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| Begins |
September 21, 2003
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| Category |
Science: Aeronautics
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| Category 2 |
Social_Science: Economics
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| Description |
Lowering the cost of space transportation, although widely perceived as necessary, has proven intractable as a technical problem: after four decades effort the cost of space travel remains essentially unchanged. In this course we will develop a formal methodology which relates the cost of space launch to the underlying physics. Using this tool, we will show that lowering the cost of space transportation is largely immune to technical solutions; rather, we will find that the present high cost of space travel is a consequence of economic issues that will have to be addressed before any significant lowering of the cost of space transportation can occur.
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