h (Rand Simberg) wrote:

Of course there are.

Don't throw the hardware away, and fly a lot.

Rand, you say in another thread that you've never claimed to be
smarter than those you post to, which is quite true. What you do is to
keep posting these glib throw-away lines, which imply quite strongly
that the dumb bunnies at NASA have never given a thought to the
benefis of reusability and high flight rates.

You know perfectly well that that's not true. You know perfectly well
that reusability and high flight rates *were* the case advanced for
STS development, just as they have been the case advanced for any
number of proposals (and half-begun hardware developments) since.

In more extended contexts, on your weblog and the New Atlantis
article, you acknowledge that -- but there the implication is that
nobody who's gone for reusability and high flight rates has done it
*right.*

Would it kill you to acknowledge that reusability is in fact a hard
technical challenge? Would it kill you to acknowledge that while high
flight rates would lower costs, it's going to to be very hard to *get*
to those rates from where we are now, because we're not even close to
price/demand elasticity?

Because as long as you continue to tap-dance around those two facts,
it's hard to escape the implication that Rand Simberg knows some nifty
answers he has yet to share with us idiots out here.