“Mike, just to be pedantic, I think it was a plywood and scrap metal model spaceship.”

Pedantry in libertarian circles isn’t a vice, its standard operating behavior. Being able to drone on loudly, talking past each other longer than the other guy is the key strategy for winning arguments between libertarians (yes, I resemble that remark).

I thought I’d heard the mockup upperstage/orion/LAS assembly was composite. Frankly I’m far more upset at the idea that its plywood and scrap metal, and they charged us taxpayers how many billion for that? 1.5? 2 billion? I know some Hollywood model makers who could have built that sucker for a few hundred thousand, if plywood and sheet metal is acceptable.

I was thinking about building a scale model of the Estes I-X on a shoestring budget, but building it powerful enough to go higher than that “test vehicle” (snort) did, to great press exposure and fanfare…

“For what its worth, the first Ares test was already flown.”

No, Max, that was not an Ares, despite its label. That was an SRB with the worlds biggest plastic model spaceship on top. The proper name for that ship was the Estes I-X.

Watch out Jon, they banned me from nasaspaceflight.com for saying this same thing…. the NASA fanboi-industrial complex is circling the wagons and trying to shut down anybody who criticizes socialist spaceflight anymore.

PS googaw now thinks that NASA will be responsible for nearly 90% of SpaceX’s revenue.

http://www.futron.com/pdf/others/STFELST.PDF

They conclude that the market for expensive satellites is inelastic while the market for cheaper satellites is elastic. This is not surprising if the cost of the satellite itself dominates total costs. It turns out there is a technical term for that: cross price elasticity of demand.

I call BS. Most studies I’ve seen found little evidence for demand elasticity until you get below about $500-1000/lb. If there were elasticity at prices above this, how come we haven’t seen evidence for that with cheap foreign expendables like Proton and Zenit? It isn’t some conspiracy by “astronaut fans”, but the stark reality that I’ve never seen any evidence contradicting. Do *you* have any evidence showing elasticity of demand for comsats above about $1000/lb (SpaceX with satellite launches only would be around $2k/lb)?

If you’re going to insult people as “astronaut fans”, and claim economic nonsense, be prepared for people to call you on your claims and demand some evidence in return.

As I’ve demonstrated the demand for space tourists at $20 million per flight is about $20 million per year (i.e. one tourist per year to LEO).

You have demonstrated no such thing. If there were a commercial crew capsule that had unlimited available seats, that was offering $20M/yr prices, say launching out of a first world country, not requiring half a year worth of training, etc. and they were only able to sell one ticket per year, that would be one thing. But that’s not been the situation with Soyuz. Soyuz has only offered limited numbers of seats for space tourists, and every one of those AFAICT has been filled. And they’ve been flying more customers lately even though the price has been going up. That should be a clue that price isn’t the only reason for the low number of orbital space tourists to-date. I could always see if I can get some info from Erik Anderson, but the evidence I’ve seen is that there is a lot of frustrated demand there, even at $20M per year.

I do agree that in order to get up into the large numbers of tourists per year range, you need to get lower than $20M.

You have no evidence that this market is any more elastic than the comsat market and there are good reasons to believe that it is less so.

I’ve discussed this on the blog before, but if you look at wealth distributions in society, the number of people in a given wealth class goes up very rapidly as the amount of wealth decreases. Assuming that super rich people are just as likely as super ultra rich people to want to fly into space if it costs less than x% of their personal wealth, as you drop the ticket price, demand should go up a lot faster than the per ticket price drops–ie an elastic market.

At some point satellites become elastic as well, but every market study I’ve seen–including from proponents of the satellite industry has shown that the number of satellites flown increases slower than the ticket price until you start getting to very low launch costs compared to what SpaceX is going to be able to do. Ie in the price range we’re in, dropping your price drops your overall revenue, so why would you do it? I can see SpaceX doing a little of that since the revenue they’re cutting into is that of their competitors, but this isn’t going to result in a revolution in space launch.

As Rand put it, extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets.

Unmanned markets have long made economic sense, while astronaut markets never have, and the gap continues to grow every year. Unmanned markets can inherently grow in capability in the future (due to Moore’s Law and related progress) while astronauts are inherently limited by our biology.

But that doesn’t translate into more demand for space launch services. Sure, they’ll make more revenue for the satellite manufacturers and operators, but they’re not actually going to provide enough extra flight demand to make anything cheaper for the rest of us.

They have already greatly lowered development costs which are the major barrier to lowering launch costs in an inherently small-batch market. Contrary to popular astronaut fan belief, fantasizing about imaginary large flight rate markets is not a key to anything except delusion and disappointment, which I’ve seen over and over again in the space field because astronaut fans keep repeating these same inane religious platitudes decade after decade. This large-flight-rate fantasy is the same garbage that gave us the Shuttle and many of high development cost attempts to replace the Shuttle. Talk about a culture that never learns. Let’s have some economic thinking instead of fantastic pseudo-economic dogma, please.

Lowering development cost for an expendable only goes so far. SpaceX without the markets provided by people in space is only at best going to provide a competitor for Soviet developed launchers like Proton, Zenit, and Soyuz. That’s not revolutionary. Sure, being competitive on the international satellite market is great, and far better than Shuttle or EELVs. But that isn’t going to lead to anything new. In fact, without improving economics, I think you’re going to see more and more of those satellite capabilities losing out to things like ground-based alternatives, high altitude long-duration UAVs, etc.

Satellites alone have not provided the demand to create any improvements in launch price during my entire lifetime. Somehow imagining it’ll be different this time sounds like the definition of insanity.

And most of the “shuttle replacement” RLV approaches have been NASA-centric political programs that have tried to be jacks of all trades. I don’t think that’s actually inherent in RLV developments. The only private RLV project in 30 years that has gotten enough money to have a shot at succeeding was going after the satellite market, and failed. Sure there are lots of private RLV efforts that failed to raise enough money, but that doesn’t prove anything about the markets they were chasing, only about peoples opinions about them.

Sorry googaw, you’re going to have to provide more evidence instead of just making assertions and being throwing around insults about “astronaut fans” if you want people to treat you as anything other than an anonymous troll.

~Jon

Aren’t there studies that supposedly show this? But look at it this way: most geo satellites today do not max out Ariane 5 capability, nor do they use a Delta IV Heavy. They also typically cost more than their ride to orbit. If both these are true, doesn’t that strongly suggest that this demand is inelastic?