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Old January 22nd 04, 04:59 AM
Jim Kingdon
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Default The Wrong Kind Of Partisan

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,109127,00.html

I'm intrigued by your statement that phasing out the shuttle is a good
thing. What makes you think that CEV will be any better?

In favor:

* Better technical design (that's assuming a capsule, which I take to
be a consequence of it needing to go to the moon). I won't try to
rehash all the arguments here, but one possibly unfair thought I had
while browsing the latest return-to-flight summary at
http://returntoflight.org/assets/pdf...01-20-2004.pdf is how
many of the issues in the CAIB report largely (if not completely) go
away if the payload is on top of the rocket rather than the side.

* Assuming it launches on EELV, and NASA resists the temptation to
make a lot of CEV-mission-specific "enhancements" to the underlying
booster, you have a slightly larger flight rate over which to spread
the fixed costs.

* Assuming that it launches on EELV, and both Atlas and Delta compete
for the launch contracts, you get a bit more competition than
in shuttle.

Against:

* Absent any direction to the contrary, it is pretty safe to assume
that all the existing NASA bureaucracy from both shuttle and OSP
carries over to CEV.

* In doing something new, there are more ways to screw up than in
operating an existing design.

* What will it cost? Will NASA be able to afford whatever that number
ends up being? We may very well see the descope-redesign cycle that
we saw for shuttle and station.

* The above advantages which relate to EELV are pure fantasy. By the
time the astronauts can escape from the launch pad (including the
sliding wires, tanks, bunkers, etc), the entire launcher program
pushes a ton of crew-rating paperwork, and any number of additional
requirements, the thing will barely be recognized as whatever
launcher it originally derived from.