cjh@CCA-UNIX@sri-unix (10/29/82)
Taking just a cursory look at costs, your figures are excessive by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Compare the cost of a shuttle (the one a private firm is trying to buy, for instance) versus that of an executive jet, or the cost for a shuttle flight (in terms of # of average incomes) versus that of the first commercial plane flights. What is needed is a technological breakthrough to bring these numbers anywhere near your figures (consider for instance that the solid fuel shuttle boosters are already taking a significant fraction of perchlorate(? see the article I entered a while back) production); such a breakthrough would have to begin by getting around the mass ratio problem (the msg after yours has some cute calculations on minimum energy needed to get people into space but doesn't say how much ancillary mass (e.g., spacesuit or capsule) the numbers allow for). This is about the most off-the-wall assertion I've seen in the digest in some time. Got any ideas about how we could reasonably get from here to there?