4 ms·
More time could have been spent reducing launch costs and working on reusability, but the cost of a rocket is not the most expensive part of commercial space sy
by greesil 7y ago
More time could have been spent reducing launch costs and working on reusability, but the cost of a rocket is not the most expensive part of commercial space systems. In any case, there has been a lot of innovation. Materials, electric propulsion, guidance/nav, instrumentation and sensors, to name a few. That's also 50 years of science and understanding of the solar system. That's knowledge and instrumentation that can keep astronauts from getting killed by a solar flare, since your focus seems to be crewed spaceflight.
- mikeash 7y agoCommercial space systems are expensive because the rockets are expensive, though. When you spend a couple hundred million on a launch, everything has to be super lightweight and durable. There’s nothing that says a comsat has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s just the most cost effective way to use very expensive launches. In a world where reaching orbit is cheap, satellites can be cheap too. If it breaks down, go fix it, or bring it back and put up a new one. If it’s twice as heavy as it could be, but also twice as cheap, that becomes a win. Imagine if all cargo sent from China had to be sent in single-use cargo planes. Everything being sent would be designed around this. Making a cell phone one gram lighter but $10,000 more expensive would be a huge win. All of the cargo would be incredibly valuable. A naive analysis might therefore indicate that sending stuff on reusable ships instead of expendable cargo planes wouldn’t save you much money, since the cargo itself is most of the cost.