Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: After Station? (Outreach II)
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 14:04:51 GMT

In article <4bb1dh$frf@nntp5.u.washington.edu> doyle@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE () writes:
>> That's the way we did and do aviation.  NACA didn't build an airline, it 
>> designed wings, engine cowlings, pressurization and so on and individuals 
>> and companies built the airplanes and airlines based on this technology. 
>
>Every body loved the idea of traveling all over the world in safe
>comfortable air craft.
>There is no concenses on what we should do in space. Or even if we
>should go into space.

On the contrary.  Forget the idea of space as a government-run spectator
sport, with only a tiny elite allowed to participate.  You will find that
then there *is* wide consensus that travelling into space in *cheap* safe
comfortable spacecraft would be a good thing, and that the government
should be helping to develop technology that would make this possible. 

Incidentally, your impressions of the early development of air travel
are incorrect.  Most people didn't "love the idea of travelling all over
the world in safe comfortable aircraft", because they saw air travel as
impossibly expensive and largely irrelevant to them.  (Sound familiar?)
Remember when "the jet set" was a synonym for "the idle rich"?  It wasn't
that long ago.  Air travel has become affordable to the average person
only in about the last 25 years.
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: markets (was Re: After Station? (Outreach II))
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 00:18:17 GMT

>I dought that the idle rich will spend huge amounts of money to
>spend a few weeks in a cramped space station drinking recycled
>urine and eating space rations just so they can have zero-g sex
>and stare out the window...

You'd be surprised what people will pay for.  Substitute "a couple of days"
for "a few weeks" and I think you'd find it would work.  Longer stays require
either something to do (free-fall sex is almost certainly overrated) or a
luxury environment, which won't appear right away.
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: tourism (was Re: After Station? (Outreach II))
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 16:15:59 GMT

In article <4cclht$7b3@nntp5.u.washington.edu> doyle@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE () writes:
>> >[consumables]
>> >...That is $300 per day per guest and $300 per day per staff memeber.
>
>> Uh, so?  It's not hard to find hotels on Earth that charge that much,
>> if you really go looking.  This is not a very significant expense for
>> an expensive tour package.
>
>That is a cost to the hotel of $300 per day /person not per guest.

That's right, it's an expense, as I said.  My point was not that existing
Earthly hotel rates would cover this; my point was that we're not talking
about whole new orders of magnitude of costs.  Hotel rooms are typically
not big money-makers -- hotels usually figure to break even on rooms and
make their money on food and booze -- so existing luxury-hotel expenses are 
already in the $hundreds/day/room range.

>If you assume 1 staff for every 3 people... include the cost of 
>the Hotel, cost of shipping up the staff, and maybe some profit
>you are talking well over $1000/night/person hotel.

Yes.  So?  This is *not* grossly out of line for top-bracket hotel rooms. 
A good-sized suite at a luxury hotel is probably already in that range. 
We're talking about amounts that people already pay, for rather better
accommodations but in rather less interesting locations.  These numbers
aren't horrible and scary and indicative of basic flaws in the concept;
they are, at worst, a minor extrapolation of current hotel experience. 

>> You don't need space nuts for this.  The recent Japanese market survey --
>> the first really thorough and professional study of the market for space
>> tourism -- pegged the *Japanese* market for short spaceflights at between
>> half a million and a million seats per year, assuming costs in the low
>> tens-of-thousands-of-dollars range.
>
>There is a large difference between people who could afford to go or
>checked a box on a survey and people who will actually write the check.

This was a conservative estimate with some allowance for that.  The more
optimistic estimates were considerably larger.  And even if the more
conservative estimate is too high by a factor of ten, we're still looking
at a very large market. 

>The tens of thousands of dollars range is hundreds of dollars a pound
>we are a long way from that.

The barriers are financial and political, not technical.  The analogous
transition in air travel took only a decade.  (When I was a kid, it was a
big event when my father once went on a business trip by air; when I
entered graduate school, flying home for Christmas wasn't surprising
or especially costly.)

>> Safe is not a big problem if you design and build your spacecraft as
>> high-performance airliners rather than manned missiles.  ...
>
>...There has never been a safe manned veicle at any price...

I assume you mean "safe manned *space* vehicle".  We do know how to build
safe airliners; it's not that big a stretch to apply similar philosophies
to spacecraft, which has not yet been done.
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: tourism (was Re: After Station? (Outreach II))
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 1996 22:45:09 GMT

In article <4cfsmi$cp8@nntp5.u.washington.edu> doyle@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE () writes:
>> We're talking about amounts that people already pay, for rather better
>> accommodations but in rather less interesting locations.  These numbers
>> aren't horrible and scary and indicative of basic flaws in the concept;
>> they are, at worst, a minor extrapolation of current hotel experience. 
>
>This is not for a suite this is a per person cost.

How many people typically occupy a suite?  Two?  Then we're talking about
something that is only a factor of two away from existing experience.
Probably less, actually, because per-person rates in exotic locations can
be higher than at luxury hotels.  I don't understand why this frightens
you so.  The bottom line remains that we're talking about costs which
are high but not horrifying; they wouldn't be a serious barrier.

>> ...optimistic estimates were considerably larger.  And even if the more
>> conservative estimate is too high by a factor of ten, we're still looking
>> at a very large market. 
>
>But what if they are off by a factor of 100...

That's still thousands of tourists per year, *from Japan alone*.  Add in
the other industrialized countries and it remains a hefty market.  And an
error of two orders of magnitude really strains plausibility pretty far. 

>What if your cost estimates are off too?

What cost estimates?  Costs were an input, not an output.  It is quite
clear that you can't make tourism pay at current prices, and also that
the demand curve is non-linear.  The market will drop off very sharply
when the price goes beyond a few months' salary for the average yuppie.
Serious tourism cannot even be attempted without reduction of costs to
that level.

>And even if it is only off by a factor of ten can you make
>a profit at that level.

50k people a year each paying $20k is a billion dollars a year.  If you
can't make a profit on that kind of revenue stream, something's wrong.

A long-haul 747 flies maybe twice a day carrying 500 people each time
at perhaps $1k per ticket, which is a million dollars a day.  Three
or four of them give a billion-a-year revenue stream, at a capital cost
not far short of a billion dollars, and airlines make money on this.
Half a dozen billion-a-year spacelines should suffice to finance almost
any reasonable development and production costs.

>> >The tens of thousands of dollars range is hundreds of dollars a pound
>> >we are a long way from that.
>> The barriers are financial and political, not technical.  The analogous
>> transition in air travel took only a decade...
>
>Do you actually believe there are no technical barriers.

Yes.  So does almost everyone who's studied the problem at length. 
Getting to hundreds-a-pound should be easy, given a serious effort. 
Getting to tens-a-pound doesn't look impossible.  The technical issues
are not trivial, but they are under control.

>> >...There has never been a safe manned veicle at any price...
>> I assume you mean "safe manned *space* vehicle".  We do know how to build
>> safe airliners; it's not that big a stretch to apply similar philosophies
>> to spacecraft, which has not yet been done.
>
>I thought the shuttle was planning to do that.

They talked about it, but didn't do it.  Applying airliner design
approaches to the shuttle would involve, at a minimum: 

1. Replace the SRBs with something more controllable -- it is unacceptable
that there is no safe abort mode for the first two minutes of flight.

2. Provide go-around capability to make landings fault-tolerant; glide
landings are acceptable in emergencies but not as routine practice.

3. Demonstrate all major abort modes in test flights before flying real
cargos or any crew other than test pilots. 
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: tourism (was Re: After Station? (Outreach II))
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 03:27:13 GMT

In article <4cigej$52m@nntp5.u.washington.edu> doyle@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE () writes:
>> >This is not for a suite this is a per person cost.
>> How many people typically occupy a suite?  Two?  Then we're talking about
>> something that is only a factor of two away from existing experience...
>
>A suite at most hotels can be occupied by lots of people.

Can be, yes.  Note the word "typically" in my comments.  While suites have
a lot of uses, in at least some hotels I believe they are primarily luxury
accommodations rather than convention facilities.

>> >And even if it is only off by a factor of ten can you make a profit...
>> 50k people a year each paying $20k is a billion dollars a year.  If you
>> can't make a profit on that kind of revenue stream, something's wrong.
>
>We are a long way from having 50k people a year in space.

Correct, but that's the assumption you made:  that the Japanese study is
off by a factor of ten.  One tenth of half a million is 50k.

>If it costs you 2 billion a year you can lose lots of money.
>so you are assuming launch costs of less than $100/lb, good luck.

No luck is required.  Billion-a-year revenue streams inspire a great deal
of greed, which beats luck the way four aces beats a pair of twos.  The
fuel costs are a fraction of $100/lb.  Airline costs are a small multiple
of fuel costs, and spaceliners should actually do better because they have
less hardware for a given amount of fuel -- it's the hardware that needs
maintenance.

>> A long-haul 747 flies maybe twice a day carrying 500 people each time
>> at perhaps $1k per ticket, which is a million dollars a day.  Three
>> or four of them give a billion-a-year revenue stream, at a capital cost
>> not far short of a billion dollars, and airlines make money on this.
>> Half a dozen billion-a-year spacelines should suffice to finance almost
>> any reasonable development and production costs.
>
>so you are planning 747 sized space veicles.

Can you explain how you conclude this from what I wrote above?  The 747
is just the plane for which I happen to know the numbers.  A spaceliner
with 747 capacity would probably be oversized for a 500k/yr market; you'd
want something smaller so you could operate a substantial fleet, spreading
risks and simplifying operations.

My point above was that billion-a-year revenue streams are well within
existing experience, and it is easily possible to make substantial profits
on them despite very heavy capital investments as the price of entry.

>> >Do you actually believe there are no technical barriers.
>> Yes...   The technical issues
>> are not trivial, but they are under control.
>
>What is the difference between technical issues and technical
>barriers?

A technical barrier is a barrier, something that stops you.  A technical 
issue doesn't.

>> >> I assume you mean "safe manned *space* vehicle".  We do know how to build
>> >> safe airliners...
>> >I thought the shuttle was planning to do that.
>> They talked about it, but didn't do it...
>
>The airline philosophy I was refering to was of taking off
>with one system down.

That wasn't what I was talking about, nor was it what you were talking
about earlier in this particular line of discussion.  The issue at hand 
was the feasibility of safe spacecraft.  Taking off with one system down
has nothing to do with enhanced safety -- it is a way of improving schedule
reliability, at the price of (done right) minimal safety impact.

The way you build safe spacecraft is the same way you build safe airliners:
fault tolerance, thorough testing (that means hundreds of test flights,
not four!), adequate safety margins, gradual envelope expansion, intact
abort at all times.  The mere fact that the shuttle is too expensive to
flight-test thoroughly indicates that it was not designed by airliner
design philosophies -- adequate testing is not optional in an airliner.
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: tourism (was Re: After Station? (Outreach II))
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 22:28:10 GMT

In article <4co1en$68f@nntp5.u.washington.edu> doyle@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE () writes:
>> >...I may be posible to find people who
>> >will pay $15,000 for transportation and $1000 a night...
>> To repeat what was said earlier:  the best market survey done yet
>> estimates a Japanese tourist market of at least half a million seats a
>> year under those conditions.  It is inconceivable that there's no way to
>> make a profit in a market that size. 
>
>Well, for starters there is the profit margin. The mark up for profit
>margin is usually about 100% or more. The figure I mentioned especially
>for the transportation have no room for profit.

The Japanese cost model was a 50-passenger vehicle costing about $1G to
buy, with costs per trip of $430k amortization (assuming Japanese capital,
which is much cheaper than US capital), $160k fuel, $200k miscellaneous
(maintenance, marketing, etc.), giving a total of $16k/seat.

(Comparable numbers for a 300-passenger widebody airliner are $22k 
amortization, $20k fuel, $20k miscellaneous, total $2100/seat.)

Now, the 500k/year volume estimate was at a ticket price of $24k/seat.
This sounds like an adequate profit margin to me, bearing in mind that
that $16k includes all costs, not just direct operating costs.

>I thought the population of japan was about 100 million.
>Do you really think .5% of the people will spend $25,000
>per person for a space vaction every year.
>The japanesse are much thriftier than that. 

The Japanese tourist business is extremely large, actually.  The number
of Japanese travelling outside Japan in 1994 alone was estimated at 14
million.  And the average rate of increase has been 12%/yr recently.
(By the way, the population of Japan is well above 100 million; I don't
have current figures, but the 1986 estimate was 120 million.)

However, I may have misread here -- on closer inspection, that 500k/yr
looks like their estimate of the world market, with the Japanese market
only about a third of that.  Oops.  Sorry about that.  But 170k/yr isn't
exactly trivial either...

>Also this is all extremely speculative as launch cost are presently
>about $10,000 /lb. And have not come down much in the last 30 years.

What did you expect?  We're still using pretty much the same launchers
we were using 30 years ago.  The first prerequisite for reductions in
launch cost is a serious attempt at reducing launch cost!  There has
been none, unless you count the shuttle (which had the right marketing
slogans but little or nothing backing them up).
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

Newsgroups: sci.space.policy
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: tourism (was Re: After Station? (Outreach II))
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 22:41:27 GMT

In article <4co9br$9pr@nntp5.u.washington.edu> doyle@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_GATEWAY_FILE () writes:
>> >so you are planning 747 sized space veicles.
>
>> Can you explain how you conclude this from what I wrote above?  The 747
>> is just the plane for which I happen to know the numbers.  A spaceliner
>> with 747 capacity would probably be oversized for a 500k/yr market...
>
>The size of the market.

The Japanese study thought that 50 passengers per flight was closer to
optimum for the near-term market.  You don't want a handful of big,
infrequently-flying vehicles; that's a recipe for bankruptcy, and for
great vulnerability to an accident which takes a single vehicle out of
service even temporarily.  You want a substantial fleet -- they thought
about 50 -- of much smaller spaceships flying constantly, the way the
airlines do it.

>> >What is the difference between technical issues and technical barriers?
>> A technical barrier is a barrier, something that stops you.  A technical 
>> issue doesn't.
>
>This sounds more psychological than technical.

Precisely.  The "barriers" are psychological, not technical. :-)  People
who study the issue without axes to grind find issues, but no barriers.
The technology needs work and money, but solutions exist.

>> ...The issue at hand 
>> was the feasibility of safe spacecraft.  Taking off with one system down
>> has nothing to do with enhanced safety -- it is a way of improving schedule
>> reliability, at the price of (done right) minimal safety impact.
>
>It has to do with cost.

So why bring it up in a discussion of safety?  It's still a change of 
subject, and an irrelevant one at that.

>> ...The mere fact that the shuttle is too expensive to
>> flight-test thoroughly indicates that it was not designed by airliner
>> design philosophies -- adequate testing is not optional in an airliner.
>>
>Was there an actual philosophy behind building the shuttle?

Not a very visible one; it was a muddle of a number of things, with the
usual airliner approach conspicuously missing.
-- 
Look, look, see Windows 95.  Buy, lemmings, buy!   |       Henry Spencer
Pay no attention to that cliff ahead...            |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu