Re: Here We Go Again!

On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 15:53:06 GMT, in a place far, far away,
fairwater@xxxxxxxxx (Derek Lyons) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

simberg.interglobal@xxxxxxxxx (Rand Simberg) wrote:

Yes. It was the National Space Transportation System, and supposed to
satisfy all launch requirements, both civil and military, so NASA had
to consider DoD requirements when it designed it. (This programmatic
approach, more than the design itself, was the most disastrous thing
about the Shuttle, and NASA doesn't seem to have learned any lessons
from it, because they did the same thing with VentureStar).

Who designated it the 'National' system? NASA?

NASA, or whoever was trying to sell it and keep it funded.

Was it an inescapable
political requirement in an era that saw very little support for NASA
in the first place?

No, but the policy establishment didn't object at the time (partly
because it was fundamentally a jobs program, and whether or not it
would actually achieve its program goals wasn't that strong a
consideration). Certainly many drank the koolaid at the time, and had
it been realized how disastrous a decision it was for military space
access, and commercial spaceflight, it wouldn't have been made, but
the Pentagon never really had any intention of giving up its ELVs, and
few were thinking in terms of competition and commercial rockets at
the time. It was still too close to Apollo, and the era in which "our
rockets always blow up," and hard to imagine it being done by
non-government entities. It was really just an extension of the state
socialist enterprise that had been established to beat the Soviet
state socialist enterprise to the moon.

Unfortunately, while we're finally breaking out of this mindset, there
are still many people who believe that only government can do human
spaceflight, and that a government monopoly remains the best way to
achieve that (for instance, no one criticizes the obvious fragility of
continuing to rely on a single means of getting American astronauts
into space, as Ares/Orion will be).

Remember that nobody makes decisions in a vacuum or with the clarity
of 20/20 hindsight.

I'm not claiming that they do. I'm simply pointing out what the
decisions were, and trying to dispel some of the mythology.
.

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