In article ,
says...

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

In article ,
says...

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

Of course, the Challenger disaster put an end to that practice and
actually made it illegal for NASA to sell commercial launches anymore.
That was the start of opening up the commercial markets in the US.
Unfortunately the USAF decided it wanted control and the original EELV
was born, leaving us with ULA. In other words, the USAF "intervention"
for national security reasons prolonged the practice of the US
Government subsidizing the US launch industry, keeping the real costs
high and actually hurting the US launch industry in the long run.

I'll admit, I initially, naively thought the decision to not allow
commercial flights was a mistake. Now looking back, I think it was the
right
move.
Of course as you say, the original EELV wasn't much of an improvement.

And heck for a while the Titan IV made the shuttle look good

Actually, Titan IV total program costs $17.6B divided by 39 flights
gives us $450 million. Using that same method gives the shuttle a per
flight cost of $1.45 billion. So while many people pointed at Titan IV
as being more expensive than the space shuttle, it wasn't really true.

Cite:

http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/.../99titaniv.pdf


I think we're comparing apples to pears here.

Yes, taking program cost is a valid way of looking at things.

That said, at the time when both were flying the quoted prices for
additional Titan IV costs were routinely quoted higher than what NASA was
quoted for additional shuttle flights.

That just indicates that NASA had much higher fixed costs with the
shuttle than USAF had with Titan IV. That's damning with faint praise
here.

Again, goes back to the argument that I stand by, that ultimately, the
incremental costs of the shuttle were in fact fairly low. It was pretty much
always the fixed costs that killed it.
With Titan IV, it appears more that the fixed costs were more reasonable,
but the incremental costs were much higher.

The big problem was that you really couldn't add many additional shuttle
flights to the manifest. There was a limit to how fast you could safely
process orbiters, build new external tanks, and refurbish the SRBs and
SSMEs.

The shuttle was a magnificent machine, but it was expensive as hell and
held NASA back with its high fixed costs. If we don't learn these
lessons, we're doomed to repeat them. SLS, unfortunately, looks to have
similar high fixed costs with an even more dismal flight rate (at most
twice per year). It's an absolutely terrible way to spend the
taxpayer's money.

Jeff
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