Ken:

Your arguments are thoughtful but you are going up against the Big
Boys if you're tackling Henry.  Allen Sherzer will doubtless chime in
on the subject of staggering operational costs, too.  Good luck, son.


Ahem.  The Russians are in the Free World now, or at least it would be
Politically Correct to contend so.


It will be tough to make DC-X succeed, and to turn it into an
operational orbital vehicle.  Doubtless it will fail to meet some of
the promised goals.  The reason people are so fond of it is that it's
the *only* chance we have now, or will have for a *long* time to come,
to develop a launch vehicle with radically lower costs.  

There is no Shuttle successor in funded development, NASP is dwindling
away, and ALS/NLS/Spacelifter sure as hell aren't gonna knock any
zeroes off that $2000-$3000 per pound cost.   Part of the blame for
this must be placed on a Shuttle program that consumes many annual
billions of the, er, Free World's available space cash.  As you will
no doubt hear from many correspondents in the days to come. (-:

DC-X is an attempt to break out of the vicious cycle by keeping
development costs low and flying incremental "X-plane" hardware.
It's been, to my mind, incredibly successful already-- they've built a
complex prototype in under 600 days for under 60 megabucks.  I would
have been extremely skeptical that this could be accomplished in 1990s
America, never mind flying the thing, getting a successor funded, or
building the DC-Y.

I'm sure you know well that launch costs are THE basic problem for any
expansion of astronautics.  I don't see a realistic  prospect for
beating down those costs, for multi-ton payloads, anywhere else.  If
the DC flops, it'll be business as usual in space.  The Nineties and
the Double-Oughts will look just like the Seventies and Eighties, a
prospect too depressing to bear.

(Pegasus represents another assault on the problem from a different
direction.  It doesn't lower cost-per-pound but it offers an orbital
launch for under ten megabucks.  It's creating its own market for
small payloads.)

I read the magazines and I've attended the last two IAFs. There are
plenty of engineers with paper ideas for cheaper launch systems, some
of them as good as or better than SSTO.  There is no sign in today's
world that any of these designs will be allowed anywhere near an
assembly line.

[...deleting some things I'm not going to prove tonight...]

Strawman.  Is anybody seriously proposing this?  References, please. 
The DC must be developed in the real-world funding climate, which
includes a NASA ferociously committed to continuing Shuttle
operations, as well as the "bird in the hand" argument your common
sense tells you.   If DC-Y flies at all, it flies alongside the
Shuttle, not instead of it.

Also, of course, DC-Y and its operational descendants will be useful
for a wide variety of jobs even if they are *not* man-rated.


If a DC-X successor can fly a 10,000-kg payload for $1M, or even $5M,
rather than the $40M it now costs, more people will be able to afford
more payloads... for the same money, you can fly several satellites
instead of one.  Big outfits can fly multi-satellite series.  Little
outfits will be able to fly spacecraft of their own, instead of
begging a ride.  This is just supply and demand.  You should be able
to convince *yourself* that point 4 will be true, assuming DC makes a
big difference in costs.  Do you have some reason to think not?