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For the past two months I have focused on the effort to develop a reusable launch vehicle that would provide low-cost access to orbit. Now, I consider this a highly interesting field of inquiry, as it is certainly a significant engineering challenge, but I'm sure all parties concerned would freely admit that it would make an incredibly boring science fiction movie. The only really good science fiction movies that were about rockets for rockets' sake were made before 1960. So, I thought that this month I would delve into a bit of speculation about something more far-flung.
Well, let's think for a minute. Cheap rocket launches are all well and good, but you have to have something to launch, after all, and a first-generation RLV is intended primarily for launching communications satellites and...well, communications satellites. Now, I'm more than happy to watch the launch industry send up more and more of the things, but only if it's a step on the path to bigger and better things. We'll never need a starship Enterprise if all we do is send up orbiting switchboards--and if we never need one, we'll never build one. Fortunately, the necessary second part of the equation is already in place--consumer demand to go into space. Tickets for suborbital and orbital flights are already selling like hotcakes even though no suitable vehicle yet exists, and we all know that Dennis Tito paid through the nose for a week on the International Space Station. So with the demand being what it is, some company somewhere is bound to step up to the plate and start providing the means for people to fly into space aboard an RLV. Call this company Pressurized Modules, Inc. and let's say that they start out by building pressurized passenger modules for orbital joyrides--modules that substitute for a communications satellite as an RLV's payload. So far, so good. There's a catch, though: aerospace technology is expensive. This leads directly to two requirements. First, costs have to be spread out as broadly as possible among a large assortment of companies so that the costs for any one of them are not prohibitive. Second, we have to build as many of any product as we possibly can, because the more we build of something, the cheaper we can make it. What I'm saying is, Pressurized Modules will be in a world of hurt if they only build joyride modules and they only sell five of them.
The copyright of the article The Orbital Invisible Hand in Outer Space is owned by Robert Davis. Permission to republish The Orbital Invisible Hand in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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