Sorry John ... hard to keep an eye on things ... whilst juggling several monkeys at a time
The wool pants example is pertinant: Wool pants were made by slaves in 1850, by non-union workers in 1900, by union workers in 1950, again by non-union workers in 2000. What's next, slave made wool pants by 2050? There will be nothing basic about the function of wool pants which will have changed in those two hundred years; just the price.
I've heard it said by a number of people smarter than me that the one problem with space flight is the chronic lack of Economy of Scale. It's sort of an industrial Catch-22: only a handful of people can afford to put things into space because the cost is so high; the cost is so high because only a handful of payloads are ever flown each year.Aerospace inflation is certain to reverse if and when the flight rate increases; unfortunately there's no way to make that happen except for government subsidies to private launchers to artificially depress the cost of payloads into a range that can be affordable to universities and/or smaller laboratories, not to mention space startups like Bigelow and Rocketplane Kistler. At a certain point, you could reduce costs enough that, say, Virgin Galactic starts chartering Falcon-9/Dragons for some of its high-roller space tourists with possible stopovers at a Bigelow station or even the ISS. A launch manifest of, say, two Falcons a week would both reduce the costs of each launch AND increase the company's profits.And I note that the exact opposite is happening to Ariane Space right now; at only six launches a year, they're having a hard time staying in the black. Turn that into sixty launches, they'd have all the work they could ever wish for.
No incentive to reduce costs. Space access is a limited field. Limited fields equal higher prices. No incentive to solve price hurdles.Same thing was true of computers through the 1950's and 1960's. It was only with the rise of the minicomputer, such as the PDP-1, did you see prices start to migrate lower, as there was now an incentive.
Quote from: Downix on 04/23/2010 08:16 pmNo incentive to reduce costs. Space access is a limited field. Limited fields equal higher prices. No incentive to solve price hurdles.Same thing was true of computers through the 1950's and 1960's. It was only with the rise of the minicomputer, such as the PDP-1, did you see prices start to migrate lower, as there was now an incentive.I believe this is the best explanation. Producers want to get the highest profit they can for their product. Revenue of course is quantity times price. Investing in ways to make something cheaper almost always costs money. They are willing to make that investment only if they feel cheaper prices will result in more customers.In many parts of the space industry there is just no incentive to lower costs. Take take producers that supply the Shuttle. Since decreasing the price they charge NASA will not result in NASA buying more parts than they will only lose money by making prices cheaper.
Actually, space launch has gone down in price slowly in real terms on a $(year)/kg basis. Looking at the last few years is really missing the forest for the trees in observing trends. In the past we were flying heavy payloads on Titan IV instead of Atlas V 531 (comparable payload), and the Titan cost $400m in 1985 $, which is >$800m in today's dollars. With the retirement of STS, the fleet average cost/kg will again drop significantly as less expensive vehicles pick up the slack.If there were a rule of thumb on launch costs over time, it would be about a 50% reduction every 20 years (~-2%). This is mainly due to the development of more cost effective systems (in the US), which results in a pretty chunky plot rather than a smooth decline. Total commercial mass launched and payload size both have upward trends of about 3% (http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast/media/launch_forecasts_051810.pdf). So the market is expanding slowly while the cost is going down slowly, resulting in relatively flat total spending on LVs. If everything keeps pace, the $500(2010)/lb point will come in about 40 years, as will payloads in the VHLV class. That's not great news for the Mars crowd, but at least things are moving slowly in the right direction. Of course a trend doesn't predict the future, but it does give us a baseline for reasonable expectations.
