🚀 go-pugleaf

-From: aws@iti.org (Allen W. Sherzer)
-Subject: Re: DC-Y funding
-Date: 7 Jan 93 02:48:15 GMT

-In article <C0Fq3r.Dyu.1@cs.cmu.edu> roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov (John Roberts) writes:

->The Shuttle only launches about eight times a year, and represents relatively
->few subsidized GAS cans, mid-deck experiments, etc. Is the market really
->*that* small?

-In testimony before the House Space Subcommittee, Dennis Dunbar, VP of
-the Space Systems Division at GD said that if Government bought launch
-services in a commercial and competative manner then costs would be
-roughly cut in half.

-Yes the market is that small and government policies and systems (like
-Shuttle) are sending prices up and not down.

->(And if these incidental payloads were not subsidized, the market
->might be even smaller.)

-Not so. If NASA implements the voucher system authorized in last years
-authorization bill they could launch more payloads for less cost. There
-is a difference between providing subsidies for a hugely expensive system
-like Shuttle and giving somebody enough money to launch their own payload.
-The latter encourages greater reliance on lower cost systems.

I was thinking of the commercial (rather than government) payload market.
The Shuttle has lots of "nooks and crannies" for small payloads, and if
the government is using the Shuttle anyway for the large payloads and
human-tended experiments, then there's very little marginal cost to the
government in also using the Shuttle for small payloads (particularly those
which need to be returned to Earth after several days in orbit), so
the idea of "subsidization" would mainly be relevant to non-government
users who are presumably deciding whether to use the Shuttle or some 
commercial launcher to lift their payloads.

You seem to be implying that the market even for small payloads is almost
exclusively government-funded - that the private sector for the most part
just isn't interested in launches of small payloads - because if there were
a private market, and if commercial launchers were cheaper to the customer
even with the subsidized prices of GAS cans, etc. on the Shuttle, then the
private customers would choose the private launchers even with the current
setup.

John Roberts
roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov