"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...
Pat Flannery wrote:

Brian Thorn wrote:
So, the stick is dead, long rest the stick.

Five years later and God Only Knows how many billions wasted. Does
anyone seriously doubt Delta IV-Heavy could have been manrated by now
with that much time and money?

That's the one I would use, and it certainly could have been man-rated
by now.
We man-rated the Saturn V after only two launches, only one of which
worked right.

And if NASA tried that today, or if s.s.* had been around then - we'd
see a zillion posts/threads castigating NASA for doing so.

And rightfully so. The record of Saturn V wasn't all rosy. POGO continued
to be a very real, very dangerous problem after Saturn V was considered
"man-rated", whatever that means...

The only reason NASA pushed so hard and so fast during the 60's was because
of the Space Race with the Soviet Union. Absent that, funding would have
been far lower and NASA would have had to have stretched out its programs.
It's likely that Mercury Mark II (Gemini) would not have existed as a
stop-gap to keep setting "firsts" in space until Apollo could fly. Of
course, absent the Space Race, there likely wouldn't have been a Saturn V
either. It was far to big and expensive and was unsustainable once the
Space Race funding was cut out of NASA's budget.

And if NASA is going to start saying that there is safety to consider,
remember they were the guys who came up with the concept of manned
all-up testing with the first launch of the Shuttle.

Thereby proving the point made above.

That was because NASA was deluding themselves with artificially pumped up
safety numbers. Didn't they advertise a 1 in 10,000 failure rate back then?
It was only after Challenger that NASA as a whole admitted to the public,
and to themselves, that the shuttle was far more dangerous than advertised.

Back in the early days of the shuttle program, contingency plans like TAL
aborts and RTLS aborts made people feel better, even though there were many
people who knew just how dangerous something like a TAL or RTLS would have
been to actually execute.

Jeff
--
"Take heart amid the deepening gloom
that your dog is finally getting enough cheese" - Deteriorata - National
Lampoon