Market Demand Methodology for U.S. Suborbital Reusable Launch Vehicle Industry

Abstract

An approach was developed that leverages 100 years of transportation technology to forecast technological capability needed to sustain a commercial market for the suborbital reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) industry. Maturity of sRLV technologies will enable the development of commercial capability necessary to support market demand. The analysis is centered on the economic physics (EcoPhysics) of transportation, taking into account the cost of cargo capacity, as well as the speed, range, and altitude of these transportation vehicles with respect to time and technology. The methodology includes the transportation system’s flight profile, program mode (experimental, commercial, military, etc.), reusability, human rating, government policies, and other factors. Twenty-four characteristics of the new flight candidate are systematically compared to equivalent characteristics of historical transportation systems. Three historical systems are selected to simultaneously derive cost estimates of each new flight system, converging over time to a single cost. The analysis outputs over 40 demand and supply variables that are displayed on a dashboard, comparing each sRLV provider candidate under evaluation. The following data for each of the candidate systems are estimated: development costs, recurring vehicle costs, vehicle predicted catastrophic failures, system operations and maintenance costs, and predicted flight rate capability. The analysis includes a benchmarking algorithm that compares the characteristics of proposed candidates to leading-edge technological trends. Benchmarks also ‘roll up’ subcategories and provide a total system evaluation. A key feature of this approach is that the benchmark values are a composite of a range of “non-like” parameters such as performance, operations cost, safety, comfort, and esthetics, facilitating realistic comparison of fundamentally different types of systems.