On Mon, 9 Dec 2002 21:41:28 -0500, "Sean Patrick Daly"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I'm floored at the idea that space access should only for those who have
>fully educated themselves (by school or self) on the intricate workings of
>the launch vehicle that would carry them.
I hope that's not what I said, because it certainly isn't what I
meant. The people I consider irrelevant are the people who think
Apollo was a hoax: let's face it, it just doesn't take much research
*or* much brains to figure out that yes, it really happened.
>Space tourism should be exactly what it is... Tourism. If you can finance a
>$400,000.00 house, why not a trip to orbit?
Can you finance a world cruise? A trip to orbit is just a high
altitude world cruise, after all.
>Lets see, $400,000.00 loan at 7% for 30 years comes out to about $958,036.60
>(Not too shabby) ($2,661.21 per month is affordable for upper middle class).
$2661/month for 30 years for one vacation is upper middle class?
That's 80% more than my house! And I can live in my house for those
30 years. I want *your* salary. :-)
>You take reservations, start the loan process and deposit the down payment
>and future monthly payments in escrow. They then get put in line and
>train/fly in the order in which they signed up. (Full fare paid up front
>clients would fly first) After flight, they continue to pay their monthly
>payment until either the loan is paid off, or they pay the principal.
Eh? How do you foreclose, if they fly before they pay off the loan?
>Lenders insurance would help with those who default (and if they have not
>flown yet, they lose all money paid thus far).
Your lender's insurance premiums are going to be, um, sky high.
>If you could make room for 12, you would get a minimum of $4,800,000.00
>(assuming paid in full passengers). If you could keep the costs of training
>and flight operations to under $800,000.00 per flight, you could walk away
>with $4,000,000.00 ($10,696,439.20 if they all financed full term).
I think you have to figure just the $4MM. The other $6.7MM would be
considered offset opportunity cost, no net profit. You wouldn't even
see the $6.7MM unless you financed it yourself, which you probably
wouldn't; are you are a space tourism operator, or a bank? :-)
But 12 passengers at 200 pounds apiece is 2400 pounds. If you're
flying 2400 pounds for $800,000, you're at $333.33/pound, which is
about 30 times better than the American competition for manned
spaceflight, and several times better than anything else going, manned
or unmanned. I think that's a bit much to hope for. And you have to
fly at less than six times that to break even. That's $2000/pound.
Tough for manned flight - very tough - but maybe possible.
The biggest problem in financing a space tourism venture, it turns
out, is the recurring cost of paying off the R&D debt. So they key to
success is to keep your R&D debt low or zero. Hm, who do we know who
is doing that? :-)
>I won't argue that most of these people are not space enthusiasts, but they
>have $$$ and would love the bragging rights that would come with an orbital
>adventure of some sort.
If you could sell it the way Buzz Aldrin does in his novels, this
approach would work, no question. But even Buzz can't sell it the way
his characters do, alas.
>Remember this... The technology that you are all using to trade messages on
>this list at one point was completely useless to the masses. Before there
>was product, there was no market.
There's a big difference between "useless to the masses" and "no
market." There was a market; it was DOD, who wanted a robust
internetwork which could survive WW III. (E-mail wasn't part of that
by design, but it rapidly became the driver, even before ARPANET
graduated from defense & academia to commodity.)
The same can be said of rocket technology, with one key difference:
networking moves information around, while rocketry moves matter
around. Information, having no mass, can be moved almost without
cost. Moving matter always has an associated cost - and the faster it
goes, the more it costs.
(Charles Pooley and others talk about the parallels between the
information revolution and our desired CATS revolution. The way to
get a CATS revolution a la the information revolution is to make
matter transportation as cheap and easy as information transportation.
To do this, we need to make the matter nearly massless. {If you make
it truly massless, it becomes a photon, as Isaac Asimov pointed out in
a good murder mystery.} That's one of the ideas behind warp drive.
Where is Zephram Cochrane when we need him?)
-R
--
"Is this a bagel?"
"It's the Guardian of Forever!"
"Well yes. But is it a bagel?"
--Overheard at Loscon 29
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