The Chinese remote orbiting platform and launch escape system both incorporate the Apollo 13 unlearned redundancy lesson NASA left out of the shuttle and station designs assuming failure no longer to be an option.

Thus the Chinese are already comfortably ahead.

:>

Because rafts didn’t cost a billion dollars.

The failure of VSE supporters to do even the simplest finanical calculations is quite telling.

Building a billion-dollar moonrockets to get a few million dollars worth of platinum doesn’t make sense — no matter how many historical anecdotes you tell.

> What im getting at, is that ELVs are not stupid or bad per se, if you build them cheap enough

We can’t build them cheap enough. Handwaving and historical analogies notwithstanding. The Saturn V “raft” cost $2 billion in 2005 dollars — as much as a B-2 bomber or ten 747s.

> Chinese are actually best positioned to actually get to the point of mass-producing ELVs with cheap
> methods, they are the current masters of the art [of cheap mass production] after all. So it might very
> well turn out that they CAN mine the moon with ELVs.

Only if you ignore the math. You can call a Saturn V or the Hope diamond “cheap,” but calling something cheap doesn’t make it cheap.

And as Rand said, we don’t see any cheap Chinese airliners darkening the skies. I think you greatly overestimate power of Communism to overcome the laws of economics.

> This still means that they have to have some methods of transporting more valuable cargo, like
> humans, on more reliable methods. Although with chinese population, im not sure that they consider
> humans much more valuable than lunar mining machinery for example …

Most people do. Ask any insurance company. Saying it’s okay to blow up a $2 billion ELV because no lives are lost is fallacious. $2 billion invested in medical research could save thousands of lives.

I’m not worried, though. We’re a service economy now. We can go on servicing each other while China goes and finds new resources to fuel their icky old industries. This way they will have more trinkets and beads to sell us, so we can owe them an ever growing portion of our nation. Aren’t we just so damn enlightened?

Chinese lunar prospectors discover platinum bearing asteroid fragments and radio Beijing with an encrypted message. Hong Kong traders purchase as many platinum put options as they possibly can.

Announce the discovery.

Collect profit.

In China’s case, they have NO native sources of platinum and their platinum imports will very likely move from $3 billion to $4 billion in the next few years. Therefore, a major decrease in price of platinum flows directly to their balance of trade figures. For China, driving down the price of platinum is almost as good as selling it.

Spend X billion on a lunar platinum mine and cutting the price of platinum in half will save $2 billion per year in expense in addition to whatever they might sell.

Not to mention how dirt cheap platinum might permit all sorts of novel new technologies.

= = =

If the Chinese were evil, a lunar platinum mine would be a terrific mechanism for causing havoc with the global futures market. Leak info (maintaining “plausible deniability” is crucial) about your lunar platinum discoveries after buying or sell commodities futures accordingly.

Buy a fistful of put options (i.e. sell short) and THEN announce finding a million ounce nuggest of Ni-Fe easily mined for PGM & make money before mining a single ounce.

This is what Langley should have done with some of that HSCT money. Instead they screwed it away with nothing to show for it. Now they’re paying the price with all the cuts due to the repioritization toward space exploration.

This was discussed on sci.space.something some years ago (what hasn’t been discussed there?). Someone brought up the point that driving down the price of gold, platinum, whatever would saturate current markets, but perhaps open up much larger new ones. E.g., gold might take the place of copper in wiring and be used for cookware.

Whether this has any hope of being economically true (aside from the question of whether the gold etc. is actually available in exploitable forms and quantites Out There), I have no clue. But it’s another aspect of the problem to think about.

The M3 bomber is less stealthy to radar, but is much more stealthy to observers, and typically once the radar detects the M3 aircraft, it’s already too late to deploy defenses. Also, when traveling at M3, the bomber can launch relatively cheap, stealthy, and long range ramjet powered cruise missiles, expanding its swath of destruction.

— Donald