Re: Back to the moon? When?


"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4734d6eb$0$9937$afc38c87@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jeff Findley wrote:
"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4733e170$0$26857$afc38c87@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
They're not quite as willing to risk killing people this time. Also,
they're still trying to think of a convincing reason for actually going.

B.S.

I take it you disagree, but why start your response that way?

Because your assertion flies in the face of hard data which has been
discussed here many times. That and I was in a particularly bad moon on
Friday, likely because I was starting to come down with a nasty intestinal
bug that I'm finally recovering from today.

When you're looking for reasons, look for the simple ones first. In the
business I'm in, projects have four variables: requirements (functionality),
resource (money), quality, and schedule (time)

For NASA, quality is a given. NASA doesn't start a project planning to kill
anyone and they always aim for complete mission success. Quality is
something that NASA takes great pride in. So you try to maximize quality.

Schedule is always a given, in that NASA always tries to complete a project
as quickly as possible. This is natural given that funding is year to year,
so in any given year, you try to accomplish as much as you can with the
funding you've got. You try to minimize schedule.

From NASA's point of view, funding is fixed in that they don't get to pick
and choose how much funding they're going to get. Back in the glory days of
Apollo/Saturn, this wasn't the case. The congress and the administration
gave NASA all the funding they needed to get the job done as quickly as
possible. However, the funding data also shows that once development of
Apollo/Saturn wound down, so did the funding. It wound down to the point
where they couldn't even keep the Apollo/Saturn production lines open. Most
of this happened even before the first successful lunar landing (Apollo 11).
I think the best NASA can hope for as an agency is increases which cover
inflation. This means that the new lunar program's funding is fixed (it's
tied to the fixed date shutdown of the shuttle program and the eventual
shutdown of US ISS operations).

Requirements are partly a given (set by congress and the administration when
they choose to fund, or not fund, a project), but are mostly made up by NASA
as they go. No one told NASA just how many people would need to fly on a
lunar mission. No one told NASA that the ultimate goal would be a manned
lunar base or a manned lunar rover, which starts to drive the size of your
lander, the size of your TLI stage, and the size of your launcher (since
NASA chose one cargo launch per mission architecture).

At any rate, in this case we have a project where everything becomes fixed
but the schedule. The bottom line is that it's going to take a lot longer
this time around because the funding is *a lot* lower than it was the first
time.

Jeff
--
"When transportation is cheap, frequent, reliable, and flexible,
everything else becomes easier."
- Jon Goff


.

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