"Everyone has forgotten SpaceShipOne - built for pennies by NewSpace and on a comparable timescale to the Mercury sub-orbital flights."Hi Bob! No, we haven't forgotten it. But Mercury was an orbital spacecraft that was tested as a sub-orbital. SpaceShipOne couldn't come anywhere near what Mercury was.
Wayne Hale has noted that the gap between manned U.S. Space missions from U.S. soil with American spacecraft is now greater than that between Apollo & Shuttle! Depressing.
The current gap goes back to a bad decision made during the Constellation program. Orion should have been designed to launch from an EELV instead of Ares I.
Quote from: RonM on 04/19/2017 03:13 pmThe current gap goes back to a bad decision made during the Constellation program. Orion should have been designed to launch from an EELV instead of Ares I.Orion would not have been able to do its mission (lunar at the time) if it had been down-sized to be EELV-capable. Nor would such a design effort have prevented the "gap". We are waiting right now, for example, for Starliner to fly on Atlas 5. We are probably at T-minus one year or longer to "gap's" end. - Ed Kyle
Quote from: woods170 on 04/19/2017 06:33 amThrowing the proverbial bat in the henhouse:I've never heard that expression before. What does it mean? Do bats scare the hens into running around like mad?
Throwing the proverbial bat in the henhouse:
When President Bush decided that STS would stop flying in 2010, the plan was for Orion to start flying in 2012. The Constellation Ares I debacle prevented that. Even with typical program delays, Orion on EELV would be operational today.
Look at it this way: This will be the last gap, correct?
Wayne Hale has noted that the gap between manned U.S. Space missions from U.S. soil with American spacecraft is now greater than that between Apollo & Shuttle! Depressing... Not much to say about that. ...Other than when I said a couple years ago that this would happen; I was told to shut my mouth - I didn't know what I was talking about. I don't always like being right - especially about this subject... https://twitter.com/waynehale
NASA had the solution in-hand, in time and threw it away.
Orion could have been flying operationally on a Shuttle-based launch vehicle to and from station before the last Shuttle lifted off.
.Commercial: NASA having the ability to launch a 25-mT Orion to the station together with up to 60mT of cargo with a Shuttle replacement would likely have at least delayed the Commercial option. But I do believe that commercial crew and logistical resupply to the ISS would have happened anyway because Administrator Griffin did not want to use Ares/Orion for that purpose. He was the one that actually initiated the commercial effort for ISS because Constellation was targeting the moon, not the station. So Commercial would have happened anyway, but probably on a different timescale.
Quote from: clongton on 04/19/2017 05:19 pmOrion could have been flying operationally on a Shuttle-based launch vehicle to and from station before the last Shuttle lifted off.No.Strongly insist that the flaw was in under funding ISS CRV/CTV as concurrent with Shuttle, using Soyuz as a "gap filler" . Then the "two bit" tomfoolery of the idi.ot Bush administration getting CRV/CTV on the cheap to kill a cheap program that maintained the ability to have consistent HSF development maintained as a skill all along.Then if you wanted Orion (or OSP) you might have had it ready for follow-on before Shuttle program conclusion.Everyone wants it simple, reductionist, and cheap. It's never that way.Best you can do is minimal proficiency with consistent, gradual budgets. Which can be ramped up/down.
But I'm not entirely counting the government out as you seem to be doing. There is such a thing as a commons problem, and markets alone don't solve those. Some things in space are such problems, I think.
Some things NASA does really well. In particular, I think they've been very successful with unmanned scientific probes. What hasn't been done so efficiently by NASA, in my opinion, is human spaceflight since Apollo.
That is changing with commercial cargo and crew, and those programs have worked wonderfully. But SLS is still sucking up a lot more dollars than commercial cargo and crew.If we could get NASA out of the business of doing things and instead get it limited to the business of funding competing, independent entities to do things, then we'd really have something.
I think the U.S. government has at least as much reason to fund colonization of space as it has to fund science in space. They just don't know how to do it.
The average voter would probably be more likely to think colonization of space is a good use of money than more science.
The gap between ASTP launch and STS-1 launch was 2.098 days. The gap between STS-135 launch and now is 2.112 days, so the record was broken the April 6th not yesterday.
check my math. I'm notoriously bad at time calculations
Excel says 2098 days since July 21, 2011
are y'all calculating from the end of STS 135 or the beginning?
From launch to launch: July 15, 1975 (ASTP) to April 12, 1981 (STS-1) is 2,098 days. And from July 8, 2011 (STS-135) to today is 2,111 days.
to landing of ASTP to STS 1 launch was a gap of 2,089 days, correct? which would put us now 9 days beyond that gap.