*I think it’s funny that the Wikipedia article on the Vostok 1 says, “first known human spaceflight in history”. I guess someone is still holding out for that Nazi moon base.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5_dOEyAfk

Level 2 requires the rocket to fly for 180 seconds before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface constructed with craters and boulders. The minimum flight times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform a real descent from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon. First place is a prize of $1 million while second is $500,000.

Fox News says North Korea launched, “Defying World Pressure“.

Sunday’s move was a bold act of defiance against Obama, Japanese leader Taro Aso, Hu Jintao of China and others who pressed Pyongyang in the days leading up to liftoff to cancel a launch they said would threaten peace and stability in Northeast Asia.

The U.N. Security Council approved an emergency session for Sunday afternoon in New York, following a request from Japan that came just minutes after the launch.

“North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint and further isolated itself from the community of nations,” Obama said in Prague, urging Pyongyang to honor the U.N. resolutions and to refrain from further “provocative” actions.

No, it was defying Obama, not the world.

“The World” is effectively powerless. The US is the ONLY country capable of any realistic long term warfare beyond it’s own borders. The UN, unless you want someone to rape your children, is completely ineffective. The UN can paper the world in resolutions but without the military power of the US they are worthless.

Kim Jong Il (or whoever is really in charge of North Korea) is taking advantage of Obama’s weakness and naiveté.

The fact is, that until there’s an economic incentive to put people in space, it’s not going to happen.   Tourism is a start and will probably open up Low Earth Orbit to reasonably cheap access.   Unfortunately we don’t have a reason yet to go anywhere else.

Peter Taylor has some great info on his site

1. Peter A. Taylor says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 9:21 pm – EditDear Mr. Andrews,

   I apologize for my colleagues’ rudeness, but they are mostly correct. The problems with chemical rockets have nothing to do with scaling. We don’t know how to make cheap small ones, either.

   The mass of a pressure vessel scales linearly with volume. Aerodynamics favors larger vehicles, and larger launch vehicles tend to cost less per pound than smaller ones. There’s no reason in principle why you couldn’t build a rocket as large as a supertanker and launch it from water as Robert Truax (Seadragon) and Jim Akkerman (Advent) proposed. But you’d never find enough customers at $5000/lb. to fill your manifest. The problem is that all launch vehicles, large and small, are prohibitively expensive for commercial manned spaceflight.

   However, you may be correct about having struck a nerve. Here are a couple of dirty little aerospace engineering secrets:

   1. Nobody really knows why rockets are so expensive.

   2. Nobody will admit that they don’t know.

   Rand Simberg claims that it’s because of economies of scale, but I’m not persuaded. I prefer Maxwell Hunter’s “lack of intact abort capability” explanation.

   You have an economics background. I would be delighted to hear your reaction to my Launch Cost Rant (a discussion of 19 different explanations I’ve heard):

   http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/launch.htm

   Once you get into low Earth orbit, I agree that large vehicles need something better than chemical rockets. But for Earth launch, if we don’t know why chemical rockets are so expensive, how do we know that something else is going to be better?

   Peter Taylor

2. alan says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 11:40 pm – EditI’m a layman on rockets, although I’ve been a “space nut” since I can remember (watched the 1st moon landing live so it’s been a while.) I do know something about aircraft and aircraft maintenance, I was a helicopter mechanic in the Marine Corps.

   Economically speaking, I think there is one main reason rockets are so expensive, although everything on your list (except for the first three) contributes to the problem.

   Economies of scale in rocket production and operation.

   Historically, rockets have been one off builds. One offs can’t use the economies of scale that an industrial production line brings to cost savings. Since World War II even airplanes haven’t been built in true assembly line quantities. A few hundred or even a few thousand built won’t drive the price down much. You have to build tens of thousands or even millions. Then the true economies of scale kick in.

   Think of cars. If your car had to be built one at a time, and the factory only made a few hundred a year from all custom parts, it would cost millions of dollars. Sure enough, if you look at Formula 1 cars, those are the prices they deal with.

   Anything built as a one off will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the product of an assembly line. Prototypes of everything from cars to electronics are hundreds of times more expensive than the final product. I used to work for a company that designed microchips, and the chips they made to test designs were incredibly expensive because the production runs were so small. When they finalized the design, they shipped it off to one of the big fabs and the chips were made for pennies a piece.

   I mentioned airplane production in WWII. The US built over 300,000 airplanes from 1939 to 1945, and on assembly lines like cars. I think that if we made that many rockets in six or seven years, they’d be pretty cheap.

   Notice that I’m talking about economies of scale in building the rockets, not in launches. Operational economies of scale have more to do with manpower costs than anything else. Imagine NASA trying to launch a rocket every day of the year. Epic Fail.

   One off production methods equal expensive. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Dams and tall buildings are one offs too, and incredibly expensive, but the expense is amortized through constant use over decades. A new 737 costs around $50 million (Boeing made 5700 as of 2008, an average of 142 a year. Still not what I consider production line quantities.), but an airline will fly it full, at least a couple of times a day, every day for years. A Boeing 777 is estimated at $187 – $250 million yet airlines are buying them because they know they can amortize the costs over thousands of flights. If you could do that with the space shuttle, you’d amortize the $1.7 billion cost of the Endeavor pretty quick, but it would be impossible to fly that pig twice a day, every day for years. Instead we get estimates of $1.3 billion per launch over the life of the program for the space shuttle.

   If we get to the point where we can build a rocket that can be launched thousands of times with minimal turn around expense and low operational manpower requirements then they’ll approach airliner economies of scale in operation. On the other hand, if we can build hundreds of thousands of them, the cost per rocket would be lower and we wouldn’t have to worry about amortizing the costs over long term operation.

   Frankly I don’t see hundreds of thousands of rockets being built. So the best bet is to come up with a robust design that can hold up with minimal maintenance for thousands of flights.

   So I’ll throw it back to you, as an aerospace stress analyst, is it possible to build an airframe and engine system for a rocket that can hold up for the thousands of flights required to amortize it’s costs down to levels comparable with those of airline operations? I think your point about intact abort capability falls in there somewhere.

   (My bet is no, but I’d love to be wrong.)

Point out that chemical rockets don’t seem to be able to scale to get us to millions of people out in space, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth commences.  Not to mention the ad hominem attacks.   I’ve even been told to “Leave the rocketsurgery to those qualified to comment on it”.

No explanations of how my reasoning is wrong, just comments like “that’s stupid” or “completely nonsensical”.

The severe lack of reasoned discourse makes me think I might have struck a nerve.

That may be, after all I’m not a rocket scientist. However, I do have some experience scaling things, and while I might not know the correct rocket terminology, I think I’m correct when I stipulate that chemical rockets will never lift enough mass off the Earth to allow a meaningful human presence in space.

The Saturn V, the biggest thing we’ve ever launched (just go with me here) weighed in at 6,699,000 lbs, or 3,350 tons, and managed to put a measly 100,000 lbs (50 tons) into lunar orbit.

So lets pretend we want to build a classic L5 space colony.  How big does it have to be?

Well, I don’t know, but the Empire State Building weighs 365,000 tons and it’s only about a thousand feet tall.  Some of the L5 colony designs are several miles long.   But for the sake of argument, lets start small.

The Snarky L5 habitat will weigh 500,000 tons.  I suspect that’s too small but you’ll see it doesn’t matter for the sake of this thought experiment.

The Saturn 5 could lift 50 tons into Lunar orbit.  L5 is comparable to lunar orbit for our purposes so let’s start building Saturn Vs to launch material and start building the Snarky Space Colony.

We’ll need 10,000 Saturn Vs.    (NASA only ever launched 12, so we might have a problem or two.)

If we launched one a day, we’d be done in 28 years.  How likely is that?

Lets wave a magic wand and double the payload to L5.

That’s now 5,000 magical rockets.

Double it again.  The rocket gods have blessed us with a magical chemical rocket drive that can put 200 tons of payload at L5. (I’ll leave it to the real rocket scientists to explain how unlikely that really is.)

That’s 2,500 super magical rockets.

For one colony.

Oh.  Did you want more than one colony?

How about supplies and such?

Oh, you cry foul…   That’s cheating to insist on L5.  Build it closer, like in Low Earth Orbit.

OK, lets see, the Saturn V could put 130 tons into LEO.   It doesn’t help much.  The biggest step is getting the mass off Earth in the first place.

It’s just not going to happen with chemical rockets.

On the other hand, General Atomics figured they could launch a 400 meter diameter, 8,000,000 ton (Yes, that’s 8 million tons) payload at once.  And not just to Earth Orbit, but anywhere you wanted it.

Of course the REAL problem with NASA’s Orion is that they stole the name from the real Orion, a nuclear spaceship design that could have given us the entire solar system decades ago if it weren’t for the nuclear test ban treaty.

A 1959 report by General Atomics explored the parameters of three different sizes of hypothetical Orion spacecraft:

	“Satellite” Orion	“Midrange” Orion	“Super” Orion
Ship diameter	17–20 m	40 m	400 m
Ship mass	300 t	1000–2000 t	8,000,000 t
Number of bombs	540	1080	1080
Individual bomb mass	0.22 t	0.37–0.75 t	3.00 t

The biggest design above is the “super” Orion design; at 8 million tons, it could easily be a city. In interviews, the designers contemplated the large ship as a possible interstellar ark. This extreme design could be built with materials and techniques that could be obtained in 1958 or were anticipated to be available shortly after. The practical upper limit is likely to be higher with modern materials.

Most of the three tons of each of the “super” Orion’s propulsion units would be inert material such as polyethylene, or boron salts, used to transmit the force of the propulsion unit’s detonation to the Orion’s pusher plate, and absorb neutrons to minimize fallout. One design proposed by Freeman Dyson for the “Super Orion” called for the pusher plate to be composed primarily of uranium or a transuranic element so that upon reaching a nearby star system the plate could be converted to nuclear fuel.

The key is that this thing could have been operational with 1950′s tech. As far as I’m concerned, if Doctors Dyson and Pournelle said it was doable then it was.  Nuclear power is still the only thing that’s going to allow us to get large amounts of mass into Earth orbit and beyond.  Nothing else has enough specific impulse to do the job.

Update:  Welcome Instapundit readers!   Please don’t melt the servers.

Update: Welcome Transterrestrial Musings readers!

Update: More on scaling chemical rockets here.