Thread: CEV PDQ
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  #26  
Old May 9th 05, 07:17 PM
Pat Flannery
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Ed Kyle wrote:


So to get the costs for a shuttle-derived system down
to something reasonable - say $400 million per flight
at four launches per year - NASA would have to establish
a program that only employed around 6,500 (total, for
everything from factory to control center to parking
lot security, etc). This is only about one-third of the
total currently involved in the space shuttle program.
(Or it could employ the same number of workers at 1/3rd
the pay.)


Is there any breakdown regarding how many of those are related to
orbiter inspection, TPS repair, and SSME (I assume that the cargo
version wouldn't use SSMEs, but rather expendable RS-68s for the sake of
economy and system simplicity) postflight checkout and maintenance?
Also if we go over to a unmanned system, we don't have to meet the
stringent requirements for SRB safety, so we can probably reuse more SRB
segments.

Pat