Except that a throwaway booster is going to be less expensive for many
missions than running any shuttle. Why? Safety issues. If you have a
cryogenic rocket (hydrogen and oxygen) in the shuttle hold, you've got a
bomb in there waiting to go off is something goes wrong. Same with some
other fuel/oxydizer combinations. But if you launch it on an unmanned
expendible, you don't have to worry about Astronaut safety.

Another factor is that manned boosters needs to keep their G-forces low
enough to make sure the crew gets into space without being squashed. On
expendibles you don't have this factor, and therefore you can use higher
thrust, which might save on overwll weight.

No, expendibles are a necessary part of a successful space program for
decades to come. This is one of the fallacies that the shuttle program
should have taught everyone. We TRIED going with a shuttle for all heavy
lifting jobs, and it just didn't work.

If we have any national will to do space exploration right, we NEED both a
truly reusable shuttle AND a set of medium to heavy lift expendibles.

--- Dave

"starlord inreach.com" starlord* wrote in message
...
In my opion going BACKWARDS to another throw away booster is a waste
of time and energy and money. They could have had the next gen. of
shuttle built by now and flying and be building manned mission crafts
in orbit.


"jerry warner" wrote in message
...
I think we are entering the era of the robotic probe. Hundreds
(1000's) will be
launched of varying complexity ... all at a fraction of the cost of
one manned
mission
and with far more earth-bound economic impact. Im a firm believer in
manned
missions but they need to be reserved for important ventures on a
brand new
launch platform.... Saturn V-A ?
jerry


BenignVanilla wrote:

I have been closely following the Mars mission and understand the
importance
of the experiments, but certainly all of that gear ads complexity.
Then I
look at the photo's Cassini is sending back and am in awe. So I
got to
thinking, what the complexities be, in designing a probe that is
just a hi
res camera, and a transmitter/receiver. Considering economy of
scale, if the
device were small and simple, we could product them cheaply and in
such
quantities that we could launch them all over the solar system.
Let them
wander, take photo's and send them home.

What are we talking in expense? complexity? doablibility?