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Big if there. The Seattle Times article says that the Vulcan rocket will have a mass of 375 tons. (Probably US tons?) Assume it's got the same payload fraction

Big if there. The Seattle Times article says that the Vulcan rocket will have a mass of 375 tons. (Probably US tons?) Assume it's got the same payload fraction as a Soyuz, about 2.5%, which means it can put 9.4 tons into orbit. (A Falcon 9 can put 22 metric tons into orbit) According to some comment on stack exchange, the world collectively orbited 255 tons of stuff in 2007. Assuming every payload can be launched on a Vulcan rocket, (Which they can't) and assuming a generous turnaround time of one week, (Allen says it should be faster than that) then it would take only a single plane 27 weeks to satisfy the launch needs of the entire world. You could double the amount of stuff launched, and still only need one plane. There's probably not going to be a lot of airframes to spread development costs across.

rbanffy 9y ago
Either that, or we will launch a lot more stuff, 9 tons at a time. The biggest thing going against it is it's not clear this scheme can drive the costs down enough to double or triple the launched mass per year. There is a limited number of things we can do in space. A significant part of the cost of any single probe is the launch. If we can reduce launch costs enough (maybe making the booster reusable) and through building a standard probe with pluggable sensors, drive down the building costs, we could have dozens of probes going places we currently can't afford to go. We spend enormous effort in shaving off every single gram from anything that goes to space. If going to space gets cheaper, we can spend a lot less time shaving probes and more time probing.