Even traditional contractors will benefit from spacex succeeding in that they will emulate many things spacex does and it will be great PR for a beligered US aerospace industry often viewed as over priced and inflexible.
I have a lot more fate in F9 then I do in Ares I and if you care about the US space program you too should hope for the best of luck to spacex.
Quote from: Patchouli on 07/20/2008 11:53 pmI have a lot more fate in F9 then I do in Ares I and if you care about the US space program you too should hope for the best of luck to spacex.Hope is one thing. Counting one's chickens before they hatch is, well, foolish.
Quote from: Jorge on 07/21/2008 01:23 amQuote from: Patchouli on 07/20/2008 11:53 pmI have a lot more fate in F9 then I do in Ares I and if you care about the US space program you too should hope for the best of luck to spacex.Hope is one thing. Counting one's chickens before they hatch is, well, foolish.I for one do truly wish the best of luck to SpaceX. But as Jim points out they have a long way to go before proving the F9 and Dragon. I find it rediculous that NASA is betting the future of a $100B investment in the ISS on such a long shot bet. NASA should simutaneously pursue a lower risk option such as the tug proposed by Loral or ARCTUS proposed by SpaceHab in the last COTS go around. Developing a transfer vehicle is hard enough, trying to also develop a rocket on a shoe string budget is asking for failure.Success in multiple ISS delivery options will bode very well for commercial support of exploration. These delivery vehicles could be the foundation to the EELV class rocket supported exploration, enabled with very little NASA required investment.
Quote from: libs0n on 07/20/2008 08:02 pmMoon missions were canceled. A downsizing of the space program, sure. But to not further use the investment that had been made in hardware, to throw that all away to build the Space Shuttle, was a choice, a decision made by management at the time.Can you clarify this? If Saturn production was canceled in August 1968, how is the decision to build the shuttle involved?
Moon missions were canceled. A downsizing of the space program, sure. But to not further use the investment that had been made in hardware, to throw that all away to build the Space Shuttle, was a choice, a decision made by management at the time.
Because of the choice to build the Space Shuttle, a resumption in production of elements that could have been incorporated in a post Apollo space program was not pursued. The Shuttle was one of many options available to meet future needs. NASA picked what it did, got behind it, and funding went to that; that choice was an opportunity cost that meant competing options were unrealized.
Everything stems from bad management. There were options other than the Shuttle. The decision to build the Shuttle, the commitment to it, were choices They were poor choices.
Correct. But what does this really mean? If you could have done it but haven't you still don't have it. Europe could have Hermes by now, the Soviet Union could have landed on the moon in the 1970ies ... This argumentation is pretty pointless. It may explain, but it does not give you the capability.All these points can be summarized: If there is a will to afford it (and if it is technically possible, by the laws of physics), you can do it. Priority means in the end: Budget, and you need the will to afford it. And this will has been, still is and very likely will be lacking. It has been there only once: In the very special climate of the cold war. Get over it, it won't come again.
I say concentrate on LEO because this is the only place we are willing to afford, independent of the "why". If we want human spaceflight - for whatever reason - this is the least expensive place, the only we are willing to afford. And we can learn a lot by going there, as Jorge said, to once make going beyond affordable too.
It would be truly ironic if the most economic vehicle to run turned out to be the Shuttle. LEO is what it's economics were meant for.Now if it didn't have those pesky wings, no crew escape capability (ejection seats? anyone? anyone? Buehler?), mixed crew cargo, and crew not on top of vehicle.
QuoteEverything stems from bad management. There were options other than the Shuttle. The decision to build the Shuttle, the commitment to it, were choices They were poor choices.The decision to build a shuttle in and of it's self wasn't really a bad one the only bad thing was the execution and the fact they put all their eggs in one basket.A lot of mistakes and compromises were made during the course of the program many of which were forced onto NASA by outside forces.The size of the shuttle and it's payload requirements can be partly blamed on congress forcing NASA to partner with the USAF
this also cause a change from titanium to aluminum construction back in 1970 and forced use of the fragile ceramic TPS.
The first attempt really should have been with a smaller vehicle with a much smaller cargo bay.
Maybe something like the Soviet LKS or MAKS shuttles or if they wanted a full sized shuttle maybe Max Faget's NAR A shuttle.Yes I know the NAR A shuttle's orbital mass is the same as the orbiter that eventually flew but it had less critical performance goals and also would have experienced lower heating during reentry.
The second bad decision was the shut down of the Saturn and Apollo assembly lines before the shuttle could enter service.They should have at least kept one pad configured for the Saturn IB and been given funding to have a supply of Apollo spacecraft until 1983.
The third bad decision was a combination of NASA being forced to complete the shuttle on a deadline and on a budget that was several billion short this lead to the SRBs being used and the decision to remove some safety equipment.
The last one was putting all eggs into the shuttle basket which helped contribute to feature creep.
Still the shuttle did prove to be fairly successful and met a lot of it's mission requirements and should not be used as an example of why RLVs fail.
Lastly it has no Russians engines I find it foolish to depend on a foreign engine for the manned space program esp when international relations typically are subject to constant change.
Thats why I find it a little foolish that NASA didn't select a second low risk COTS D option for crew transport such as spacehab or spacedev just as a backup since these two companies vehicles make use of the already proven EELVs.
An R&D focused organization - such as the NACA that developed the X-15 - would have had the right mentality to attack that design trade space with an array of X-vehicles. But that organization was absorbed by NASA, and effectively became extinct on May 25, 1961, when the resources of the agency were marshalled to meet one monolithic operational goal. The agency began evolving from an R&D organization to an operational one. And then, to make matters worse, the agency succeeded in that goal and became convinced that the Big Monolithic Program, not Many Small Programs, was the One True Way.The agency hasn't been the same since. All the other debates - capsules vs, spaceplanes, science vs operations, EELV vs Direct, what have you - have been mere sideshows.
Quote from: Patchouli on 07/22/2008 04:53 amThe first attempt really should have been with a smaller vehicle with a much smaller cargo bay.Close. The first attempt should have been a smaller vehicle with *no* cargo bay. It should have been an X-vehicle, not saddled with operational requirements of *any* description.
An R&D focused organization - such as the NACA that developed the X-15 - would have had the right mentality to attack that design trade space with an array of X-vehicles. But that organization was absorbed by NASA, and effectively became extinct on May 25, 1961, when the resources of the agency were marshalled to meet one monolithic operational goal. The agency began evolving from an R&D organization to an operational one. And then, to make matters worse, the agency succeeded in that goal and became convinced that the Big Monolithic Program, not Many Small Programs, was the One True Way.
Quote from: Jorge on 07/22/2008 05:53 amAn R&D focused organization - such as the NACA that developed the X-15 - would have had the right mentality to attack that design trade space with an array of X-vehicles. But that organization was absorbed by NASA, and effectively became extinct on May 25, 1961, when the resources of the agency were marshalled to meet one monolithic operational goal. The agency began evolving from an R&D organization to an operational one. And then, to make matters worse, the agency succeeded in that goal and became convinced that the Big Monolithic Program, not Many Small Programs, was the One True Way.The agency hasn't been the same since. All the other debates - capsules vs, spaceplanes, science vs operations, EELV vs Direct, what have you - have been mere sideshows.Great post, Jorge.Reading through your post, I was about to make the comment you made above (my emphasis) about NASA morphing into an operations agency vs. a R&D agency like NACA. Then you beat me to the punch, as per usual. I think one of the reasons that has made it even harder for NASA to return to its NACA R&D roots is that their operations were so manpower intensive that the "standing army" has politically become a self-licking ice-cream cone. You don't need 15,000 engineers and technicians in order to do some X-15 tests. In fact, if you get much more than a hundred people involved in an X-project it's already getting bogged down. But yeah, what you said.~Jon
Exactly. Look how fast the Skunkworks went from back of the envelope to fully operational SR-71. Pure efficiency!
Quote from: clongton on 07/22/2008 08:10 pmExactly. Look how fast the Skunkworks went from back of the envelope to fully operational SR-71. Pure efficiency!I agree with a lot of Jorge's post as well. One thing to remember about doing things in the Skunkworks model is that it requires several key things:- Clear and concise objectives- Focussed oversight- Lack of outside interferance- Lots of money.Given those 4 ingredients, a small dedicated team can do an awful lot in a short time.Many of NASA's recent programs have had none of these key things.Paul
Great discussion this weekend, folks!QuoteLastly it has no Russians engines I find it foolish to depend on a foreign engine for the manned space program esp when international relations typically are subject to constant change. Grrrrr!! Repeating myself again: Russian-built RD-180's are stockpiled here, more than sufficient to allow time for development and qualification of a domestically-produced version which has made its own significant progress. The evidence is out there on what their true availability is. If you choose to ignore it, you only look irresponsible. I'm tired of the deliberately uninformed, Cassandra attitude.