Alan Boyle has a good rundown on the current state of play. I wonder, though about the assumptions underlying this comment:
To be competitive with other power sources, Maness figures that the powersat system’s launch costs would have to be around $100 per pound – which is roughly one-hundredth of the current asking price. Launch costs may be heading downward, thanks in part to the rise of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, but Maness can’t yet predict when the charts tracing cost and benefit will cross into the profitable zone.
Launch costs to where? They’re that high to GEO, but not to LEO, and it doesn’t say where the satellite constellation will live. It’s going to be a long time before it’s a hundred bucks a pound to GEO, though though a robust market for LEO propellant depots will be a help in that regard. But we’re not far from having a thousand bucks a pound to LEO. Anyway, it would be nice to see more details on these things.
The bottom line, though, and the reason that I’m not that sanguine on the business prospects for SBSP, at least for base load, is this:
In addition to potential environmental concerns, large-scale solar farms can’t generate a steady flow of electricity at night, or during cloudy weather. But if engineers ever figure out a way to store up the intermittent energy generated by solar cells or wind turbines, at levels high enough to keep utilities flush with power, Maness thinks that would deal a heavy blow to his powersat dreams.
“At that point, I take my marbles and go home,” he said.
Yup. It’s not the technical risk of the space hardware and launch costs, but the risk of terrestrial competition as technology evolves, that is the biggest risk of all.
Yup. It’s not the technical risk of the space hardware and launch costs, but the risk of terrestrial competition as technology evolves, that is the biggest risk of all.
This is especially true when billions of dollars are flowing into terrestrial research and extremely little into space. I have sources that tell me that Spectrolab was not able to get the USAF or any of the Aerospace companies to fund $7-$10M dollars to qualify 33% efficient cells (up from 28.5%) as they “are not needed to meet current identified requirements”.
Stupid stupid stupid.
The other threat is nuclear.
1. Thorium-fuelled exports coming from India
2. Chinese Will Build Modular High Temperature Nuclear Reactors Like Cans of Soda: in Eight Packs
3. Hyperion Power Generation Update
Increasingly, nuclear power is being mass-produced, more like a Model-T than an office building. That will bend the cost curve, to use a currently popular phrase, and change power forever. The Thorium reactor news is particularly interesting since it produces less plutonium and less radioactive waste than current uranium-based designs. Thorium is also easier to come by than Uranium, as I understand these things.
Adiabatic compressed air energy storage (adiabatic CAES), if developed, could be a strong competitor. In this concept, the heat of compression is not rejected to the environment (as it is in today’s CAES systems, requiring combustion of natural gas to reheat the air before expansion), but rather is stored separately and added back to the air before expansion.
The thermal storage could be done, for example, by taking hot air from the compressor and running it through a long chamber partially filled with thermal mass (for example, strips of iron, pieces of concrete, etc.) The air would cool as it travels down the chamber, setting up a thermal gradient. To reheat the air, it would flow in the opposite direction, gradually warming as it traveled from the cold to the hot section. Second law losses could be kept small by minimizing the delta-T between air and the thermal storage mass at each point.
I understand the conditions at the outlet of aeronautical compressors would be suitable for such systems, but that systems capable of operating over a range of pressure ratios would be needed.
The all-molten battery concept from MIT is also interesting for large scale, cheap energy storage, but there may not be enough antimony to make it scale.
Paul, I was just reading up on CAES this weekend myself, and was the first thing that came to mind when I read “if engineers ever figure out a way to store up the intermittent energy generated by solar cells or wind turbines, at levels high enough to keep utilities flush with power…”
The other key to terrestrial sources beating SBSP would be finding a way to scale such storage technology for individual or business use. One of the biggest barriers to home solar power is still storage of energy that is generated while one is out of the house at work during the day when the sun is up, especially when detached from a power grid.
Before competing with terrestrial solar/wind + storage, SBSP will have to compete with terrestrial nuclear. India and China are build a lot more nuclear capacity than they are wind or solar capacity.
The killer tech here would be sufficiently cheap extraction of uranium from seawater, so terrestrial reactors could continue to use the one-through fuel cycle for centuries to come.
A working Fusion power system would kill this idea.
An aneutronic system like P-B11 would really kill it .
Lets hope that Bussards Polywell works when scaled.
There are any number of solutions to the energy storage problem on Earth – using gasified biomass waste for peak loading is probably one of the easiest.
There was an interesting piece of research done in the Netherlands many years ago with the idea of making ~10km diameter by ~100m high artificial atolls in the North Sea and then using them for pumped hydro. It was borderline economic then.
I can not see SPSs working directly for terrestrial applications, but surely there is a large market for even high cost solar power in orbit? I would really like to see that market developed.
Simple battery technology will also likely come along way over the next few years. Lithium air batteries for example. Some of the very high cycle (~25,000) lithium batteries are probably already borderline commercially viable for grid energy storage.
A working Fusion power system would kill this idea.
Just “working” isn’t enough. It also has to be economically competitive. This is a tall order for fusion, which replaces simple, cheap, robust fission reactor cores with complex, expensive, and tempermental plasma systems. Unless uranium gets really expensive (unlikely), or the fusion reactor can eliminate the turbines & generator via direct conversion (which is mostly handwaving at this point), it’s hard to see how fusion will ever be competitive with fission.
In addition to potential environmental concerns, large-scale solar farms can’t generate a steady flow of electricity at night, or during cloudy weather.
This objection applies more to terrestrial than to SBSP; sited properly they will have much less night than ground-based, and as I understand it microwave beam penetrates moderate cloud cover more much effectively than sunlight.
(I still think the cost is a killer for applications other than, e.g., a military base in Afganistan, but that’s another issue).
But if engineers ever figure out a way to store up the intermittent energy generated by solar cells or wind turbines, at levels high enough to keep utilities flush with power, Maness thinks that would deal a heavy blow to his powersat dreams.
They already did. It is called pumped storage. Besides the more common fresh water dams there are interesting facilities such as this one.
Links to small scale Fusion projects….
http://www.ecnmag.com/article.aspx?id=183072&adcode=section=effzone
(Or just click on my name)
IMO, the application of space that appears most promising for energy technology would be the deployment of shading material from near the Earth-Sun L1 point (to counteract a warmed climate). I imagine schemes where materials are released there either as vapors or very small particles. Radiation pressure accelerates the material toward Earth (smearing out the resonant absorption lines of atoms and small molecules), but before its gone it scatters sunlight and reduces terrestrial insolation.
The advantage of this would be that relatively dumb materials could be used, not sophisticated active shading devices. Preferably, the materials would be mined in space.
Brock:
There is plenty of Uranium, even in friendly places (e.g. Australia), so western nations do not bother with Thorium. India is interested in Thorium because it has poor Uranium deposits which they prefer to use in their nuclear weapons program. Thorium deposits there, on the other hand, are rather extensive.
I always think of when I used to fix stuff for a living when you start talking about all this space infrastructure stuff. Just cuz we didn’t have a part that needed to be repaired on site, we would do what we could right then and then wait or try a workaround.
We didn’t wait till the machine was self repairing.
I get the feeling that NASA, and your conflicts with it’s mission stuff seems to be based on the idea that they want to have everything done at once, rather than just doing what they can now, while working at the remainder as they can.
Just makes sense to a normal guy like me.
I was at the NSS meeting. They need $100/kg to LEO to make it pay. They have already booked in using the unit’s extensive power to run an ion thruster to spiral out to GEO. And yes, they have taken into account the degradation induced by the Van Allens. BTW, I favor advanced ultracapacitor’s and/or nanotube flywheels for energy storage.
Oops. I meant $200/kg
There are several layers of red herrings here. For batteries to be economical, there has to be a big difference between peak load and off peak. Right now day time is peak and night time is off peak. Solar farms will flatten the peaks (the hottest days of the year when the system is at peak load tend to be sunny). There is already a huge amount of hydro in the US that can shift to cloudy days and night time if sunny daytime becomes off peak. Batteries are not part of the case against terrestrial solar and won’t be for decades until the peak shifts to night time.
If we get $100/lb to LEO, that’s a $20,000 ticket to the international space station. Forget about space solar power beamed to Earth, let’s settle LEO! This is comparable to the cost of travel when the US West was settled–a covered wagon ride took months. $20,000 is only 40% of annual US per capita gdp. There were fifty thousand people who lived in California in the 1850 census. Why transport industrial supplies for a marginal business case of reexport with a heavy subsidy when there would be tens of thousands of people who would want to settle LEO, The Moon, Mars and many other destinations at those prices?
Douglass @ 2:01 pm – yes, that’s pretty common whenever you’re dealing with government-funded R&D programs. If I had a buck for every time I heard a presentation on “first principles” end by asking for more to fund basic research, and the presenter handwaves actual applications as “that’s just engineering,” I wouldn’t have to worry about work or retirement for the rest of my days (and I’m not exactly an old-timer). The whole concept of “build what’s possible now and sink profits from it into developing the two-point-oh version” is almost foreign to government-funded R&D.
>>== Maness figures that the powersat system’s launch costs would
>> have to be around $100 per pound – which is roughly one-hundredth
>> of the current asking price. ==
> Launch costs to where? They’re that high to GEO, but not to LEO, …
?
$10K-$30K a LB to LEO is about ave. SpaceX might be able to drop it to K dollars a pound – or not.
Now the big plus though is that the launch costs are high due to limited market – virtual all is fixed costs and overhead. So if you were lifting thousands of tons a year to build huge SSPS, vrs every decade or two – you could get launch costs way down. Course for that kind of money and trouble you could do better investing on other power systems on Earth.
$10K-$30K a LB to LEO is about ave.
For what vehicles? Not for Ariane. Not for EELV. Not for the Russians.
Shuttles $30K a pound,
SpaceX Falcon1 was $11k, Falcom 9 they think might be a bit over $3k, but they were promising less earlier.
NASA is talking about $200m to $240M per EELV launch at $5k ish a pound – but then with nearly $20 billion in up program costs, if you only get 50 flights, thats $400 M per launch before you get to the bird. And those were NASA numbers – and they tend to play fast and lose with cost numbers. Assuming they are correct – thats near $650M per flight, or $13k ish per pound. So I’ld bet EELV will push $20K a pound by the time you cover all the costs.
Russians dump on the market when they have old gear – but I gather their rates are going up to.
Oh if your interested in the data on the EElV program costs its http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-04-778R
Or googling on “EELV program costs gao” and “EELV program costs gao”
SpaceX Falcon1 was $11k, Falcom 9 they think might be a bit over $3k, but they were promising less earlier.
Falcon 1 is irrelevant, given how small a part of the market it is. If Falcon 9 comes anywhere close to that cost, it blows your estimate out of the water.
NASA is talking about $200m to $240M per EELV launch at $5k ish a pound – but then with nearly $20 billion in up program costs, if you only get 50 flights, thats $400 M per launch before you get to the bird. And those were NASA numbers – and they tend to play fast and lose with cost numbers. Assuming they are correct – thats near $650M per flight, or $13k ish per pound. So I’ld bet EELV will push $20K a pound by the time you cover all the costs.
Why would you believe anything that NASA says about launch costs for a vehicle it doesn’t want to use? Are you this naive in other matters?
And I see you ignored Ariane. And you confuse price with cost. You haven’t made the case for your statement in any way.
How could NASA generate $20 billion in development costs for two vehicles that already launch? No need to answer, rhetorical question.
Still, I find Mr. Stark’s argument uncompelling. Ariane is supposed to have launch costs under $10k and Russia never seems to run out of “old gear” (well under $10k per kg), probably because they keep making more of it.
>> SpaceX Falcon1 was $11k, Falcom 9 they think might be a bit
>>over $3k, but they were promising less earlier.
> Falcon 1 is irrelevant, given how small a part of the market it is.
> If Falcon 9 comes anywhere close to that cost, it blows your estimate
> out of the water.
True – but they were talking a fraction of that a couple years ago, adn they haven’t flown the first flight – so its debatable.
>> NASA is talking about $200m to $240M per EELV launch at $5k ish
>> a pound – but then with nearly $20 billion in up program costs, if
>> you only get 50 flights, thats $400 M per launch before you get to
>> the bird. And those were NASA numbers – and they tend to play
>> fast and lose with cost numbers. Assuming they are correct –
>> thats near $650M per flight, or $13k ish per pound. So I’ld bet
>> EELV will push $20K a pound by the time you cover all the costs.
> Why would you believe anything that NASA says about launch costs
> for a vehicle it doesn’t want to use?=
I don’t and said so. However given the mear program cost numbers listed by the GAO (near $20B) push the per pound cost to$8k..
(assuming 50 total flights for the EELV, adn 50,000 lb a launch) to
$20B/50 = 400,000,000
400,000,000/50,000=8,000 a pound)
..Assuming theres some cost to do the individual launches (NASA was stating they estimated $240M a launch for their costs – and yes their numbers are off the wall but this actually seems low for them) so your over $10k per pound.
>And I see you ignored Ariane.==
Yeah I was tired of looking this stuff up by then.
> And you confuse price with cost.
We were only talking about Costs – except in the case of Russia.
Generally folks charge a price higher then their costs – Though in the govs case, its a toss up.
>You haven’t made the case for your statement in any way.
I’ve shown the per launch and per pound cost were about to over that stated in the article. You assumed Even GEO was less then that.
> Karl Hallowell Says:
> September 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 am
> How could NASA generate $20 billion in development costs for two
> vehicles that already launch? ==
That wasn’t NASA’s bill, but the DODs EELV program costs as calculated by the GAO.
I don’t and said so. However given the mear program cost numbers listed by the GAO (near $20B) push the per pound cost to$8k.
Those cost numbers are completely irrelevant. They are sunk, and already paid for by the Air Force, and they will have no effect on prices going forward. Price will be based on average and marginal cost, without amortizing them. That’s what I mean about confusing cost and price. An SPS developer doesn’t care about cost — he only cares about price.
The Atlas V heavy can put 13,000 lbs in GEO for $130M. That’s ten thousand bucks a pound. Price to LEO will be roughly a third of that. You only pay outrageous costs per pound if you use small vehicles.
It’s in dollars per pound to GEO.
William Maness and Hiroshi Yoshida come close to the same numbers I get. This is based on the assumption that space bases solar has to undercut terrestrial sources for it to make sense. In that case, we are talking 1-2 cents per kWh and as much as 25 TW over the next 30 years.
Rockets alone won’t get into the $100/pound range, but they do fine for the bottom stage of a two stage to GEO. A mass ratio three, 300 ton Skylon or other flyback booster stage, will provide 4-5 km/sec to a 50 tons second stage. The second stage would arc up to 320 km taking about 15 minutes to come down. At an acceleration of not much more than a g, the second stage would enter GTO before it fell back into the atmosphere.
That means a mass ratio 2 second stage needs 15 km/sec exhaust velocity to provide the remaining 9-10 km/sec. Chemical are not in that class, but ablation laser are. It takes about 8 GW.
If 25 tons is getting to GEO and a booster flight cost a million dollars (96 of them a day) then the cost per kg for the chemical stage is $40.
Eight GW of laser (and bounce mirrors at GEO) at $10/watt and written off over 10 years would be a capital charge of $8 billion a year. At 0.8 billion kg/year, the cost of the laser lift would be $10/kg. It could cost a lot more and still not be equal to the chemical stage cost.
With a lot of bootstrapping, the investment in the transport facilities might be as little as $60 B for a hundred ton per hour transport system.
If anyone wants to check the assumptions or the spread sheets or to work on this, please ask. Relatively little of it is my work, I just stuck the pieces together (mostly from Jordin Kare).
Keith Henson
hkeithhenson@gmail.com (my other account is down today)
>> I don’t and said so. However given the mear program cost numbers
>> listed by the GAO (near $20B) push the per pound cost to$8k.
> Those cost numbers are completely irrelevant. They are sunk, and
> already paid for by the Air Force, and they will have no effect on prices
> going forward. Price will be based on average and marginal cost,
> without amortizing them. That’s what I mean about confusing cost and
> price. An SPS developer doesn’t care about cost — he only cares about
> price.
And you really think a real launch system will charge you only a fraction of their real costs? Real prices, have to cover real costs. If folks actually would just launch your stuff at margin costs, and eat the capital costs – launch costs now would be a tiny fraction of what is charged.
Also of course – and folks skip over this – no current launcher could support construction of any significant SSPS. So you’d need to develop a new one, and that commercially developed one must cover its total costs with its prices.
And you really think a real launch system will charge you only a fraction of their real costs?
No.
Either you didn’t read what I wrote, or you don’t understand accounting, or both.
Also of course – and folks skip over this – no current launcher could support construction of any significant SSPS.
Who said it would? Who are you arguing with?
> Keith Henson Says:
> September 23rd, 2009 at 2:57 pm
A nit, but:
> ==
> That means a mass ratio 2 second stage [to GEO] needs 15 km/sec
> exhaust velocity to provide the remaining 9-10 km/sec. Chemical
> are not in that class, but ablation laser are. It takes about 8 GW.==
??
Given your assembling parts of a SSPS to LEO – connect it to a electromagnetic tether so it uses its current to pull itself magnetically to GEO? Prety much no investment needed, and infinate ISP. Slow as hell – but who cares.
>Rand Simberg Says:
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
> Either you didn’t read what I wrote, or you don’t understand accounting, or both.
Or neiather -I read what you say and certainly know basic acounting.
You said I was confusing price and cost – I basically said price will have to be over costs or your not going to get suppliers – and outlined the lowball costs.
You seem to be insisting supliers will undercut that, and normally do – hence supplying cost to orbit far bellow costs. Hence why your so surprized by the authors assumption current lift costs are, and will in the near future be, in the $10,000 a pound range to leo
You also said:
>==
> Those [program and dev] cost numbers are completely irrelevant.
> They are sunk, and already paid for by the Air Force, and they will
> have no effect on prices going forward. Price will be based on average
> and marginal cost, without amortizing them. ==
In the case of the EELV, thats possible since its costs could be defined by a political whim – rather then pricing to recover costs. But given the cost to the gov [program costs divided by number of flights + margin costs] would be FAR higher then just the margin costs – its virtually inconceivable that the gov would allow the EElV makers to offer commercials such a major discount. Yes doing so would allow dramatic cost/price reductions, and could even open up space in a major way, and offer cost savings to the government — but that’s really irrelevant in the current political climate. If the companies tried the press and politicians would eat them alive for “ripping off” the government.
Kelly wrote:
“So you’d need to develop a new one, and that commercially developed one must cover its total costs with its prices.”
That’s one way of doing the accounting, but not the only one.
When I worked the proforma statement, the cost per kg to GEO didn’t appear. The real constraints are that the power satellite business has to sell power (or power sats) at a rate that under cuts the fossil fuel and nuclear sources and the business as a whole has to make money — quickly. (In this case, profitable in a little over 8 years, see Figure 6 here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485)
To simplify the accounting I just had the power sats sold for 1.6 B/GW as they were constructed. That’s way under any other source so there should be plenty of customers.
The model assumed the company owned the transport system and paid for developing it and running it out of profits from selling power sats. It also fed a lot of energy back into making propellant and operating the lasers.
Keith
In the case of the EELV, thats possible since its costs could be defined by a political whim – rather then pricing to recover costs. But given the cost to the gov [program costs divided by number of flights + margin costs] would be FAR higher then just the margin costs – its virtually inconceivable that the gov would allow the EElV makers to offer commercials such a major discount.
I didn’t say that they would. They are making money delivering GEO payloads at $10K/lb.
At 96 flights per day, 35,000 per year, and a five year write-off of $20 B development that’s $115,000 per flight. At $290 M/vehicle and 500 flights, the vehicle wear out cost ($580,000) is 5 times the development cost per flight.
This is an entirely different world than communication satellites launches.
Isn’t math fun?
>Keith Henson Says:
> September 23rd, 2009 at 10:59 pm
>> Kelly wrote:
>>
>> “So you’d need to develop a new one, and that commercially
>> developed one must cover its total costs with its prices.”
> That’s one way of doing the accounting, but not the only one.
==
> The model assumed the company owned the transport system
> and paid for developing it and running it out of profits from
> selling power sats. ==
That’s a point – if you eat the launch costs in the total SSPS program costs that would allow you to cover the costs. Though if you did SSPS in a serious way (a fleet of 10K ton SSPS) your launch market scale would drive down cost to orbit by a couple orders of magnitude.
Which getting back to the article this threat is responding to, they miss the point that the high current launch costs are due to the negligible market for launch. If your doing serious SSPS, your talking about launching several thousand tons per year – more per year then in all of past history – which would be so different from current launch environment, that I don’t know why they mentioned it!
>== It also fed a lot of energy back into making
> propellant and operating the lasers.
?? don’t follow this bit?
>>== It also fed a lot of energy back into making
>> propellant and operating the lasers.
> ?? don’t follow this bit?
Oh sorry, forgot your carbon synthesized fuel. Can’t see how you could compete with oil at $60 a bael or whatever its likely to stay at in the next few decades.
Oh, also,you might want to consider the DOD’s work on BlackSwift, specifically its hydrocarbon fuel turbo ramjets that were rated for over Mach-6. That would allow a much cheaper adn more compact kero/LOx fueled craft then the skylon. And given their are actual jet engine manufacturers signed up to build them with off the shelf parts (I think they have prototypes tested), its a lot nearer term then Skylon – no mater how cool their PDFs are.
Kelly writes: “If your doing serious SSPS, your talking about launching several thousand tons per year”
200 GW per year at 5,000 tonne per GW is a million tons to GEO per year. That’s a little more than 100 tons per hour. 200 GW is the immediate starting point, the actual construction needs to pick up to 1 TW average and 2 TW per year at the 25 year mark.
“Can’t see how you could compete with oil at $60 a bbl”
The hydrogen part of a bbl of oil at a penny a kWh (off peak power perhaps) is $20 a bbl. Capital cost scaled from Sasol’s plant would be around $10. $30/bbl synthetic oil would compete very nicely against $60/bbl oil. The energy efficiency between electrolytic hydrogen and synthetic oil is ~75%. Considering the problems with handling LH2, that’s probably worth it.
Re BlackSwift, if they will perform better than Skylon, reaching 200-300 miles suborbital with a 50 ton laser stage, for less, I am all for it.
> Keith Henson Says:
> September 24th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
>
>> Kelly writes: “If your doing serious SSPS, your talking about
>> launching several thousand tons per year”
>
> 200 GW per year at 5,000 tonne per GW is a million tons to GEO per
> year. That’s a little more than 100 tons per hour. 200 GW is the
> immediate starting point, the actual construction needs to pick up
> to 1 TW average and 2 TW per year at the 25 year mark.
Damn, your not talking small start up scale! 200GW a year is enough to replace all US electric generating capacity of in 5 years!!
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html
You’ld saturate the global market in 20 years or so? Why so much?!
Hell for 100 ton lift per hour you don’t need skylons – you need fleets of StarRakers!!
Course on the plus side – a convention-ish rocket RLV fleet could deliver to LEO for under to well under $100/lb even including. LEO to GEO if you use some electric powered low to no reaction mass tug wouldn’t need to costmuch of anything to dev or operate.
>== It also fed a lot of energy back into making
> propellant and operating the lasers.
?? don’t follow this bit?
If you go three pages into here
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/SkylonLaserAndCO2-2.pdf
and look at the right column, at the point where 160 GW has been built, 20 GW is being fed back into making propellants and powering the lasers.
Kelly wrote:
“replace all US electric generating capacity of in 5 years”
That’s the scale. Actually most of the production would probably go to China and India for the first 5 years.
“You’ld saturate the global market in 20 years or so? Why so much?!”
Synthetic liquid fuels. If we want to keep flying, oil has to be replaced. Actually, 25 TW by 2040 should be just enough to phase out carbon sources. After that, if we want we could build another 15 TW and feed that to synthetic oil plants. Then pump the oil back into the empty oil fields. We could take 100 ppm of carbon out of the air in 20 years. (Takes 300 TW-years.) If the global warming people are right about CO2, and we tried hard enough, it’s possible we could bring on an ice age by the end of this century.
The other reason is that the lasers don’t scale well. With 8GW the payload size is 25 tons and the orbital mechanics is that it takes 15 minutes.
I doubt the capacity of the transport system will be upgraded beyond 100 tons per hour. The big increases to 2 TW/year (1000 tons per hour) will probably be tapping lunar and then asteroid materials.
> Keith Henson Says:
> September 24th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
>> “replace all US electric generating capacity of in 5 years”
> That’s the scale. Actually most of the production would probably
> go to China and India for the first 5 years.
I really can’t see selling that much capacity that fast. They aren’t going retie their existing infrastructure that much faster then projected. I know, that India and China need a lot of new capacity – but they were expecting to add maybe 1,000 GW every 20 years each. Your talking about putting that much new capacity on the market in half that time! And its not like your the only provider of GW in the world.
😉
>> “You’ld saturate the global market in 20 years or so? Why so much?!”
> Synthetic liquid fuels. If we want to keep flying, oil has to be replaced. ==
Ah, even with China and India coming up to first world standard of living, they arn’t going to use up all the oil and coal in the world – and no one in the world is going to bother with Kyoto or whatever treaties (they’ll point at one another and wag fingers – but not do anything) so your over producing?
>== If the global warming people are right about CO2, ==
Ah they haven’t made any projections yet.
>==
> The other reason is that the lasers don’t scale well. =
So why use them.
😉
Kelly wrote: “I really can’t see selling that much capacity that fast. They aren’t going retie their existing infrastructure that much faster then projected.”
I depends on the price. Not even considering pollution from dirty coal, if SBSP is half the cost, coal plants are history.
” I know, that India and China need a lot of new capacity – but they were expecting to add maybe 1,000 GW every 20 years each. Your talking about putting that much new capacity on the market in half that time! And its not like your the only provider of GW in the world.
Undercutting other sources by half, this source would pick up 90% of the energy market.
>> “You’ld saturate the global market in 20 years or so? Why so much?!”
> Synthetic liquid fuels. If we want to keep flying, oil has to be replaced. ==
“Ah, even with China and India coming up to first world standard of living, they arn’t going to use up all the oil and coal in the world – and no one in the world is going to bother with Kyoto or whatever treaties (they’ll point at one another and wag fingers – but not do anything) so your over producing?”
No. Consider how much energy it takes make synthetic liquid fuels. This is proposing $30 per bbl synthetic oil. Huge market.
>== If the global warming people are right about CO2, ==
“Ah they haven’t made any projections yet.”
Doesn’t matter.
>==
> The other reason is that the lasers don’t scale well. =
“So why use them.”
Because lasers are the only way I know to get both high exhaust velocity and high thrust. This leads to low mass ratio which gets the cost down. The push from 4km/sec to 14 km/sec is only $10/kg with lasers.
I am not particular though. If you have a better approach, let me know.
> Keith Henson Says:
> September 25th, 2009 at 8:14 am
>>Kelly wrote: “I really can’t see selling that much capacity that fast.
>>They aren’t going retie their existing infrastructure that much faster
>> then projected.”
> I depends on the price. Not even considering pollution from dirty coal,
> if SBSP is half the cost, coal plants are history.
Unlikely. You are talking about gov run utilities world wide, and it takes time to turn over massive infastructure.
Also assuming you canundercut by thathuge a amount is –optimistic.
>> ” I know, that India and China need a lot of new capacity – but they
>> were expecting to add maybe 1,000 GW every 20 years each.
>> Your talking about putting that much new capacity on the market
>> in half that time! And its not like your the only provider of GW
>> in the world.
> Undercutting other sources by half, this source would pick up 90%
> of the energy market.
Even at that your dumping product on the market faster then any projections of new demand. AND your ignoring competition undercutting you. Mid east oil costs them $5 a barrel. If your dropping a lot of power on the market – your driving down the cost of your competitors as well.
And frankly I can’t see anyone agreeing to be 90% dependant on your source – and presumably your production group.
>>>> “You’ld saturate the global market in 20 years or so? Why so much?!”
> Synthetic liquid fuels. If we want to keep flying, oil has to be replaced. ==
>=
> No. Consider how much energy it takes make synthetic liquid fuels.
> This is proposing $30 per bbl synthetic oil. Huge market.
How sure are you of the $30 a barrel cost? I hope your not just basing that on energy costs?
>>>== If the global warming people are right about CO2, ==
>>“Ah they haven’t made any projections yet.”
> Doesn’t matter.
??
Theres no scientific evidence that CO2 based global warming is happening, NOAA NASA etc are showing the globe is not warming as the greenhouse gas advocates think – the vastbulk of scientists in any way related to climtae disagree with it – and no Nation has done anything to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
How does this not mater?
>>>==
>>> The other reason is that the lasers don’t scale well. =
>>“So why use them.”
>== If you have a better approach, let me know.
I did mention a electromagnetic teather tug. No reaction mass, and a mile or few of a electrified wire loop is a lot simpler. And you are shiping electric power production parts up to GEO?
Ion or electrothermal thrusters. I.E. stuff actuallyflown!
😉
Kelly wrote
> Keith Henson Says:
> September 25th, 2009 at 8:14 am
> It depends on the price. Not even considering pollution from dirty >coal, if SBSP is half the cost, coal plants are history.
“Unlikely. You are talking about gov run utilities world wide, and it takes time to turn over massive infastructure.”
This is 25 years from first power to the grid to displace existing power plants and oil.
“Also assuming you can under cut by thathuge a amount is –optimistic.”
If you can’t make an engineering case for this low a price, then you can’t get the market. If you can’t get the market, there is no point in power satellites at all.
snip
> Undercutting other sources by half, this source would pick up 90%
> of the energy market.
“Even at that your dumping product on the market faster then any projections of new demand.”
I don’t think so. The Chinese market is 100 GW/year. The Indian one is similar.
“AND your ignoring competition undercutting you. Mid east oil costs them $5 a barrel. If your dropping a lot of power on the market – your driving down the cost of your competitors as well.”
Energy isn’t completely fungible. In any case, the world demand for electricity and heating has to be met before people start making synthetic oil. That’s at least 10 years into the project.
“And frankly I can’t see anyone agreeing to be 90% dependant on your source – .”
People never had a problem with being 90% dependent on hydro. What reason can you think of that would make SBSP less reliable than hydro? (Especially with spare units.)
“and presumably your production group”
To simplify the accounting model and reduce the capital investment, I assumed the power sats would be sold to utilities or pools of utilities as completed. You provide an excellent additional reason to use a “build them and sell them” model.
> No. Consider how much energy it takes make synthetic liquid fuels.
> This is proposing $30 per bbl synthetic oil. Huge market.
How sure are you of the $30 a barrel cost? I hope your not just basing that on energy costs?
$20/bbl energy, $10/bbl capital cost. That’s based on Sasol’s plant in Qatar.
>>>== If the global warming people are right about CO2, ==
>>“Ah they haven’t made any projections yet.”
> Doesn’t matter.
??
“Theres no scientific evidence that CO2 based global warming is happening, NOAA NASA etc are showing the globe is not warming as the greenhouse gas advocates think – the vastbulk of scientists in any way related to climtae disagree with it – and no Nation has done anything to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“How does this not mater?”
First, I don’t think anyone would try to bring on an ice age by lowering the CO2 content of the air. (It was a joke!) Second, lack of energy will kill people long before they are drowned by rising oceans even if the global warming people are right.
>>>==
>>> The other reason is that the lasers don’t scale well. =
>>“So why use them.”
>== If you have a better approach, let me know.
“I did mention a electromagnetic teather tug. No reaction mass, and a mile or few of a electrified wire loop is a lot simpler. And you are shiping electric power production parts up to GEO?”
The problem is not moving parts from LEO to GEO it is the cost of getting to LEO. Using high thrust, high exhaust velocity laser ablation lets you go only four tenths of the way to LEO on chemical fuels and the big push, 10km/sec out of 14, comes from high exhaust velocity laser propulsion.
Why not do it all with lasers? This method lets you get 4-6 times as large a payload out of the same sized lasers.
“Ion or electrothermal thrusters. I.E. stuff actually flown!”
😉
If they will support 100 t/hr at under $100/kg to GEO and require the same or less investment, show me and I will support your proposal. I am not attached to this Rube Goldbert method, I just don’t see any less expensive way. If you do, please put numbers on it.
Hum, these are getting long.
>Keith Henson Says:
> September 26th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
>>> It depends on the price. Not even considering pollution from dirty >>>coal, if SBSP is half the cost, coal plants are history.
>> “Unlikely. You are talking about gov run utilities world wide, and
>> it takes time to turn over massive infastructure.”
> This is 25 years from first power to the grid to displace existing
> power plants and oil.
Power plants are 40 year investments – and your production rate was about 20years to replace all existing electric power!
>> “Also assuming you can under cut by that huge a amount is –optimistic.”
> If you can’t make an engineering case for this low a price, then you
> can’t get the market. If you can’t get the market, there is no point
> in power satellites at all.
So if you can’t take over the world electric suply – its not worth doing?
Well, at least thats better then the greens going off about windmills and such with no capacity beyond nibbling some crumbs of the market.
😉
====
> I don’t think so. The Chinese market is 100 GW/year. The Indian one is similar.
That much growth a year? I heard they were projecting under half that?
>> “AND your ignoring competition undercutting you. Mid east
>> oil costs them $5 a barrel. If your dropping a lot of power on
>> the market – your driving down the cost of your competitors as well.”
> Energy isn’t completely fungible. In any case, the world demand
> for electricity and heating has to be met before people start
> making synthetic oil. That’s at least 10 years into the project.
Well I ment competician for both the electricity and the synthetic oil.
>> “And frankly I can’t see anyone agreeing to be 90% dependant on your source – .”
> People never had a problem with being 90% dependent on hydro. ==
There was more then one suplier, and damn hard to take out the suply nuless you can take out weather or the damns.
> What reason can you think of that would make SBSP less reliable
> than hydro? (Especially with spare units.)
Well it is easier to take out the sats. Building the sats would unavoidably drop cost to orbit to $10’s/lb. Which makes GEO accessible to terrorists.
But mainly your single project istalking about becoming a world monopoly for suply. Thats not going to go over well – even if you sell them to other retailers.
>>> No. Consider how much energy it takes make synthetic liquid fuels.
>>> This is proposing $30 per bbl synthetic oil. Huge market.
>> How sure are you of the $30 a barrel cost? I hope your not just
>> basing that on energy costs?
> $20/bbl energy, $10/bbl capital cost. That’s based on Sasol’s plant in Qatar.
So mideast oil could always undercut you, but offshore and deep wells (and oil sands) couldn’t without new tech…
Though– I think lowered energy costs atproduction site would cut costs of some of those — oil sands especially.
fyi.
>>>==
>>>>> The other reason is that the lasers don’t scale well. =
>>>>“So why use them.”
>>>== If you have a better approach, let me know.
>> “I did mention a electromagnetic teather tug. No reaction mass,
>> and a mile or few of a electrified wire loop is a lot simpler. And
>> you are shiping electric power production parts up to GEO?”
> The problem is not moving parts from LEO to GEO it is the cost of
> getting to LEO. ==
With your projected market scale a standard rocket RLV should easily do that for well under $100/lb. Mixing chemical and laser doesn’t help your cost only your mass ratio. Given the Fuel/Lox cost yo orbit with a RLV is < $8/lb, and the bulk of the costs are capital costs adn servicing costs – your mixed mode launcher seems likely to INCREASE rather then decrease the cost to orbit? I.E. your increasing the complexity and capital costs of the launch system.
== please put numbers on it.
ok – next
Assuming something like a Kero/Lox biamese shuttle with 25 tons of cargo, and 1,000 tons of Lox/Kero per launch. RD-180 derived rockets and F100 jets on each. 25 ton cargo cap. 60ton dry weight orbiter.
$10B for development of the craft (mid way between the DC-X $5B and Boeing 60 passenger RLV $16B numbers.) and a launch site able to support a couple ship sets in high rotation.
$400M purchase cost per craft (actually with the fleet size you’d need, the price per could come down)
Repair labor costs for DC-X were projected at 100 man days per fight. A Biamese should be tougher, and with all the lessons learned over your high flight rates you should bring servicing costs down and up service life and reliability up. Assuming 200 man/days per flight (2 ships per launch), your still only a about a hundred $k of labor hours per flight. A couple $100k for fuel. Maybe $4M a flight of all labor consumables per fight. If the ships last hundreds of flights – add a couple million more. Thousands of flights, add a couple hundred(s) thousand per.
If your talking a million tons to GEO per year, that’s 2,740 tons per day. That’s 110 flights per day. So the capital costs to R&D the craft and buy them and the infrastructure getting eaten by so many flights, unlike normal flights where it dominates – here its only tens of thousands of dollars per flight.
50,000 lb/per flight $4m per flight, gives you $80 a pound to orbit. With RD-180-ish and F100 engines and off the shelf gear.
If you want to bring that cost down, make more durable and less labor consumptive ships. A couple years at these flight rates should do that pretty easily. Hell McDonnell Douglas demoed a well-trained crew (some described them as NASCAR like) could swap out the engines of a F-15 in 15 min!!
As for tech upgraded. I’d strongly suggest you develop better engines. LOx/Kero Rocket/ramjet combined cycle engines could double the average ISP from ground to orbit. So you can go SSTO and drop the biamese. Which halves the labor (no real labor load to service ramjets) and etc costs per launch. I ran some numbers and using a electromagnetic launcher to get you up to 300 mph or so, can cut a couple % points worth of fuel weight (I think nearly 5% of the take off weight) since your up to better ram speed with less rocket lox consumption. So you can think about HTOL off a custom runway. Less costs to prep and turn around the craft etc. So you could look at $40/lb to LEO.
By the way Keith, I really have a hard time figuring out what the numbers in your PDF tables refers to — so I’ not sure what your counting as R&D costs, servicing costs, purchase costs, etc for your skylon configuration?
How about more details? HTHL? Mass ratios and mass for both stages?
Before I was pointed to the Skylon, I was modeling with a 1/20th scale down of the first stage of a 6000 ton Neptune to get a suborbital flight to 320 km. And we started at 40,000 feet, using a ring of eight 50 ton thrust fan jets to get the lightoff away from the landing area.
Gary Hudson says that if you are serious about reusing rockets, 15% structure is the minimum.
The best numbers I have heard optimistic experts are ~300/kg to LEO and $500/kg to GEO. That’s 3-5 times too high for power sats to make economic sense.