It tends to be more about management appeasing the board, and the BOD appeasing the groups of largest shareholders (who tend to want their holdings worth lots of money *now* rather than 5-10 or 20 years in the future).
MKremer - 10/9/2006 2:17 AM
It tends to be more about management appeasing the board, and the BOD appeasing the groups of largest shareholders (who tend to want their holdings worth lots of money *now* rather than 5-10 or 20 years in the future).
BA, NG and LM are in a long term industry. If you are buying LM shares expecting a rapid payoff you are in the wrong stock. I would buy any one of the three companies for my 401K. Because they will all get their share of commercial and defense money.
Jim - 4/9/2006 1:19 PM
SSTO RLV is the holy grail of spaceflight. It would have never worked. Same comment applies to yinzer's post
LM have done some of the most amazing work in space and the Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket is probably the best and most reliable launcher on the planet.
I agree the X-33 or X-34 was never going anywhere near space no matter how much the best stunt pilots wanted them to. Especially traveling at mach 5 ?? we don't have the abilty to build some Gene Roddenberry type airccraft that will fly off into space on Energy that comes from nothing. There are some people who are not grounded in reality and this whole X-plane/ George Lucas Starship idea that can do a single stage to orbit is staring to remind me of the time Lockheed metric confusion caused a Mars orbiter loss
I agree the X-33 or X-34 was never going anywhere near space no matter how much the best stunt pilots wanted them to. Especially traveling at mach 5 ?? we don't have the abilty to build some Gene Roddenberry type airccraft that will fly off into space on Energy that comes from nothing. There are some people who are not grounded in reality and this whole X-plane/ George Lucas Starship idea that can do a single stage to orbit is staring to remind me of the time Lockheed metric confusion caused a Mars orbiter loss
There's nothing Sci-Fi about an SSTO. Atlas was almost an SSTO. An SSTO RLV is a bit of a reach and it's payload would be so small it wouldn't be cost effective at this moment, but it certainly doesn't depend on zero point energy or Hollywood screen writers. As for an SSTO RLV, it won't happen until there is demand for it (in the rate of launches). We don't need an SSTO RLV right now.
>As for an SSTO RLV, it won't happen until there is demand for it (in the rate of launches). We don't need an SSTO RLV right now.
Indeed, it's a chicken and egg problem. There wasn't suddenly a chicken (vehicle) or egg (demand), rather they evolved together over time until becoming our familiar breakfast and dinner components. The launch industry will have to develop in the same manner unless a dramatic discovery reduces launch costs (including DEVEOPMENT costs).
wannamoonbase - 10/9/2006 2:51 PM
BA, NG and LM are in a long term industry. If you are buying LM shares expecting a rapid payoff you are in the wrong stock. I would buy any one of the three companies for my 401K. Because they will all get their share of commercial and defense money.
That's what I thought about Honeywell. I stupidly left money in my old AlliedSignal/Honeywell 401k invested in HON stock, and man, that's been worthless over the last 6 or 7 years. It's still a lot better than losing every dollar that I put into Loral stock, but that's another story. I think I'm done with investing in company stock. Might as well let the fund managers who supposedly know what they're doing make those decisions. (Although, my other funds haven't done well either. I'm tempted just to invest in money market accounts and be happy with my measly 5% return. It beats losing money!)
But as I said, the Orion contract will not make any substantial money for LM (we're talking about a company whose revenues last year were triple the entire NASA budget), it's just pretige, the ability to say to investors "we're really high-tech; we make spaceships!", that they were bidding for.
And besides, why is everyone whining about X-33 when at the same time LM designed the very nice, very sucessful Atlas V, which is far more comparable to the CEV (in that it is not a techology demonstrator, but an existing technology, goal-oreinted program)...
Simon
The XRS-2200 had a T/W of 27, while SSME has a T/W of 54, and the J-2 (which it was based on) would have a T/W of 69 if it's performance degraded simlar to SSME at sea level.
How can you build a SSTO with that engine when it takes up fully 1/3 of the available non-fuel weight of your vehicle?
Lessons learned from X-33:
Linear aerospikes - suck.
Composite tanks - don't save much weight.
Needed mass fraction for SSTO - unobtainable with current state-of-the-art technology.
Spending 1 billion (hardly 'underfunded') to learn those lessons on the subscale demonstrator is far better than spending $5bln to learn it on a prototype venturestar, and continuing on that path now would only be throwing good money after bad down a hole. Certainly the idea should be revisited when a few basic technology improvements have been made, but for now there isn't much that's happened in the last 4 years to justify trying to do it better.
