Re: starship-design: FTL travel

[Curtis Manges <clmanges@worldnet.att.net>]

>  That is too small to deliver nuclear
> >war heads for the military, put man into space for NASA, or deliver
> >stuff
> >for Communications,

Say, isn't the majority of commercial space business expected to be in
launching/servicing comm sats? If your launch system can't handle this, you lose
a lot of market . . .

> but is the right size to build things in space,
> >because
> >it is the size ordinary people can still grasp and use.
>
> Hate to tell you but in space you can lift and move tons by hand, and its
> very expensive and dangerous to break down large thinks into many small parts
> for on site assembly.

I had to wonder about this one, too. I think you'd be making a project more
expensive by having to send it up in lots of small parts; more complex design,
and I'm sure that labor costs for assembly will be, well, out of this world. ;-)
This makes me wonder if there's some way to calculate a cost-break for modular
assemblies. This would tell you that the cheapest approach would be so many
chunks of such a size; more smaller ones or fewer, bigger ones would cost more.
Anyone done that yet?

> Kelly

Curtis