From: vince@offshore.ai (Vincent Cate) Newsgroups: sci.space.tech Subject: Re: With $1 bil could you make low cost to LEO? References: <9186edb5.0301080934.4d47f3c1@posting.google.com> <3e1f9c5c.17498069@supernews.seanet.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.42.133.230 Message-ID: <9186edb5.0301120634.339f7284@posting.google.com> derekl1963@yahoo.com (Derek Lyons) wrote in message > henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer) wrote: > >What it doesn't have is *customers*. > > And that ultimately is what various space enthusiasts run screaming > from even thinking about. Cheap space acess is doable, problem is > nobody *wants* it, at least not in significant quantities. It seems that to get launch costs down by a factor of 20 you would need launch volumes to go up by much more than a factor of 20. The demand for communications sat launches, in particular GEO sats, is just not going to go up so much even if launch costs go down. There are only so many slots and the sats that are there are good for many years. However, space tourism has the potential to be a huge market, if we get cheap space access. The total tourism market is like $400 bil per year. At a ticket price of $20 mil per person, the space touism demand seems to be about 1 ticket per year, for a total space tourism market of $20 mil per year. There are credible studies that indicate that the space tourism market could sell 500,000 tickets per year if the price was as low as $50,000 (I would go). This would make a total total space tourism market of $25 billion per year. For one report on space tourism see http://www.spacetransportation.org/genpub~2.pdf So if you can get costs to LEO cheap enough, and safe enough, it seems there are in fact many people that want it. -- Vince