering costs, for example, were the same no matter what the size of the rocket. "You do the same engineering for the two vehicles, only for the bigger rocket you put ten to the sixth after a given quantity rather than ten to the third or whatever," Truax said [not always literally this but with the general idea of time requirements not scaling linearly with mass increase].

The same was true for lab tests. "The cost of lab tests is a function of the size of your testing machine and the size of the sample you run tests on, not the size of the product."

Ditto for documentation, spec sheets, manuals, and so forth. The cost here was a function of the *number* of parts and not the *size* of the parts. "There are absolutely no more documents associated with a big thing than a small thing, as long as you're talking about the same article."

By this time Truax had accounted for a healthy chunk of the total cost of a given launch vehicle. About the only thing that *did* vary directly with a rocket's size was the cost of the raw materials that went into making it, but raw materials constituted only *2 percent* of the total cost of a rocket. "Two percent is almost insignificant!" he said. "And even with raw materials, if you buy a ton of it you get it at a lower unit price than if you buy a pound. And this is especially true of rocket propellants."

So if all this was true, if engineering, lab tests, documentation and so forth didn't determine a launch vehicle's price tag, *what did*? Essentially, three things: parts count, design margins, and innovation. Other things being equal, the more parts a machine had, the more it was going to cost. The more you wanted it to approach perfection, the more expensive it would end up being. And finally, the newer and more pioneering the design, the more you'd end up paying for it.

"We came up with a set of ground rules for designing a launch vehicle," Truax said. "Make it big, make it simple, make it reusable. Don't push the state of the art, and don't make it any more reliable that it has to be. And *never* mix people and cargo, because the reliability requirements are worlds apart. For people you can have a very small vehicle on which you lavish all your attention; everything else is cargo, and for this all you need is a Big Dumb Booster."
From Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition.

If a larger vehicle is designed without the number of parts and complexity increasing as much as the mass increase, the number of parts per unit mass and the cost per unit mass can decrease, with the rocket becoming more simple relative to its size. Raw materials costs increase, but they have been a relatively trivial component of rocket expense, with everything from aluminum to rocket fuel being orders of magnitude less than the total expense of current rockets. See the explanation in the above quote.

About a million dollars was spent on designing and analyzing the Sea Dragon. It is reminiscent of the old Orion project by being well studied but not actually developed due to lack of billions of dollars funding.

The NASA technical reports server is excellent and includes the CR-52817 report in PDF version online here, which is a summary of the Sea Dragon concept, although the nature of this topic is that even the summary is still almost 300 pages long. To give a general idea of the Sea Dragon, here's a few excerpts from the introduction:
NASA-CR-52817 wrote:As presently designed, the vehicle has a gross liftoff weight of 40-million lb and is capable of propelling a payload of 1,100,000 lb to a circular orbit of 306-nm altitude.

[...] A command module of the Apollo type provides the guidance and control and communications functions, and will be be capable of separation, re-entry, and recovery as well as abort functions.

[...] The stage can be recovered and reused with minimal refurbishment.

[...] Each stage uses a simple pressure-fed propellant supply system [with a moderate performance tradeoff but with a small number of parts and little complexity compared to many thousands of parts and extreme cost per unit mass for turbopumps].
For the 1952 Von Braun Mars Expedition, imagining 37000 tons of spacecraft, Von Braun noted "the 5,320,000 tonnes of rocket propellant required for the entire enterprise was only 10% of the amount delivered in the Berlin Airlift and would cost only 4 million dollars." ($0.03 billion in today's dollars)

(Von Braun is frequently referred to as the father of the U.S. space program, later directing the Marshall Space Flight Center throughout the 1960s; in addition to overseeing the development of the Saturn V, he remained an enthusiastic proponent of continued progress, including the nuke-pulse Orion rocket proposal).

Although nobody expected total costs to be quite as low as fuel alone, what has prevented as much being done in space today as predicted in the 1950s is rocket expense being actually literally orders of magnitude above fuel costs.

For example, that's in contrast to airline travel, where reusing each aircraft over up to thousands of flights allows the total expense to be just several times fuel expense.

As one random example, a launch of the Atlas D used about $0.04 million of kerosene and liquid oxygen, converted to today's dollars, while the rocket itself cost $27 million ... a launch cost exceeding fuel expense by three orders of magnitude ([4]).

Consider the space shuttle. When a giant standing army of support personnel is involved yet it has little economy of scale by only launching a moderate number of tons per year, the result is that the total project cost divided by the number of missions is $1.3 billion per mission, $60 million per metric ton of available payload capacity to LEO, $60000/kg to LEO ([5]).

The Space Shuttle was designed to be a "jack of all trades" to fulfill a bunch of different roles, having the huge extra mass of wings for a flexibility in landing sites desired by the military, being a glamorous spaceplane with the "high-tech" extreme complexity and challenging design that fascinates many academics and the public, etc. It has 2.5 million parts ([6]). Even the external tank fuel tank of 27 metric tons weight costs around $55+ million, $2 million per ton.

What if a launch vehicle was designed not with cost as a secondary concern but as the primary concern above all else, focused on achieving economy of scale? What if it is possible to have a fuel tank with acceptable weight without it having extreme complexity and extreme manufacturing cost equivalent to a large percentage of its weight in gold? What if it is possible to have a truly reusable engine, not like the astronomically complex SSME taking months of overhaul between launches, such as to have a vastly simpler pressure-fed design accepting the resulting moderate performance tradeoff in exchange for far quicker refurbishment?

The Sea Dragon analysis indicates that it is possible.

And even smaller scale MCD (minimum cost design) rocket proposals also have obtained far lower projected expense than current launch vehicles, such as $767/kg for a McDonnell Douglas booster concept and $474/kg for a Martin Marietta booster concept (converted to 1993 dollars, [7]), although their figures are less low than the Sea Dragon with less economy of scale.

From the perspective of space industrialization and space colonization, there's little to lose, as the astronomical expense of current launch vehicles makes them useless for such, yet much to potentially gain.

There are even alternatives to using rockets as the primary method for obtaining 8 km/s orbital velocity or 11 km/s escape velocity.

One option is a mass driver. Like the one in the 1975 NASA study mentioned near the start of this post, such can launch many times their own mass cumulatively over years of operation, and that applies on earth as well as on the moon.

One concept is an October 1991 mass driver proposal from Sandia National Laboratories (part of the U.S. DOE), SAND91-1600:UC-706, Hypervelocity Gun Report: Electromagnetic Coilgun.

For a coilgun (mass driver) of 960 meters length, 0.72 meters diameter, angled upwards at 25 degrees built on a mountain slope, firing 1.82 metric ton projectiles at 6 km/s, their cost estimates were $0.41 billion research and development expense and $2.3 billion for the gun and launch facility, plus $0.05 billion operating cost per year, launching 4000 projectiles in the first 7 years of operation.

For launch into LEO, with the projectiles needing additional delta-v to reach 8 km/s orbital velocity, as well as to raise perigee to have an actual orbit not intersecting the ground/atmosphere, the system involved the projectiles having onboard rocket engines (610 kg onboard propellant). Still, such were relatively small with the small amount of delta-v needed. Manufacturing expense per projectile was estimated as $470,000. And further refinement was estimated as allowing to make the cost be less than half as much.

For perspective, a cost on the order of $0.5 million per projectile can be compared to a Space Shuttle launch costing $60 million per ton or to other current launch vehicles costing tens of millions of dollars per ton.

Higher velocity mass drivers are also possible, accepting a tendency towards increased initial capital expense in order to obtain less rocket delta-v requirements. In the end, such can allow less cost per unit mass delivered to orbit, after suitable economy of scale.

Studies indicate that suitable projectiles pass through the atmosphere with acceptable ablation of a heat shield nose, e.g.:
One investigation wrote:The theory of ablation in a dense atmosphere had received recent attention in connection with the outer planet probe program, and two members of the Ames team applied the resulting software to the problem of the Earth launcher: Chul Park and Stuart Bowen. They found, much to everybody's surprise, that an Earth-launched vehicle [projectile] would not have to be prohibitively large to survive: a vehicle the size and shape of a telephone pole could be launched out of the Solar System with a loss of only about 3% of its mass, and 20% of its energy to the atmosphere.
[...]
A reference design telephone pole launcher would have the specifications shown below.

Vehicle: Telephone Pole Shaped, Mass of 1,000 kg
Launch Velocity: 12.3 km/s
Velocity at Top of Atmosphere: 11 km/s (escape velocity)
Kinetic Energy at Launch: 76 x 10^9 joule
Ablation Loss, Carbon Shield: 3% of mass
Energy Loss: 20%
[...]
Charging Time From 1,000 MW Power Plant: 1.5 minute
[...]
The energy cost of the launch would only be about 65 cents per pound, but amortization of capital would add 10 to 20 dollars per pound, even if the launcher were used continuously, day and night, every 12 minutes.
From here.

On the order of $10/kg would be not bad compared to figures discussed here for current rockets like $10000/kg to LEO or $40000/kg to GEO...

A mass driver would still be a project costing around the billion-dollar level at least. However, the payoff could be great.

It is more or less automatic for a mass driver operating on sufficient scale to have vast cost reduction compared to current rockets. For example, consider the earlier example of a terrestrial mass driver launching a 1 metric ton projectile as often as every 12 minutes. Over the first 10 years of operation, that would amount to 440000 metric tons launched. Such could not cost the current ~ $40000/kg to GEO and to escape velocity unless it cost 440000 metric tons * 1000 kg/ton * $40000/kg or $18 trillion.

And it would be absurd for the mass driver to cost 18000 billion dollars. Rather, it would cost orders of magnitude less, such as around a billion dollars being sufficient for a nuclear power plant running it and not many billions for other expenses. The net result is that is such a mass driver would be orders of magnitude less expensive than current rocket launch costs per kilogram launched.

And that is quite understandable.

As fundamentally a giant linear electric motor on earth, such has no reason to be subject to either the failure rate of current rockets nor the excessive expense that results from them being like throwing a 747 airplane away after a single flight. Unlike rocket components, with the launcher not having to fly, no parts are subject to the need to make them lightweight under high stress with low safety factors that drives up rocket component costs.

It's like the difference between an astronomically expensive space shuttle engine light enough to fly versus how a lower performance test stand engine can be comparably simple, orders of magnitude cheaper, and easily reusable. For example, see How to Design, Build, and Test Small Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engines if curious about what is meant here ... performance requirements drive cost in engineering.

Incidentally, if space tourism develops enough, leading to more launch system development, nearly the ultimate system possible someday would be a maglev accelerator or mass driver such as tens of kilometers length, accelerating a rapid-refurbishment reusable rocket to multiple km/s at an acceptable number of g's.

The rocket provides the remaining delta-v to LEO. Such combined systems take advantage of the exponential nature of the rocket equation to provide great benefit, just like it matters much to have 0.3 km/s or 0.4 km/s from earth's rotation by launching a rocket east. Given enough development, one day airline-like cost only several times energy and fuel expense could be obtained, only a few thousand dollars per passenger transported to orbit. Remember that 30 MJ per kilogram to LEO before inefficiencies is like 9 kilowatt-hours of electricity before inefficiencies, and a kilowatt-hour of electricity costs only around $0.05 for industrial users today. Of course, that's more of a distant future possibility, not like the more near-term possibilities discussed previously, since it would require more advancement.

In the meantime, there are lesser but still highly beneficial alternatives to current rockets that could reduce costs much compared to current prices, such as the Sea Dragon previously described.
Ender wrote:I have the book he is talking about, and it actually has a section in it dealing with this and how the entire industry is currently geared specifically against the development of heavy lifters. It was a real eyeopener.
Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:The entire industry didn't want to develop heavy lifters to protect a cash cow?
Pretty much, yeah. It sounds implausible as all hell until you realize how few companies are making rockets, and how massive that cash cow is.
Space launch vehicles were originally derivatives of ICBMs, designed with the military goals of absolute minimum weight, maximum performance, and almost no regard for cost, with cost being a minor consideration compared to other goals. The MCD (minimum cost design) proposals mentioned earlier were an example of an alternative design possibility if instead minimizing cost became the primary goal above all else.

There is a lack of sufficient financial incentive for large aerospace corporations to spend enough funds on developing much cheaper launch vehicles. As a random example with arbitrary figures, imagine launching 10 tons a year now at $10000/kg to get $0.1 billion a year revenue. Try to develop a cheap launch system and plan to charge $1000/kg or $100/kg, and that same 10 tons per year would only give just $0.01 billion or $0.001 billion annual revenue.

Get a larger share of the total market after cost reduction, reach a few times more launch volume, such as tens of tons a year, and it is still far less than the original revenue. Such wouldn't work as a business plan for paying back billion-dollar expense for a new launch system. Of course, it is possible for the situation to be different through vastly increased demand occurring when prices are reduced, but counting on that to a substantial degree requires more than pessimistic, conservative business planning focused on short-term financial costs versus returns.

And no billion-dollar projects are usually financed by private investors aside from ones with obvious returns based on established technology, like building a dam, an automobile factory, etc. There are too few entities with that kind of funds, and those which have them don't invest them in something perceived as risky.

There may have been some cases where proliferation concerns about intercontinental-range ballistic missile hardware becoming inexpensive and easy to build by third-world nations, if cheap and simple orbital launch vehicles were developed, have led to governments not being particularly interested in their development. But overall the preceding is the most fundamental aspect of the situation.

Lack of funds is always a problem for private industry.

The major European aerospace company EADS has estimated that they could build a system launching suborbital space tourists for $200,000, which would be a vast factor of 150 price reduction by two orders of magnitude compared to the current (orbital) space tourist tickets of Space Adventures for $30 million each. Of course, that's suborbital rather than orbital, but, even at the suborbital scale, they envision relatively low cost through reusable vehicles "refurbished quickly enough to fly once per week." The problem, as usual, is lack of funds. The engineers at EADS performing the study estimate that 1 billion euros development expense would be needed from investors, and, given past history, it is doubtful whether or not such will actually be obtained.

It's no happenstance that the X-prize required the winner to launch their reusable spacecraft twice within 2 weeks (as was managed by the Space Ship One craft in 2004). With the rapid turnaround requirement, the foundation wanted to avoid a situation like that with the Space Shuttle where an astronomically complex launch vehicle is only technically reusable rather than reusable in an useful sense, having so excessive months of refurbishment time and expense as to compare poorly in cost to expendables. Of course, that's just suborbital, but the degree to which there is innovation is not bad when considering that the X-prize was just $0.01 billion, relatively tiny in this context. Those working on space tourism operate on a shoestring budget today, but, if inexpensive suborbital space tourism is developed, it could lead to similar rapid-refurbishment reusable methods being used to develop inexpensive orbital tourism and space launch as well.

As for NASA, the same U.S. Congress which decides energy policy is the same one which decides space policy, and they don't accomplish better long-term planning on the latter than the former, with rather politics determining what is done. Some fascinating proposals have been developed by various groups of engineers at NASA performing studies, but they haven't been funded by Congress.

Besides, the general public does not even realize that inexpensive space access is possible, most people being still at the level of assuming that rockets must be their current astronomical expense due to fuel cost. They definitely don't support massive space industrialization or colonization, just unmanned space probes, flag and footprint missions, etc.

Back when space colonization and space industrialization concepts like the 1975 NASA space station study attracted a little notice, here's one sample illustration, a comment from Senator William Proxmire:
It's the best argument yet for chopping NASA's funding to the bone. As Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee responsible for NASA's appropriations, I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy.
Aside from other limiting factors, governments other than the U.S. have a relatively small amounts of funding for space anyway. For example, the Russian space agency (RKA) manages relatively much compared to its small funding, but it is just equivalent to around a single billion dollars a year total, not a tenth of NASA funding and also allocated between various different purposes, which do not involve reduced space launch cost as the primary goal above all else.

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There is a chicken-and-egg problem. Reducing launch cost per kilogram tends to require increased launch volume to amortize developing the launch systems needed. But large-scale applications of space involving launching that much require launch costs per kilogram to be reduced first.

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Incidentally, the point being made here is not that space solar power is the fastest energy solution. It isn't. Nuclear power can be quite inexpensive, works well, and has a shorter deployment time. But SSPS systems are a possibility for future development, such as after space tourism leads to reduced launch costs if such occurs. The most important point made here is that current launch costs are unnecessary. Space hardware doesn't have to cost multiple times its mass in gold. Technological solutions are well understood and within development range if only funded.

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By the way, there is an interesting aspect to the Pentagon study. The earlier NASA study was trying to have a solar power satellite system competitive with electricity from the domestic utility grid, but the recent article on the Pentagon study points out that electricity in remote regions can be an order of magnitude more expensive and more valuable per kilowatt-hour.

As a result, the type of SSPS they envision could have such specialized market niches even without being directly competitive with large power plants like nuclear power infrastructure. Rather, it might compete more directly with small inefficient diesel-fueled generators for remote areas running off imported fuel (which can have extreme cost per kilowatt-hour).

Like almost every other major use of space, from space tourism to getting precious metals from asteroids to computer chip manufacturing in near perfect vacuum, such requires launch cost reduction first but has interesting potential in that event.
MSNBC wrote:The report — which was done on an unfunded basis and took advantage of online collaboration with outside contributors — notes that several factors have changed in the decade since NASA took its most recent in-depth look at the space power concept (PDF file). Today's best solar cells are about three times as efficient as they were in 1997, while crude-oil prices are roughly three times as high. And in the post-9/11 era, energy security has taken on far more importance.

"The technology has advanced vastly, and the security situation has changed quite a bit, as well as the economic situation," Marine Lt. Col. Paul Damphousse, who took over the study from Smith last month, told msnbc.com. "Those things warranted another look."

Those factors still don't make space solar power attractive for commercial users, but a better case could be made for the Defense Department. The U.S. military pays a premium for its power in the battlefield, when you consider the cost of shipping oil out of the Middle East, refining it, then shipping the fuel back to the combat zone and burning it in electrical generators, Miller said. All that brings the current power price tag to $1 or more per killowatt-hour, compared with 5 to 10 cents on the domestic market, the report says.

[...] The commercial systems discussed in the past would deliver 5 to 10 gigawatts of power. In contrast, the Pentagon study calls for military systems providing 5 to 50 megawatts of continuous power — roughly a thousandth as much.

[...] The report's roadmap calls for ground-based technology development over the next few years, leading up to a demonstration in low Earth orbit in the 2012-2013 time frame, and in geosynchronous orbit by 2017. However, the report makes no commitment for funding such a demonstration. Smith said that would be up to other agencies — such as the Pentagon's own Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or NASA, or the proposed Advanced Research Projects Energy.
Unfortunately, funding is always the issue with studies like this. Historically, nobody ever funds them sufficiently, and the last part of the above quote is unlikely to really happen beyond at most a partial project that gets its funding cut before full completion.
MSNBC wrote:Damphousse said the program could use an "incremental approach," starting with experiments to transmit power wirelessly between ground stations placed miles apart. "If you can do that, then you're well on your way to proving you can do it from space," he said.

A follow-up experiment could try transmitting power from the international space station to Earth. "I actually met with a bunch of folks at NASA Ames last week ... and they warmed to the idea immediately," Damphousse said.

Damphousse said the geosynchronous system would require an investment on the order of $10 billion, but would serve as a proof of concept for commercial space power systems.

Smith said such systems could eventually deliver electricity to places that lack the infrastructure for traditional power transmission grids, and turn the decades-old dream of wireless power into reality. "It's using space for an actual tradeable commodity — not for a rover on Mars, which is also necessary — but actually delivering a commodity that can be given to anybody in the world," he said.

[...]

No. 1 on his list was reducing the cost of sending payloads into geosynchronous orbit — a cost that is currently estimated at $10,000 per pound or more.

[...]

Miller noted that the energy market amounts to $1 trillion a year market, and said the future payoff could be at least as huge as the present challenges.

"If space solar power takes off, everything that came before — Apollo, the shuttle, the station, all together — will look like a college science project," Miller told msnbc.com. "It's that much bigger."
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Crown
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Post by Crown »

Sikon wrote:<snip>
:shock:

First thanks for all the links and information, and it will take me a good long while to read them all. Second: :shock: Third, wow.
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