Jeff, why waste the time?

In sci.space.policy George William Herbert wrote:

Michael Kent wrote:

I'm sure you're familiar with "Cost, schedule, quality. Pick two."

Those words are the bane of every sane aerospace engineer in the industry,
often used as a crutch by the incompetent to justify their poor perfor-
mance. Increasing quality *decreases* cost and schedule, not the
opposite.

I think your viewpoint here is correct in scenarios where the
unit marginal cost (of whatever, a widget or RLV flight or
satellite) over the program is high compared to initial design
and production line setup costs.

Space economics is not in that corner of the trade space right now,
with very few exceptions.

While I respect your opinion, and I freely admit you have much more space
engineering experience than I do, I'm going to arrogantly stick to my
guns. My experience is in high-performance aircraft (jet fighters,
military transports, helicopters, and unmanned air vehicles mainly),
and I can unequivocally say from first-hand experience that all four
of those aerospace products are smack dab in the middle of that trade
space right now.

I just don't see enough difference between, say, an RLV and a jet fighter
to believe the fighter would be in that trade space, as you put it, and
the RLV wouldn't be. (An RL-10 can't be *that* much different from an
F404 when it comes to vehicle integration, for example.)

We know we need to head that direction, but there are engineering
community inertia issues with going there, and user demand type
issues with going there, and neither is easy to make go away.

Yeah, no kidding, as this sub-thread shows. But this ain't nothing
compared to the battles going on within, say, Boeing right now. ("Your
ideas may work on such simple things as jet fighters, but they'll
never work on such complex vehicles as [insert project he tube-and-
wing commercial transports, helicopters, re-entry demonstrators] because
we're special.")

That attitude has got to change.

Mike

-----
Michael Kent Apple II Forever!!
St. Peters, MO