h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 11:28:13 CST, in a place far, far away,
(Tom Merkle) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

(Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On 24 Sep 2003 08:15:01 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Tom Merkle) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

WHAT COULD NASA
ACTUALLY DO BETTER OR DIFFERENT THAT WOULD HELP PUBLIC SPACE TRAVEL?

It could be a better customer, with more ambition for manned
spaceflight than sending a few government employees a year. It could
stop wasting billions on dead-end projects.

Personally I think sending more than a few government employees into
space a year should be funded by the private sector. The private
sector is likeliest to come up with the total system that works the
best and cheapest for a continuing space effort.

I agree.

Allowing a committee
at NASA to pick commercial 'winners' and 'losers' who get limited
contracts results in risk-averse, expensive approaches that are
unsustainable when separated from government funding.

Who proposed that?

My point is that the whole idea of "amortizing development costs" is
meaningless when development costs are so intertwined with operating
costs. The idea of a separate "development phase" followed by an
"operational phase" is one that is lifted from commercial industry and
fits only poorly with the actual situation of an experimental vehicle
that is still being tested every time it flies.

Regardless, the development costs are still largely behind Shuttle.
Cost of improvements are a different category.

Those Development costs for the shuttle cannot be
considered to be 'sunk,' since we have spent more than their
development cost maintaining them since their construction.

Those aren't development costs.

So? no matter what 'type' of cost you label it, it's in the budget and
it has to be spent to make the vehicle fly.

Yes, and that was included in the analysis.

OSP is not starting from scratch, either.

Then that makes the projected development costs even more outrageous.

which projections are you using? the favorable ones that say 3-4
billion, the unfavorable ones that say 6 billion, or your own that
says 9 billion?

The unfavorable ones that that say twelve or thirteen billion, which I
generously reduced, even though most NASA programs tend to cost more,
not less than originally estimated.


In fact, the whole idea of using commercial production model economics
on what is still an experimental government platform is pretty silly,
as is the notion of waiting for the eventual successor to X-prize
contestants to return man to orbital space. (Actually, that's not
silly, it's sad. That's burning your 1480 Portugese caravel while you
wait for the commercial development of an 1860 Yankee Clipper. It
might happen eventually--but you'll miss out on 400 years of
exploration in the meantime.)

An interesting analogy, but it's not at all clear that it's a useful
or appropriate one.

Actually it's a metaphor.

It looks like an analogy to me, but either way, I'm not sure that it's
useful or appropriate.

But in terms of better overall system design, expandibility, and
safety, OSP makes lots of progress and is a huge departure from the
one-vehicle-fits-all program NASA has been stuck using since the end
of Apollo. I for one expect much more progress towards exploration
beyond LEO once NASA is no longer wedded to the LEO-limited shuttle.

I suspect that you'll be disappointed.

what it all comes down to in the end is that the crew are all dead and
apparently they were doomed from just after lift-off. surely some-one
must shoulder responsibility for this!