One more time. Apparently I have to shout to get past this continuing straw man.

I NEVER SAID THEY WERE EVIDENCE FOR A MARKET.

Please go argue with your fantasy sparring partner, and stop implying that I said things that I didn’t.

That’s like saying that Elon Musk intends to make his profits from missions to put greenhouses on Mars. You are confusing motivational aspirations and PR hype with expected financial return. Not that Bigelow hasn’t, both with MUFON and Bigelow Aerospace, probably been motivated more by the former than the latter, despite Bigelow Aerospace being nominally a for-profit company. But these private “philanthrocapitalist” motivations are not evidence for a market. Nor are investments made with the prospect of fat NASA contracts evidence for a market beyond said contracts, despite any and all hype relating the existence of said investments to the supposed existence of said market.

Really, when you have to stretch this far to find evidence of a possible market you have seriously stretched far beyond the bounds of what rational investors will believe in. You pretend at the moment that you are not making this kind of argument but you have and are and it’s a seriously dodgy one. Why not put all these creative energies you put into making arguments for the same old ritual litany of hypothetical markets into actually trying to discover some new and interesting ones? Like Dennis Wingo. There’s more than a little crank there too but at least he comes up with fascinating and plausible and new ideas. You just repeat tired old Exploration Directorate propaganda.

I don’t know Rand’s experience but I pretty sure that Oler is just a political operative..

thats my friend …the vast majority of my political experience is with losing campaigns…(except my own, I won those four)…of course thinking about it, other then the one time senior senator from Texas…my friend has mostly been associated with losing campaigns as well.

Robert G. Oler

Again, I wasn’t making an argument at all. I was simply refuting a mistaken opinion (no one would invest in this) with a fact. And Bigelow has been investing in deep space, because that’s the ultimate intent of his modules. One of his near-term goals is an expedition around the moon and back.

Actually, the original argument was about deep space HSF or things commonly (but misleadingly) associated with deep space HSF such as ISRU. Not even Bigelow has invested significant amounts in deep space HSF.

In any case, you were engaged in an argument from authority, namely the authority created by the existence or lack thereof of private investment in the hypothetical non-space-agency HSF markets. You need much better authorities than Bigelow to make that kind of argument.

No, he’s far too brainless about politics to be a political operative.

No, and I made no such argument. I was simply refuting the statement that no one would invest in it.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/bigelows_aerospace_and_saucer_emporium/

The agreement between Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) and MUFON sets up a “Star Team Impact Project” (SIP), with an initial funding period from five months to a year, with the option to renew for a second year. Investigations will be limited to cases where physical effects of a UFO are reported or where “living beings” are allegedly sighted or where “reality transformation” is said to occur.

Fro all I’ve read and sorry I have no referencee I can give you. You’d have to research it for yourself, it is true that the cost of Shuttle mainly lies in the standing army. Remember Shannon’s comments about $200M/month fly or not? So by their own admission NASA is saying the cost of the manpower. Take the $2.4B/yr for the Shuttle and $200K/yr per employee and that gives you about 12,000 employees (if I did that right). So there you have it. Figure how many employees are on payroll. Then what is the cost ofthe hardware actually flying, refurbishing, etc. I believe but don’t know that it must be at leat 1 ordeer of magnitude lower than the $2.4B. Someone probably knows better than I do.

“I’m sure someone has done a study to find out the costs to manufacture and process the SRB’s and ET’s and what launch operations would cost on a cargo SDLV.”

Well, yes and I think you can get some of that in the Augustine committee documents. But the trick remains the workforce. That is why a lot of people, me included, believe that even DIRECT will be in that price range. They want to reuse the standing army per Stephen comments. So the $2.4B a year are still there. Now the launcher itself may be less costly than Ares V but if we are lookin at leats 1 order of magnitude difference then it won’t make much of a difference overall.