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Old November 20th 17, 12:42 AM posted to sci.space.policy
William Mook[_2_]
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Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

On Monday, November 20, 2017 at 3:45:50 AM UTC+13, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Were liquid flyback boosters for the Shuttle ever realistic?

YES

http://www.ok1mjo.com/all/ostatni/sp...98377 048.pdf

Recovery costs would be dramatically reduced, along with
propellant costs. LOX is $0.10 per kg and Kerosene is $0.40
per kg, whilst Polybutadiene and Ammonium Perchlorate costs
well over $2 per kg. Recovery from the sea, versus landing
at an airport, makes the SRBs way more costly than LRBs, the
SRB has far lower performance than the LRB with the LRB
being nearly twice as efficient, the cost of refuelling and
handling the SRB is 10s times more costly than LRB, the
ability to throttle the LRB makes things far safer for the
LRB than the SRB, structure weight is far lower for the LRB
than the SRB, increasing payload to orbit, haha - this is
just the short list.


You are completely ignoring development costs.


Not really. The Lockheed study I cited, and others surrounding it, covered development cost and timing rather thoroughly.

NASA never received
development funding for liquid fly-back boosters.


That is true, which is why they were never developed. The advantages of LRB vs SRB remain.

And with NASA's cost
models (especially back then), it would have cost many billions of
dollars to develop.


True. However, the rebuilding of the SRBs in the end killed the Shuttle programme.

https://www.space.com/6285-space-shu...gh-costs..html


The politicians were never willing to fund that
kind of development, especially with the huge political support that
ATK has always enjoyed.


Politicians are put in power to make people think they have power. They don't. It is the ruling oligarchy that calls the shots, and space travel doesn't fit into that paradigm.

In fact, the deep state of our owners are generally opposed to the 'moonshot mentality' of the 'cornucopians' among the non-owners, who come to believe any problem can be resolved with technology.

Fact is, the oligarchy itself creates artificial scarcities to justify and maintain their power. Anyone that challenges that is dead meat. So JFK was killed, the great adventure into space then became the moon programme as nuclear propulsion was killed, then the Shuttle programme as the booster programme was killed, and eventually no programme as the shuttle programme was killed, eventually history will be re-written as the public was encouraged to question the validity of the moon accomplishments in the first place.

Consider, at the very moment we landed people on the moon, the American people began to question our presence in Vietnam, our impact on the environment and the justice of our society as our cities erupted into long hot summers of protest.

I lived through all this. I recall distinctly, in November 1966 Comedian/Activist Dick Gregory wrote of his protests of the Gemini 12 launch. He said that despite everything he felt about what was wrong with this society, despite all the money wasted that could be better spent on things more important than space, despite all that, as the mighty Titan rocket ascended into the heavens, he felt against all desire to do so, a sense of excitement and possibility that caused him to pray for the safety of the astronauts and take pride in the fact that men could do such things!

This reported in the Thanksgiving issue of Life Magazine at the time. Gregory asked an important question that transformed the nations thinking at that time, "If we can send men to the moon, why can we not end poverty stop crime get at the root of drug abuse and end war?"

This question resonated across all races, all income levels all levels of education and political values. Why can't we? Everyone seemed to say.

This general awakening of the population to making demands of their government and of their communities and of themselves to achieve their dreams and not be dominated by their fears - is the essential element of space travel that means it MUST be marginalised by the deep state. Those who rule over us must make of space travel a trivial and trivialising operation until that oligarchy is no more, or our spirit of adventure is no more. Its one or the other, you can't have both.


Supporting SRBs also meant indirect support for the supply chain
necessary to develop and produce next generation ICBMs.


This is precisely right. The Space Shuttle and NASA generally became a captive of the military establishment following the death of JFK and the election of Nixon. This is explicitly part of the record.

Politically, it
was hard to disentangle the shuttle program from the support of that
supply chain.


After LBJ got into power, this is correct. JFKs vision was to create an alternative to the military supply chain in advance of starving it and eliminating its power - along the lines Eisenhower mentioned.

He wrote extensively as Senator, and as President about 'the moral equivalent of war' that Space Travel and research afforded. That we could attain the benefits of war, to the degree there are benefits, in peace, and in a way that permitted cooperation with our enemies in a vast new field of exploration and possibility, and made of science a great boon to humanity, instead of a great problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkKnfk4k40

This was not something expressed loudly in the press, but
I am arguing the pressure was there, behind closed doors.


https://www.c-span.org/video/?c45329...ion-conspiracy


Jeff
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