Re: NASA@50
- From: Quadibloc <jsavard@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 04:49:22 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 2, 5:25 am, Quadibloc <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Actually, there is
one flaw; one area where one size doesn't fit all. You do want to be
able to vary one critical parameter - the size of the tanks, the mass
of the fuel, relative to the size of the engine.
One could also suggest a hexagonal pattern, rather than a square
pattern, for putting the boosters together - and the boosters
themselves should have round, not hexagonal or square, walls for
maximum strength with minimum mass. So the result would look less like
OTRAG and more like the first stage of a Saturn 1-B.
Of course, what with concerns like...
rocket launches being meant to display a nation's technical
competence,
space rockets also being missiles, and thus one not wanting to
subsidize a potential adversary's military capabilities,
the difficulty of consistently carrying through, at all levels in a
company, policies of product quality in a country where most people
are desperately poor,
the fact that cost savings from cheap imports, although real to
private individuals, are illusory on a national level, since the
choice is between spending the scarce resource of foreign exchange
versus the common resource of workers in one's own country who might
otherwise be unemployed...
one can't *maximize* the cost savings of mass production by having the
rocket engines for all American, Russian, French, and Japanese
launches made by the same plant in China. Or even move down one step,
and mass produce America's rocket engines in a plant in Mexico,
because some of the objections still apply.
John Savard
.
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