Re: How to be immune from budget cuts


"Pat Flannery" <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:11jk8e4qnj8qc98@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Because the way this question is phrased it seems to imply that you are
> going to have some sort of fly-off between the EELV's and then keep the
> winner and at least one other in case the winner develops some sort of
> problem down the line.
> That would be fine if all the EELV contenders had exactly the same
> payload capability and vehicle interface, as then you could design one
> CEV to fit all of them, but they don't have the exact same capabilities-
> so you are either going to have to build more than one type of CEV so
> that it will fit each of them, or go with the one that has the lowest
> performance when building the CEV to make sure that any of the competing
> boosters can loft it.

This logic is flawed.

The government makes sure there are two EELV's because if there is a problem
with one, they can launch on the other. This is because there are
satellites critical for national security that need to be launched even if
one of the EELV's has a problem and isn't currently available.

The EELV payload interfaces may not be exactly identical, but it's not a big
problem to launch a particular satellite on either of them. Same thing goes
for payload capacity. It's easy enough to design your CEV for both
payloads. On the larger EELV, you could carry more consumables or cargo,
but you could still launch on the smaller EELV.

So tell us again, why would two different EELV's be acceptable for launching
government satellites, but not for a CEV?

> Then there is the whole mess with having different launch pads for each
> of the contenders, each equipped with all the crew-related support
> structures for a CEV carrier.

Yet somehow, the government is able to deal with this when they launch
satellites.

> Even if you went with any of the EELV options that are being discussed
> you still fall shy of the weight NASA wants for the CEV.

They picked that weight so they would be "required" to develop their own
launch vehicle. If congress and the Administration required NASA to use
EELV, they would quickly find the weight "savings" necessary to make this
work. CEV is, after all, still a proposed vehicle. The CEV design isn't
past the PowerPoint stage just yet.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.


.

Relevant Pages

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