From: gary@ke4zv.uucp (Gary Coffman)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: Bootstrap hardware for LunaBase
Date: 9 Oct 92 14:41:57 GMT
Reply-To: gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman)
Organization: Gannett Technologies Group

In article <1992Oct8.111921.29942@techbook.com> szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) writes:
>2. We should develop these ideas to reduce launch costs, instead of
>assuming them. The markets -- commercial, military, and NASA if 
>they procure commercially -- exist today, and would expand more
>rapidly than launch costs decreased.  At one order of magnitude
>drop, it would make economic sense to move practically every radio
>and TV broadcast tower to Clarke orbit, for example.

A typical VHF transmission facility runs around $15 million dollars,
including site costs, except maybe in NYC. We recently did a major
upgrade to our facility for $1.2 million dollars including new transmitter,
new antenna, and new auxillary power system. Operating costs run about
$12,000 a month for power, $18,000 a year for tubes, and around $50,000
a year for supervision and maintenance personnel costs. Remembering
that we have to put a 50 microvolt/meter signal over our grade A contour
for those rabbit ear users, we have to transmit 316,000 watts. Now
show me how $500 a pound launch costs are going to make it cheaper to
put this system in orbit. Mass less tower, that's all you are replacing,
is about 150 tons.

>3. Reduced launch costs benefit competing proposals, such as asteroid
>and comet mining, equally.  The factor of 50 relative disadvantage of 
>lunar regolith extraction outlined in my post remains.  

But is it 50 times cheaper if the end product is to be used on the Moon?
In fact is it even cheaper *at all* since your proposals require robotic
capabilities that don't exist and have no reasonable expectation of existing
in the next 30 years?

>>SSF to construction only runs $30 billion. A second set for a lunar base
>>would run far far less.
>
>It is ridiculous to count only construction costs.  We must also include
>launch and life-cycle costs.  That brings us to $150 billion.

$30 billion is not the construction cost. It is the construction cost
*plus* the development engineering cost, by far the largest part of
the cost. A second set incurs only bent metal cost, much cheaper. 
Probably no more than $8 billion even with the modifications required
for surface use.

Your life cycle costs appear based mainly on estimates of consumable 
resupply and crew rotation via Shuttle to an orbiting station. The 
situation for a moonbase is much different. Shuttle is useless for 
moonbase resupply, and consumables are supposed to be mostly from 
your favorite subject, *native materials*, obtained on the Moon. 

However, launch costs still dominate because of initial base
establishment and crew rotation. Operational launch costs, assuming
a revived Saturn V for crew rotation and a new Saturn VIII EHLV for
establishing the base should be on the order of $100 billion over
the thirty year period, or about the same annual operating cost
as Shuttle.

>Furthermore, we need to develop Apollo-style launch hardware, but larger
>and from scratch, so we add on the $120 billion Apollo costs, bringing
>us to $270 billion.  Of course you wish it cost less; so do I.  I was
>told, and wishfully believed, that SSF was only going to cost $8 billion 
>when I helped L-5/NSS lobby for it years ago.

We don't have to develop Apollo-style hardware from scratch, we have
to *restart* actual Apollo hardware production. The avionics will need
to be mostly redesigned, and the VIII configuration tested, but that
shouldn't be much over $70-$100 billion in development. The problem with 
the $8 billion space station is that they used the costing methods that 
you apply to your asteroid missions instead of the ones you apply to
other people's missions. Both are wrong.

My model still costs $178 billion over 30 years, or almost $6 billion
a year. That's unlikely to allow a profit for lunar colonists during
the thirty year life of the program, make that very damn unlikely, but 
it is within the range of the possible under NASA's budget. If it can
be assumed that such a colony would eventually be profitable once the
initial program costs are written off by the government, then the effort
gets us a permanent presence on the Moon. Otherwise, it's a lot of money
for a limited life base.

Gary
Newsgroups: sci.space