"Fred J. McCall" wrote:

:Uh, no, practically none of the new launch systems which were actually
:*carried through to operational status* made any such promise. (The
:EELVs made far less ambitious promises of very modest cost reductions.)
:"You can't win if you don't play."

Well, not by the time they actually built operational hardware they
didn't. However, one of the big reasons why Shuttle got built was the
original contention that it would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
That was before the compromises started and we got the current system,
of course.

Reading Jenkins, I'm not convinced that an 'uncompromised' design
would have resulted in launch costs being any cheaper. The
'uncompromised' designs involved building something larger than a 747
that could perform in the subsonic, transonic, and hypersonic regimes,
a tall order indeed.

(Disregarding for the moment the reality of engineering - all designs
are compromises.)

It seems to me that this is a 'chicken and egg' sort of problem.
Payloads are expensive because launchers are expensive and if you're
going to spend that kind of money to get your payload up, that payload
better be engineered to death to maximize life span and such.

That's utter bull****.

Launchers stay expensive because nobody wants to put their expensive
payload up on a cheap rocket for fear that the rocket will fail. So
the rockets don't get changed much, either.

Launchers are expensive because there is virtually zero economic
incentive to make them less expensive. The mammals are staking their
future on the speculative belief that if they build it, payloads will
come.

In other words, when taxpayer pockets are available price of the
payload is no object? This philosophy is what has hurt planetary
science so badly, just by the way. The era of the 'giant probes'
meant that there couldn't be very many of them in the pipeline because
the budget for billion dollar probe programs just wasn't large enough
to sustain that.

However very little of the billion dollars was the result of high
launch prices. Even if the launch were free, the probe still has to
endure extreme environments for years or decades and still function
with extreme reliability.

The overwhelming majority of taxpayers like space exploration. What
they don't like is PAYING for space exploration at the expense of
something else. When it comes to ranking the budget, where does space
exploration fall in the list?

99% percent of the taxpayers, and the same percentage of s.s.* posters
wouldn't recognize space exploration if it bit them on the butt. They
confuse the stunts NASA has contrived to date with exploring. (Hint:
NASA has done very, very little exploring.)

:Very few of the arctic expeditions promised any sort of economic return
:at all. Private funding doesn't have to mean profit-making ventures
although it does help -- profitable projects can easily get up into
:the billions, while non-profit private funding tends to top out in the
:low hundreds of millions, last I heard).

And that sort of private funding simply isn't available for
'speculative' things like space exploration.

The real question - why was it available for Artic and African
exploration, but not space exploration?

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL