"Skorpious" wrote in message
...
But what if ???

What if we built one or two large reliable space craft in orbit. They
would
not be intended to land on Earth so forget the heat problems. It would be
accessed by the mini shuttle that is planned for 2012. They would be
intended for astronauts to take very long trips, around the Moon, asteroid
and comet visits, maybe a trip around Mars. That would solve several
problems reasonably without the added risk of landing humans in alien
evironments which can come later.

Is this an idea or would it just be as bad as our current shuttles and
station ???



These deep space shuttle ideas have been around a long time, at least since
the early 1950s when von Braun popularized his ideas for lunar bases and
manned Mars missions. They are usually part of a scheme to build a permanent
space transportation infrastructure connecting the surfaces of the Earth,
Moon and Mars. NASA has studied such concepts since the late 1950s,
continuing to the present.

The weak link in these ideas invariably turns out the be the cost of getting
to the first node in this system, namely low Earth orbit (LEO). See Harry
Stine's book "Halfway to Anywhere" for the details. NASA's shuttle was
supposed to solve this problem. In 1970-71 it was hyped and sold to the
White House, Congress, the OMB and the taxpayers as the means for low-cost,
assured access to space. Unfortunately, the $200 per pound of payload
promised by the shuttle proponents back then has turned out to be about
$10,000 per pound (a 5000% underestimate).

Lotsa people today believe that the real problem is NASA which is slammed as
a bungling, bloated bureaucracy that has tied the shuttle in wads of
unnecessary and expensive red tape. Actually, the problem lies in the
technology. The Apollo era technology embodied in the present shuttle is too
brittle and unreliable to reduce operating cost below about $500M per launch
(today's bucks). Unfortunately, however, it's the only technology we have.
Research on launch vehicle and manned spacecraft technology has been in
stasis for the past 30 years. And with the available $3-4B per year for this
kind of stuff going to patch up the present shuttle and keep it operating,
these space transportation infrastructure ideas keep receeding into the dim
and distant future. It's fun to think about these things, but I wouldn't get
my hopes up too high.

Later
Ray Schmitt