On Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 2:59:30 AM UTC+13, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"bob haller" wrote in message
...

On Thursday, December 3, 2015 at 1:23:09 PM UTC-5, bob haller wrote:
I wonder about this......

with a shuttle like vehicle on the top of the stack, ad no solids. plus
the ability to launch very heavy loads when desired.

the 2nd skylab could of been put in orbit, ISS could of been built with
fewer larger modules

no solids to have leaky joints, no foam loss damaging TPS.

and we could of slowly done more apolo applications missions.

was the shuttle ever cheaper to operate than apollo

plus the 3 apollo stacks left to rot in the weather could of been used,
either for the 3 planned missions that were canceled, or for other missions

Slight detail, but it would have been hard to use 3 of them since only 2
flight vehicles were left. Apollo 20's Saturn V launched Skylab. 18,19 new
flew.

The rest of the components are non-flight worthy.

(and as I recall, really none of the 3 on display are fully composed of
flight worthy equipment but a mix of stuff, but I could be wrong.)

--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net

In inflation adjusted dollars we've spent $1.1 trillion on NASA since its inception, most of that on the ISS and Space Shuttle. $0.4 trillion from 1958 to 1978 pays for most of the iconic stuff the historians talk about. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Redstone, Jupiter, Saturn, Atlas, Titan rockets, including all the major launch and tracking infrastructure that comes from that era. The deep space stuff that came later was built and launched in this era.

Then $0.7 trilion is spent after 1978 developing a Space Shuttle and the ISS mostly.

Over this same period $5.5 trillion is spend on missile defense during the cold war, according to Brookings. We has something like 2,200 heavy missiles and 6,200 big warheads from 1958 through 1964. The notable detail is that the ICBMs were built around the same core technology as the space launchers. The ICBMs then took a turn away from cryogenics toward solids, and the bombs became smaller and more accurate. So, there was a disconnect from the space faring side and the ICBM side of things.