Re: USA Today: NASA Administrator says space shuttle was a mistake
- From: Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:05:00 -0500
Jeff Findley wrote:
The CEV alone may cost less, but the CEV plus the stick plus the SDHLV is
likely to cost as much as the shuttle or more when you consider year to year
funding of the program. In other words, overall human spaceflight
transportation costs may not go down at all with this plan. NASA wants to
take shuttle components, mix them up, and claim they'll be cheaper, despite
the fact that they'll need to maintain the same facilities and likely need
the same number of people to build and fly CEV's on the stick and build and
fly SDHLV's.
I imagine overall cost is based on the total number of flights per year of both systems, and how those flights are divided up between the Stick and SDHLV.
The SDHLV will probably cost as much as a Shuttle to fly, but shouldn't have the cost associated with Orbiter maintenance and refurbishment between missions associated with it.
The Stick should be considerably cheaper to launch, and other than SRB refurbishment expenses, and maintenance on the CEV if they decide to make that reusable, doesn't really have much upkeep associated with it between stacking it for missions.
As far as the landers go, those are similar to ISS modules in complexity, so
I'd expect the cost to build and fly those to be similar to ISS costs.
If they are mass produced to a similar basic design, they wouldn't be as much one-offs as the ISS modules.
The only thing different would be that the destination is the moon versus
ISS. If that's the case, are the benefits of this plan worth the costs?
Something new to take photos of, I guess (I've got to admit I'd love to see photos of the inside of a lunar lava tube)
At least it wouldn't be as repetitive as photographing Earth from orbit.
But it still seems like a fairly pointless enterprise as currently envisioned.
They are talking about _possibly_ building a permanent Lunar base; that's a long way from starting to colonize the Moon.
For starters, you have to pick where you want to build your Moonbase at- and once it's built you are limited to manned exploration of a fairly small area around it for safety's sake in case a breakdown of some sort requires the EVAing astronauts to be rescued. I don't know- how far from the base would you dare go? 50 miles? 100 miles?
If you wanted to really learn what the whole Moon is like, it would make more sense to send a lot of robotic rovers there- you wouldn't get anywhere near detailed of data as from the area where you did manned exploration, but you could get a better idea of what the whole Moon is like, rather than just one area of it...and they can be run from Earth, rather than requiring operators on the Moon itself.
* It may be that you just strip the CEV down to a empty shell after landing and check and reuse its more expensive components, while scraping the shell itself.
Pat
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