Atomic Razor

A post on Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings had Paul and I boggling today. There were two interesting money quotes:

But the main thing is that I know exactly what I’d do if I became suddenly wealthy. I’d do the same thing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did, but I’d do it right, because I already know what I’m doing, and wouldn’t have to hire other people to figure it out.

And later in the comments:

My plan would be to build suborbital vehicles and gradually evolve them to become orbital vehicles.

The trouble is that, unless we're missing something critical here, there really isn't an evolutionary path from sub-orbital to orbital.  It's one of those annoying problems that just doesn't scale the way that you want it to.  At least not without the sorts of compromise that end up making you wonder why you bothered with the evolutionary path and didn't just build a new vehicle of a different type.

But the problems don't scale well.  Sub-orbital altitudes might be in space, but you're really not there, anymore than, and, my appologies to Heinlein, you're halfway to anywhere in orbit.

Physics still applies.  Low Earth Orbit is still at the bottom of a gravity well that's quite steep.

I strongly hope we do find better and cheaper ways to get into space.  But people need to ditch the hubris.