Re: An alternative to Orion/Constellation?

David Spain <nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Derek and Jeff bring up several very good points.

I don't have the time right now to go into full detail
in expounding upon my responses, but I'll give you
a brief response now and hopefully a better follow-up
later.

Replies welcome....

Derek Lyons wrote:
"Jeff Findley" <jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"David Spain" <nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:88GdnZ3vC-NLfm3UnZ2dnUVZ_vmdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Such a vehicle would be much more expensive to develop than Orion.

Yes definitely. I'm not opposed to spending money if its in the right
direction.


Shuttle costs got out of control when we decided to make it big enough
to carry a significant payload other than people [1].
One of the biggest problems with the shuttle is complexity. Making
it smaller wouldn't have made it (much) less complex. Some things could
have been cheaper (i.e. TPS due to smaller surface area and fewer tiles),
but other things would remain the same in terms of complexity (life
support, crew cabin, computers, control surfaces, windows, and etc).

Many people also forget *why* the Shuttle grew like it did. Once the
unmanned heavy lift launcher was removed from the equation, NASA had
little choice. Leaving aside the niggling detail that the heavy lift
never really was in the equation in the first place in the minds of
those paying the bills.

Yes. We should have preserved ELVs for heavy lift. Saturn 1B would have
been good to have kept around.

Which wouldn't have made things cheaper - Saturn 1B was an expensive
beast to operate.

If it were just to ferry people it could have been made a lot smaller
with a lot more launch options which would have improved the economies
of everything.

The economies of everything except actually accomplishing anything
other than limited 'spam in a can' missions. If you're going to LEO
you need a destination - Apollo had to have one provided (Skylab or
Soyuz), while the Shuttle carries it's destination on its own back.

We should be focusing on building what I call a 'traveling space habitat'.
Something on the order of a very small space station that can be sent out
of low Earth orbit (LEO) on orbital exploration missions. First to the
moon, then maybe Venus, and eventually Mars.

Of course, building such a station would be a massively expensive
enterprise - one made even worse by the need to make it survive and
operate in three very different enviroments.

Yes. But it would also allow us to explore interplanetary space over
decades.

Never mind the facts! Full speed ahead!

It would be self-sufficient and fully reusable and capable of supporting
a 6 person crew nearly indefinitely.

You (David) have no idea of the vast expense and complexity that
simple sentence implies.


I totally agree. I'm not arguing from a cost perspective, but from a value
perspective. If such a thing could operate for 2 or more decades I'd think
we'd get plenty back in return.

2 or more *decades*? Your cost just went beyond any possible value.

Think about the trillions already gone thanks to credit default swaps
and mortgage derivatives, and even the loftiest cost projections pale
in comparison.

Utterly irrelevant.

How much would it help to reduce the crew size. Say from 6 to 3? Can you
give me any ball park figures on crew/cost ratios?

It would help very little - costs scale with complexity, not size.

Many people fail to realize that while WK/SS is an excellent point
solution to what it does - it doesn't scale well at all.

To your knowledge or my knowledge, yes. But who is making that claim
besides yourself? Do you have cites? What does Rutan say?

Note how many decades air launch proponents have been pushing the
idea. Note how few air launch systems there are.

As an aside, I don't for the life of me understand this compulsion to throw
everything out with each new generation of space transport and start over.

When we do this, I'll get back to you.

How much of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo went into shuttle?

Right. The engineers on the Shuttle were wet behind the ears kids out
of kindergarten with zero experience or knowledge of anything that
went before.

My whole engineering career in the commercial sector has seen incremental
improvements where technology is refined and refined.

What kind of engineering? I.E. lets compare apples to apples.

OK fair enough.

Lack of answer noted.

Why not? Why is space so vastly different an engineering discipline from
even aeronautics that the principles of incremental improvement don't apply?

You have failed to demonstrate that incremental improvements haven't
happened. For just *ONE* example - consider the orbital lifetime of a
Mercury capsule vs. anything that followed.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
.

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