I would love to hear a detailed breakdown on what marginal cost does and does not cover. My impression is that it covered the cost of a new ET, fuel, and maint expenses associated with squeezing in one more additional flight. Not the large fixed labor/facilities costs.

In Congressional testimony Bolden claimed that each Ares I flight would cost more than a billion, but Doug Cook testified that the marginal cost of each launch would be $176 million.

The reason why the Saturn V got killed off was because some clever (soviet-inspired) journalist used the same accounting practices to convince us that we cannot afford to go to the Moon. (Geee, that tactic kind of sounds familiar.)

“And don’t forget, that China, Inc, will also easily be able to knock small American companies like SpaceX out of business by undercutting it’s prices. Not so with NASA. It’s fate lies in the hands of Congress.”

Since the CZ5 will be mass produced at Chinese prices, it is not only small American companies, that will face considerable competition, but large launch companies in all countries.

The current debate in China is over whether to develop a larger engine for their next launcher series, or whether to go with a flyback reuable cluster –
think of it in terms of the Energia core, or Zenit re-usable, if you like.

While they may do both, my guess is they will go with the Zenit class re-usable if they decide to choose one or the other.

The implications for satellite manufacturers and ground equipment manufacturers in every country are profound.

We’ll see.

“Airbus’ A300-600ST Beluga can transport cargos about 22~ feet in diameter.”

And only carries 45,000 kg, which includes payload, container, pallet, etc., far short of what would be needed in diameter or assembled weight for a true HLV payload (10m in diameter and 100mt in mass).

“The true kicker is that JSC has port access — the only real issue is the Route 146 Bridge going over the main channel to the bay that JSC is on…. How cheap can we convert that bridge to a drawbridge if it’s not?”

And that’s where you prove my point. The unintended consequences of HLV’s is that to truly maximize their capabilities, you need to spend huge amounts on transportation and facility infrastructure. And that will take a lot of upfront spending, which no one is in the mood to do in Congress.

Don’t you read the news? The Republican-led House just stripped NASA of $300M, and you think they will add in $500M or so to build a draw bridge for an unneeded launcher?

You truly must live in cloud cuckoo land…

“This was nearly achieved by NASA’s shuttle, which has a marginal cost for each flight of only $60 million.”

Only in your dreams.

While it was at it’s height of production, the ET cost $173M each.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=24363

For the SRM’s, they cost $68.6M/set.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=8785

And USA alone was costing $1.167B/year (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/United+Space+Alliance+and+NASA+Sign+Space+Flight+Operations+Contract-a018721721), which would require 20 Shuttle flights/year to reach your $60/flight figure – just for processing the Shuttle fleet.

As usual, you don’t know the facts.

The only likely difference for the commercial crew variant of the Atlas V would be the use of dual RL-10 engines on the Centaur upper stage for inherent redundancy, which is already an option for existing EELV payloads, so I really don’t see Ryan’s point.

Not one true statement in this.

1. The marginal costs are way more. The ET costs more than that. The costs of the SRM’s do not include the costs to make them into SRB’s

2. The SRB’s are not “reused”. They are rebuilt after each mission. Just some components are reused. The SRM’s reused the casings but that is minor.

And all are wrong.

Not available to other users per Boeing.

22 ft in diameter doesn’t do squat. The spacecraft container is going to take up some of that and you will be left with a EELV class payload

Michoud is not a spacecraft facility nor was Seal Beach (was NAA). AFP #20 either.

The real spacecraft manufactures like LM, Loral, Boeing El Segundo, NGST, are not near ports.

I have helped with studies on this. The point is that costs to support an HLV are much larger than the launch vehicle itself