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A comment on British technology company to 'transform' air and space travel. Parent comment

Re:British technology company to 'transform' air and space t... by 7952 on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:06PM (#10657891)
But all that extra mass does eat into the payload capacity.

A craft that is 100 tonnes dry mass and delivers 20 tonnes payload needs enough fuel to boost 120 tonnes in the last part of the flight. A centaur upper stage by comparison has a mass of just 2.2 tonnes. So for most of the flight you need much more fuel to boost the same payload.

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Re:British technology company to 'transform' air and space t... by mikeash on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @02:13PM (#10657938)
Who cares about needing more fuel? As I said in the original comment, fuel is basically free. If you manage to build a craft where the cost of extra fuel (even using an order of magnitude more) even becomes noticeable, you've already managed to make launches vastly cheaper than anything out there today.
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