On Tue, 17 May 2005 22:59:43 GMT, (Alan
Anderson) wrote:

I found something more to add that isn't merely rehashing old stuff.

Herb Schaltegger wrote:

On Mon, 16 May 2005 21:27:09 -0500, Derek Lyons wrote

Where the discussion is breaking down is Herb's insistence that we
must act as if those limits are laws of nature.

No, where the discussion is breaking down is my insistence that
*present day designs* must adhere to *present day limits*.

On the face of it, that insistence sounds reasonable. However, as George
Bernard Shaw famously noted, being reasonable often tends to result in a
lack of progress. If you never design outside the box, the limits will be
perpetuated.

Having been designed outside the box is why NASP, OSP, and X-33 are
all such successful vehicles, then? I'll try to keep that in mind.

If the launcher can't put an entire integrated Mars-bound spacecraft up
there in one piece, designing it to be assembled by a small army of
clean-room workers on the ground isn't going to result in an assembled
vehicle in a useful location. I think it seems rather plausible to assume
that the pieces will need to be put together after they're delivered to
orbit.

Then they should be assembled the same way the Command Module, Service
Module, and Lunar Module were, not by folks floating around in space
stringing wires and plumbing and installing subsystems. It's silly to
rely on assembling the vehicle the hardest way possible. The
difficulty of EVA work has been demonstrated time and again.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote reports about it.
or