🚀 go-pugleaf

The federal government paid the early airlines to carry mail. In some (most?)
cases, these mail subsidies were the only thing that made the airlines profitable.
So ... it seems reasonable to wonder if a similar program could be done for the
private launcher market. What I'm proposing is that the government agree to pay
$1000/lbs to deliver 1 million pounds to LEO each year from 1995 to 2015. At
$1 billion/year, this would be a fairly small program (by government standards).

Some additional bells and whistles:
    +	Payment is on delivery. If your launcher blows up, etc., you don't get
	paid.

    +	In years where there's less than a million pounds of payload to orbit,
	we make up the difference by shipping water (since a water has a 1001
	uses in orbit). Would it be possible to store the water in a slightly
	modified shuttle external tank? In particular, paint the tank so that
	its ambient temperature is below freezing (that way, leaks aren't as
	much of a problem) and add the plumbing to let you add water even when
	the tank is partially full of ice.

What else needs to be added to make this proposal workable (I realize, of course,
that NASA would ever let it pass no matter what we did to it)?

-- 
... He was determined to discover the		David Pugh
underlying logic behind the universe.		...!seismo!cmucs!dep
    Which was going to be hard, because
there wasn't one.	_Mort_,  Terry Pratchett