"My definition of CATS is the ability to move tonnage to space at a price close to the cost of moving tonnage on earth a thousand miles by truck. The big question is whether we will ever have that ability, or will it be as elusive as fusion, advanced nano-tech and many other dreams."
So, about $1 per lb [$2000 per ton]?
That's not my definition of CATS.
And CATS includes Access. So, CATS could mean to me, as high as $1000 per lb, but with dependable and on time delivery. So if you want something shipped into space in say 2 weeks in future, say a monday at 6 pm. You could expect it delivered with say 80% probablity it was on time and with say, 90% chance it would deliveried within hours of that time. Another aspect of access is that anyone could make an order for such a delivery without needing a huge amount of red tape.
But as far as price per lb, I generally think of it as less than $500 per lb.
So, CATS is doable now, or was doable a decade or two ago. And CATS can be done with chemical rockets.
At $1 per lb, you simply can't use chemical rockets as the fuel cost alone exceed this by about factor of 50. And in addition, one couldn't have low volume- you need a worldwide volume of at least a million tons per year assuming you using nuclear or some other exotic way of getting stuff into space. And if we ever get to the point of moving into Space say 1/2 million tons or 100,000 tons per year, we have sort "arrived" already as far as opening the space frontier and achieving CATS.
At $1 per lb, space would cheaper place to live than any city on earth.
We could evenually get to a point of $1 per lb, but only after a decade or two at hundreds of dollars per lb with volume exceeding 100,000 tons per year. I would say $1 per lb is at least 40 to 50 years in the future- assuming we had a rational space policy. It should noted that 200 million lbs per year globally at $200 per lb is 40 billion dollars of launch per year.
Compared to:
"According to Glenn Engel, an airline analyst at Goldman Sachs, the no-frills upstarts had revenues last year of $6 billion (out of an industry total of $75 billion to $80 billion), in contrast to $3 billion in 1991."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,135798,00.html
So a 40 billion gross would about 1/2 of the size of the airline business. And probably at $100 per lb, the space travel business would become indistingishable from the airline business- meaning suborbtial travel would be a way one travels on a "airplane" for distances exceeding say 1000 miles- first class from NY to London would mean a suborbital trip.