From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Fri Aug 14 1998 - 05:14:57 MDT
Philip Witham [p.j.witham@ieee.org] wrote, quoting Truax
>Make it ultimately simple (pressure fed, two-stage, single engine per stage), >make it reusable, never make it *too* reliable, and build it *big* (100,000-1 >million pounds to LEO).
While that's certainly a worthwhile route with old technology, it has quite
a few flaws. Firstly, there's a limit to how far you can reduce the cost
that way, because you're still throwing away the booster every time you
launch it. Secondly the payload is much, much too large for launching
modern satellites; I'm not sure of the mass of an average comsat these days,
but if it's taken as five tons you'd have to launch ten to a hundred
satellites per booster! And just imagine putting a hundred billion
dollar satellites on a booster with a 95% reliability rating; you've just
added an average of $5,000,000,000 to the cost of every launch, because
one time in twenty you'll lose the whole hundred billion dollar payload.
You save a lot of money with an SSTO simply because it can safely abort
in most launch failures without losing the payload.
Mark
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