In article ,
Cardman wrote:
Remember, NASA isn't getting a lot of extra money for this one,

They should have 25 to 30 billion dollars to spend on this project...

That's mostly far-future money, and it makes rather optimistic assumptions
about the savings possible elsewhere in the budget. The money NASA is
getting for this effort *now* is quite modest, even assuming that Congress
fully cooperates.

Some sort of spacecraft launchable on existing rockets is inevitable,
simply because it's the easiest way to do the job on the required
schedule.

Yes, but there is also the Moon problem.

The Moon problem is off under the next administration (even assuming
Bush gets re-elected). They won't ignore it, but realistically they
can't put a lot of effort into it now.

A contributing fact is that the EELVs desperately need either more
business or outright subsidies to stay operational,

The EELV market should be serving NASA and not the other way around.

In principle, yes. In the real world, it is a political fait accompli
that there are two EELVs and that keeping both alive is a significant
priority of the US government.

so spending money on
EELV launches will be viewed rather more favorably at higher levels than
spending money developing Yet Another Underutilized Launcher.

...The answer to reducing their overheads is to develop a reusable
rocket, when then this costly hardware is being reused again and again.

True in principle, but NASA has proved singularly unable to do this
properly in practice. They tried that once, remember? More than once,
if you count the X-33 and X-34 debacles.

"It's very difficult to get cheaper by spending a lot of money, it's very
difficult to get more reliable by adding a lot of new stuff, and those are
the only things NASA knows how to do." -- Jeff Greason

That is cheaper

The only main factor is your fixed overheads, where I can promise you
that a true RLV system just needing service people and fuel will
certainly cost much less than $150 million plus a flight.

Oh, I believe that, but what has this to do with NASA? NASA is *not*
going to get money to develop such a thing -- they've promised and failed
too many times -- and if they did get funding, they almost certainly
wouldn't do it right. NASA simply has no idea how to design things for
cheap routine operations; see above quote.

and has a better growth path

...the Delta IV-H has just about been taken as far with upgrades as
this rocket can go, where the only real option to get a larger volume
of mass into orbit at once is a brand new rocket.

The key observation is that the "at once" part is not a requirement. Once
you start doing orbital assembly, the growth path is trivial: if you need
more mass, you do more launches.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |