Elon got his rocket up ...

[Skipjack]

They are, however, a few years from going to orbit.

To be fair, one should mention that they have been sidetracked by things like building rocket racers and doing other contract work. I am not sure how long they will take to make it to orbit. They are still a while away from making it into suborbital space too, at least a few more months, I am sure.

[mrflora]

If you build it, they will come...
I think that the lower the prices are, the more people will be able to afford putting payloads into orbit. So all of a sudden, there will be new clients popping up as prices go down. I am certain of this.
Also, once SpaceX does it, there will be more competition and competition lowers the prices even more.

Edit:
Currently the price per pound on a falcon 9 is less than 2500 USD. That is if I did not miscalculate, based upon the numbers given here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/06/launch ... 9-and.html

That is pretty close already. It does not take that much imagination to see them bring it down to 1000 USD in the future.

But who would the new clients be? What would their payloads be?

Regards,
M.R.F.

[Skipjack]

Pretty much any major university in the world would have at least one team interested doing research in space. Heck, our little university here has had a man on the Mir, which was an eternity ago.
That was a one time shot with a lot help from the government and private sponsors (prestige thing).
They would love to do that again and to have more stuff and people in space, but can not afford to do so. That is just for experiments and research. I can also see tons of new telecomunications companies popping up and for manned flights, space tourists.

[GIThruster]

A lot of the technology being developed for the Lunar X-Prize has applications for relatively inexpensive deep space probes of all sorts, including landers shooting HD video on the Moon; that if the price is right, can be owned and operated by the private sector such as a university. If the cost of launch is reduced enough, and the cost of that can be spread across a couple dozen large universities (many probes/launch), then for a couple million bucks a sizable school can have its own robotic space program.

I doubt it would take much to catch on. There's more prestige in that than a winning football team.

[MirariNefas]

But who would the new clients be? What would their payloads be?

Regards,
M.R.F.

PG&E makes deal for space solar power: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/

A few hundred megawatts of powersat could take up a lot of launches. Actually it probably wouldn't be too profitable at $1000/lb, but close enough to be a good demonstration and development route. Maybe after the sats prove the technology they'd get down to setting up mining and manufacturing facilities on the moon - also worth a lot of launches.

[DeltaV]

The ongoing saga of the out-of-control Galaxy 15 satellite, threatening its neighbors in GEO, got me thinking of the untapped business potential of servicing/removing/deorbiting/salvaging GEO satellites. The dead/malfunctioning ones tend to move toward the libration points, but can cause havoc while they drift. The insurance companies might lead the way in commercializing space.

[Skipjack]

got me thinking of the untapped business potential of servicing/removing/deorbiting/salvaging GEO satellites.

There is already a company doing this, or at least starting to do this, IIRC.
I cant quite remember their name, since I am more interested in human space transport, SSTOs, RLVs, etc. So I never really read up on them more.

[kunkmiester]

Commercial space station. I'm thinking mostly a robot observatory, which would take a number of launches. If you used a multi-segment mirror to put a telescope bigger than Hubble up, as well as a multitude of other toys, and charged for time, how cheap would it have to be to get people signing up?

[Skipjack]

how cheap would it have to be to get people signing up?

I do not really think that there is some kind of sweet spot. With every dollar that the pound gets cheaper a couple of more potential clients have space within the reach of their budgets.

[MirariNefas]

What he meant was, what's the going rate for universities to get time on a space telescope?

Do universities currently pay for time on space telescopes? How is that rationed out?

But let's see, Hubble is 24,500 lbs. So, that would be $24.5 just to launch it with SpaceX.

That's about the range for a university to do it all by itself, without even any collaboration or sharing arrangements. It would have to be one of the bigger, richer universities, but still, for MIT that would be worth it. I guess it would have to be bigger and better than the Hubble to make it worthwhile though, and engineered right to avoid all those expensive servicing trips. Still, a possibility.

[D Tibbets]

What he meant was, what's the going rate for universities to get time on a space telescope?

Do universities currently pay for time on space telescopes? How is that rationed out?

But let's see, Hubble is 24,500 lbs. So, that would be $24.5 just to launch it with SpaceX.

That's about the range for a university to do it all by itself, without even any collaboration or sharing arrangements. It would have to be one of the bigger, richer universities, but still, for MIT that would be worth it. I guess it would have to be bigger and better than the Hubble to make it worthwhile though, and engineered right to avoid all those expensive servicing trips. Still, a possibility.

A launch cost of 24.5 million dollars is relatively cheap. In that situation , other costs become dominate. If the new telescope cost 1 billion dollars to build and operate over it's lifetime , the total costs would be $1,024,500,000 instead of $1,245,000,000. This would represent a ~ 20% cost savings for the program. With cheaper satellites the cost savings would be more significant.

Dan Tibbets

[Skipjack]

I think that currently satellites are over engineered and more expensive than they should be. Once launches get cheaper, it makes sense to launch cheaper satellites as well and maybe accept a higher risk of the thing failing. Then spacecraft would follow the general trend of pretty much any goods nowadays. Cheap crap with a short lifetime that can be replaced with something newer and better for half the price two years later.
Somewhere along these lines. Not that this would necessarily have to be a bad thing, mind you...

[CaptainBeowulf]

Space junk becomes a problem. If you have people putting up lots of cheap stuff that breaks down the whole time, you get to the point where you'll lose track of it, and where it interferes with most launch trajectories. There's also the danger of two large satellites colliding and turning into a cloud of thousands of bits of shrapnel, some of which can then cause other spacecraft to disintegrate, magnifying the problem. Some people I've talked to who've had jobs involving tracking objects in orbit etc. think that there's already a dangerous amount of junk up there.

In other words, you shouldn't make something so cheap that it'll just fail. If it stops doing its job, you need to still have enough control to deorbit it and burn it up.

Still, with cheaper launch costs you could accept shorter functional lifetimes or fewer redundancies for the spacecraft's main purpose, so you would still have some leeway to simplify satellite design a bit.

[zapkitty]

Space junk becomes a problem. If you have people putting up lots of cheap stuff that breaks down the whole time, you get to the point where you'll lose track of it, and where it interferes with most launch trajectories.

Actually, doing that would be illegal in most countries.

Yes, it's more of that despised government regulation

An example...

http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/libra ... ctices.pdf

[GIThruster]

If Woodward's M-E thrusters work out, even at low thrust efficiency they would be most suitable for sat station keeping sufficient to build much less expensive sats and have the ability to change their orbits, or deorbit them easily. That seems a reason for a whole new generation of less expensive but more robust and longer lasting sats. We'd probably have more launches as result.