h (Rand Simberg) wrote:

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 14:57:27 -0800 (PST), in a place far, far away,
(Derek Lyons) made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

"Lou Adornato" wrote:
You're ignoring the crucial fact that NASA walked away from this technology
and refused to even reconsider it because it would make subsequent decisions
look bad.

Which technology? Air dropped spaceplanes? Air dropped launchers?
Hybrid engines? Which?

Suborbital reusables.

Problem is, why should NASA have chased this technology? Which of
it's organizational goals does it meet?

It's not all that strange that it took a bunch of bootstrap organizations 40
years to catch up to the state-of-the-art, with NASA effectively blocking
all commercial incentive to do so and thereby driving away any potential
investors.

So what happened to all the rocketry pioneers in the twenties,
thirties, and forties... Years before NASA came along, not a one made
a serious attempt at commercial space, manned or unmanned.

Then it was a technology problem.

A reasonable answer.

D.
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