Re: Cost of slowing down?

"tomcat" <jlavine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

:Fred J. McCall wrote:
:> No. The Shuttle is a failure because it did not live up to its
:> promises by an order of magnitude.
:
:Nothing is perfect, but the Shuttle -- 70's technology -- did what
:nothing before had done. It regularly put men into orbit with plenty
:of cargo capability. It could launch satellites or retrieve them.

And it could do all that for a higher cost than what it replaced.
Something wrong with that model.

:> Now we have to step back and try and go in the right direction.
:
:What direction is that? Not taking a step backward, I hope. And, not
:taking 12 years to do it.

'That' is the direction of CHEAPER access to orbit. What the Shuttle
was supposed to do and did not.

:> Poppy***! SSTO is very difficult. What you propose is bloody
:> impossible with chemical fuels.
:
:A 6 minute SSME burn with a very high mass ratio and a 'spaceplane'
:could make orbit easily. In fact, there would be fuel left over, which
:there should be.

For some highly variable value of 'easily'. Go work your mass ratios
and strength of materials. How many engines you talking about? Still
11 of them?

:> "It makes nuclear fusion a cinch."
:>
:> Well, no. You really do believe in that magic Technology Fairy, don't
:> you?
:
:He3 fusion has been done at the University of Wisconsin. The actual
:'working' results were incredible.

All sorts of fusion has been done everywhere. What hasn't been done
is getting much net energy for any length of time. When you have that
worked out, well, we'll see you in Stockholm.

Given your penchant for 'technology by wishing hard', I'm not holding
my breath on that one.

:> :the SSME,
:>
:> We already had reliable, restartable hydrogen engines.
:>
:> :and hefty cargo capacity into orbit.
:>
:> Which could have been more cheaply achieved another way.
:
:The Saturn V used F-1 engines, not LH2/LOX, for primary boost. I
:regret that it's production was stopped. Stopping production was a
:money saver, supposedly. A false savings.

What does this have to do with anything that went before. I repeat:
we already had reliable, restartable hydrogen engines before the
Shuttle main engines were developed.

:> That's some ugly baby. It would have been much prettier if it had
:> been built as originally conceived. As it was, it sucked up all the
:> money for far too long into a dead end.
:
:How was it 'originally' conceived?

Go look at some history. There are lots of folks around here who
could discuss the original STS concepts. Start with "it was much
smaller and fully reusable with a liquid fuel flyback booster" and go
from there.

:It sucked up too much money because it flew quite often.

No, it sucked up too much money because it cost too bloody much per
flight. This was a deliberate decision made to keep initial costs
down because NASA was afraid to go as for more money yet again and had
placed all their eggs in the Shuttle basket.

Pay me now, or pay me later.

:It flew quite
:often because it was needed for satellite insertion, repair, and
:retrieval.

For some relatively small definition of 'quite often'. It never
achieved the flight rates it was supposed to achieve.

:Corporations paid for this. Money, one way or the other,
:was allocated for military missions.

Because the military was ordered not to use anything else, regardless
of the higher costs of the Shuttle.

--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson
.

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