Re: Russia's Clipper

"Jorge R. Frank" <jrfrank@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I grow frustrated with people insisting on learning the wrong lessons
>from the space shuttle...

Fine post, Jorge. Re: "the development budget was capped too low," I
submit that the conventional lament about OMB and Nixon (starting
development with $5-6B rather than the $10-11B requested) implicitly
understates the scale of the challenge.

I believe that getting from where we were in 1972 to the levels of
capability, cost, and flight rate then projected for STS was a
technical/economic challenge on the scale not of $11B (call it 30-35%
of Apollo), but of multiple Apollos, in both money and time. We didn't
want to face that then, and a lot of people still don't want to face
it today.

Maybe it was Apollo afterglow -- we'd done the seemingly impossible
from 1961 to 1969, and we could do it again. Maybe it was a misleading
intuition that since we'd reached 25,000 mph for a trip of 240,000
miles, learning to reach 17,000 mph just 200 miles up cheaply and
frequently should be easier.

By "a lot of people still don't want to face it today," I mean the
frequent assertions that STS suffered from a single key technical
flaw: not being 100% reusable... or not using titanium-columbium or
active cooling instead of the airframe and TPS we got... or acceding
to Air Force demands for payload mass, dimensions, and cross-range...
or combining crew and cargo in the first place... you know the litany
as well as I. What they all have in common is an underlying assumption
that we could have achieved 1972's goals on something like the STS
budget and timetable if only we'd done it *smarter*.

I don't believe that was ever in the cards; I believe that when you
start in this gravity well, with these Isps and consequent mass
ratios, you're already in a tough, expensive corner of the engineering
trade space -- and when you add reusability's demands on engines,
airframes, mass of thermal protection and landing system, you're in an
even tougher corner. Smarter helps only so much: however you slice it,
it's a long, costly, incremental struggle to get out of that corner.

I'm sympathetic to the alt.space POV that we should put less emphasis
on technology and more on economics and organization: back off from
the bleeding edge for simplicity and robustness, concentrate on
higher flight rates, leaner infrastructure, airline-like ops and all
that good stuff.

But you don't *get to* that good stuff simply by being private rtaher
than public, entrepreneurial rather than bureaucratic, and snarking at
NASA. At $200,000 for a brief barnstorming ride on Spaceship Two,
guess what? You're starting in a tough corner of the market space.
That too will change only incrementally, through experience in many,
many flights in many, many designs. How long before there are as many
flights to orbit per year as there were airplane flights in the first
year of the Curtiss Jenny, let alone of the DC-3?

The most importrant lesson of the Shuttle is that Apollo was a sprint,
but CATS -- whether via public or private effort -- is a marathon.

-Monte
.

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