On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 17:11:41 GMT, Rand Simberg
wrote:

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 14:37:36 +0100, in a place far, far away, "John
Thingstad" made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Actually, it's not clear that we're close at all. Fortunately, SSTO
is not necessary to make access to space affordable.

I looked over the web site at Venture Star, but I never figured out
why the program was scrapped.

I'm sure that that site would be quite uninformative. The answer is
too embarrassing to put it in an official site.

Were there fundemental problems or just that they lagged behind scedule?

There were fundamental problems, too numerous to mention right now,
but suffice it to say that they attempted to combine too many risky
and unnecessary technologies in a single test vehicle. It was a
tremendous boondoggle, but NASA didn't figure that out until they'd
wasted a billion dollars of taxpayer money on it.

The program was based on a false premises. Building the X-33 was
neither a necessary, or sufficient condition to building an SSTO, and
SSTO is neither necessary or sufficient to getting cheap launch.

yeah.. Put that way I can see what you mean.
I have said before that the focus should be on cutting pre launch
checks and assembly. Even if it requires more fuel perhaps giving
the specs a bit of leniency so you don't need to check every not
and cranny might pay off.


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