From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Sat Nov 13 1999 - 17:14:40 MST
Doug Jones wrote:
> It would be nice to have something close to a "design team in a box", with
> complete materials properties, stress analysis, CFD flow modeling, detail
> design, and manufacturability analysis all in one integrated package. "I
> want a throttling valve for 500 kg/s liquid oxygen at 20 MPa, 10% to 100%
> flow and cutoff, to fit in this volume and require minimum mass,
reliability
> of six nines, fail closed (or open), and don't forget materials
> compatibility so that it won't self-ignite." The engineer then chooses
> from an array of options presented by the software, and fifteen minutes
> later, after the CDR, the complete part spec is downloaded to the
> manufactory. Part is in hand an hour later, assembled into the vehicle an
> hour after that.
That seems a little optimistic for the 2010-2015 time frame, but only a
little. I'd say you may have such a tool, but it will have the same kinds
of problems as modern software - it will take significant effort to use, it
won't handle all of the tasks you'd like it to, and it will produce bad
designs just often enough that someone has to actually check its work. I
think it is realistic to expect the human engineering effort needed to
produce a working system to fall by a factor of 10. If you want to be
really optimistic you might hope for as much as a 100-fold reduction, but
anything beyond that is unlikely in that time frame (unless there is a
breakthrough in self-improving AI, in which case all bets are off).
Now, I think we can reasonably look for similar improvements in pretty much
everything else related to the project, and of course the fact that it isn't
a government project is probably good for an order-of-magnitude cost
reduction all by itself. However, that still leaves me with a cost estimate
of several million dollars for a new launch vehicle, and per-unit production
costs of several hundred thousand dollars apiece. That is great compared to
current practice (we get a launch cost of maybe $10/lb to LEO), but it still
costs real money (a few $10K per person, with minimal baggage). Therefore,
a meaningful colonization effort will require at least moderately deep
pockets.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@transcient.com
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@transcient.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:45 MST