On Thu, 29 May 2003 19:07:48 +0000, "Jonathan Andrew Goff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>It is possible to design a small orbital ELV, and >maybe a very small and simple RLV (or maybe a small >partially reusable/recoverable LV) using less than >say 25 people (SpaceX is doing that). Burn rate >for a company of that size is likely $2.5-5M/year >fixed rate. Taking them as an example, if their >Falcon costs say $2M per flight marginal, and they >charge $6M per flight (which is cheaper by over 50% >than you can normally get for small payloads), then >they only need 1-2 flights per year to keep their >cashflow positive, and 2-4 flights per year to pay >back their R&D within a reasonable time (2-5 years). > >So, yeah it is possible to make money on the current >market You left out an important if: If SpaceX succeeds. I see no obvious show stoppers in their plans, but they have a number of challenges ahead of them. For one thing, they believe they can go from clean paper to launch in 18 months. Are they really *that* much better than everyone else who has ever done a launch vehicle? Well...maybe. But I don't think their expected success can be used as a proof of any particular concept until they actually succeed. >I'm sorry, I was being sarcastic. I understand that >there really is a lot of room to disagree here, and >I didn't intend to offend. I still think that any >company that expects to nab more than 20 flights in >their first year is being optimistic, and any that >expect more than 100 in their first year are being >fanciful (IMO), but that is just my opinion, and I'd >love to be proven wrong. Depends on the market. If you're talking about the orbital market, those numbers are unfortunately pretty realistic. -R -- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
