Quote:
Originally Posted by Targan
When you say "put together" do you mean assemble from a full suite of existing parts? Because in the middle of the Twilight War it would be difficult to say the least to manufacture from scratch any rocket capable of reaching orbit.
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I agree. My first thought is that you would need a stable well fed population of at least one million people before you would have the minimum infrastructure to consider building something from scratch. There are just so many dependencies. Of course at such a minimum a majority of production would need to be directed solely to space related manufacturing.
The fact that Israel (the smallest country to provide both launcher and satellite) performed a solo development and launch in 1989 when their population was 4.5 million, would seem to support that minimum population level. That population number comes with a lot of caveats though. Israel could go to the outside world for things like steel, titanium, solar panels, chemicals, transistors, etc, all of which would make things much easier from a production perspective.