Randall Clague wrote: >Couldn't have said it better myself.
Thanks. Over the past six years of shooting my mouth off, I have managed to increase my S/N ratio a bit. >>As I see it, the first RLVs or ultra low cost >>commercial ELVs will have to be profitable at >>current flight rates. > > This, OTOH, is, IMHO, OTL. (Working on gummint stuff > today. Can youtell?) OTL? What does that mean? > Current launch rates are about one a week nationwide. If that. Maybe I should have said "at or close to current flight rates". > There's no way to make money at that launch rate > without charging an arm and a leg. Which is ok, because current launchers can charge an arm, a leg, and a spleen (plus occasionally naming rights on your first three male children). If you charge only an arm or a leg (and especially if you have some way of intact abort for the payload, so you can reduce their insurance costs), you can get enough flights to turn a profit, then over time you can drop your prices (maybe by offering very steep discounts if they buy launches in large numbers). > At that launch rate, it doesn't matter what the > vehicle costs, or what the fuel costs. Overhead > eats you alive, because you have to pay your people > and your landlord whether you're launching once a > week or once an hour. It is possible to design a small orbital ELV, and maybe a very small and simple RLV (or maybe a small partially reusable/recoverable LV) using less than say 25 people (SpaceX is doing that). Burn rate for a company of that size is likely $2.5-5M/year fixed rate. Taking them as an example, if their Falcon costs say $2M per flight marginal, and they charge $6M per flight (which is cheaper by over 50% than you can normally get for small payloads), then they only need 1-2 flights per year to keep their cashflow positive, and 2-4 flights per year to pay back their R&D within a reasonable time (2-5 years). So, yeah it is possible to make money on the current market, just you won't likely be able to reduce the costs very far. But you can improve the situation, and get experience doing quick-turnaround processing that will be needed to validate your RLV claims for a 2nd gen vehicle. > I disagree with you, and I somewhat resent your > statement that because I disagree with you, I smoke > dope. I don't smoke dope, never have, never will. > Let us *reasonably* disagree. I'm sorry, I was being sarcastic. I understand that there really is a lot of room to disagree here, and I didn't intend to offend. I still think that any company that expects to nab more than 20 flights in their first year is being optimistic, and any that expect more than 100 in their first year are being fanciful (IMO), but that is just my opinion, and I'd love to be proven wrong. ~Jon _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
