Armstrong lauds another spaceman

Fred J. McCall wrote:

I remember original Shuttle promises of prices in the range of $100/lb
to orbit. Then they started compromising.

Even without compromises it wouldn't have reached $100/lb, or anywhere
close to that. The whole idea was just junk, which is why NASA is not
being tasked with developing a replacement.

Paul

"Fred J. McCall" wrote:

:Uh, no, practically none of the new launch systems which were actually
:*carried through to operational status* made any such promise. (The
:EELVs made far less ambitious promises of very modest cost reductions.)
:"You can't win if you don't play."

Well, not by the time they actually built operational hardware they
didn't. However, one of the big reasons why Shuttle got built was the
original contention that it would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
That was before the compromises started and we got the current system,
of course.

Reading Jenkins, I'm not convinced that an 'uncompromised' design
would have resulted in launch costs being any cheaper. The
'uncompromised' designs involved building something larger than a 747
that could perform in the subsonic, transonic, and hypersonic regimes,
a tall order indeed.

(Disregarding for the moment the reality of engineering - all designs
are compromises.)

It seems to me that this is a 'chicken and egg' sort of problem.
Payloads are expensive because launchers are expensive and if you're
going to spend that kind of money to get your payload up, that payload
better be engineered to death to maximize life span and such.

That's utter bull****.

Launchers stay expensive because nobody wants to put their expensive
payload up on a cheap rocket for fear that the rocket will fail. So
the rockets don't get changed much, either.

Launchers are expensive because there is virtually zero economic
incentive to make them less expensive. The mammals are staking their
future on the speculative belief that if they build it, payloads will
come.

In other words, when taxpayer pockets are available price of the
payload is no object? This philosophy is what has hurt planetary
science so badly, just by the way. The era of the 'giant probes'
meant that there couldn't be very many of them in the pipeline because
the budget for billion dollar probe programs just wasn't large enough
to sustain that.

However very little of the billion dollars was the result of high
launch prices. Even if the launch were free, the probe still has to
endure extreme environments for years or decades and still function
with extreme reliability.

The overwhelming majority of taxpayers like space exploration. What
they don't like is PAYING for space exploration at the expense of
something else. When it comes to ranking the budget, where does space
exploration fall in the list?

99% percent of the taxpayers, and the same percentage of s.s.* posters
wouldn't recognize space exploration if it bit them on the butt. They
confuse the stunts NASA has contrived to date with exploring. (Hint:
NASA has done very, very little exploring.)

:Very few of the arctic expeditions promised any sort of economic return
:at all. Private funding doesn't have to mean profit-making ventures
although it does help -- profitable projects can easily get up into
:the billions, while non-profit private funding tends to top out in the
:low hundreds of millions, last I heard).

And that sort of private funding simply isn't available for
'speculative' things like space exploration.

The real question - why was it available for Artic and African
exploration, but not space exploration?

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

In article ,
says...
99% percent of the taxpayers, and the same percentage of s.s.* posters
wouldn't recognize space exploration if it bit them on the butt. They
confuse the stunts NASA has contrived to date with exploring. (Hint:
NASA has done very, very little exploring.)
hmmm.... not just "little exploring", or even "very little exploring",
but "very, very little exploring". On the other hand, without doing too
much research:

1959+: X-15 program. Exploring high speed/high altitude flying.

1959: early Explorers discover the Van Allen belts.

1960: Echo, first commsat.

1962: Mariner explores Venus.

1964: the latter Ranger flights explore the moon.

1964: Mariner Mars flyby.

1965-1966: Gemini explores long duration space flights, orbital rendez-
vous.

1966+: Surveyor explores the lunar surface.

1966+: Lunar Orbiter explores the entire Moon.

1968-1972: Apollo lunar missions.

1969: Mariner Mars flyby.

1972: Pioneer flybys of the outer planets.

1973: Skylab. Exploring long-term flight, solar research.

1973: Mariner flyby Mercury/Venus.

1975: Viking. Mars surface exploration.

1977+: Voyager explores the outer planets.

1978: Pioneer Venus

1989; Magellan Venus

1989: Galileo Jupiter

1990: Hubble Space Telescope

1990: Ulysses Jupiter and solar orbiter

1966: Mars Global Surveyor

1997: Cassini Saturn

2003+: Spirit and Opportunity on Mars

2004: Messenger Mercury


Admittedly a lot of NASA current budget goes into ISS/Shuttle, which
does very little if any exploring beyond what was done with Skylab and
MIR. Admittedly, things like Apollo-Soyuz had more to do with
international politics than exploration. Admittedly there were a fair
number of flights focused more on engineering issues than exploration
(e.g., Gemini III, Apollo 9). But the overall record does show several
significant examples of exploration.


The real question - why was it available for Artic and African
exploration, but not space exploration?

In raw dollar terms, some money is available. Telstar is an early
example. We can hope the success of Rutan's SpaceShipOne will encourage
more.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

The loss of the American system of checks and balances
is more of a security danger than any terrorist risk.
-- Bruce Schneier

On 2005-02-19, Fred J. McCall wrote:
:
:Whether Russian launchers are actually underpriced is not clear. They
:*are* inherently cheaper than Western designs, due to more automation on
roduction lines and much less manpower-intensive operations, even if you
:disregard the small matter of lower wages.

Is the 'more automation' claim really true? I find that rather hard
to believe, given the general state of Russian manufacturing. I would
think the price advantage was due to some small economies of scale
(they do build more of them), lower wage costs, and a huge currency
advantage when selling for hard currency.

Remember that Russian launchers are essentially incrementally improved
versions of old designs - and those old designs were *really* produced
in mass. (As of 2000, there had been over 1,600 R-7 launches...)

As I understand it - the factory facilities were designed for mass
production, large numbers of them in parallel, so a lot of the capacity
"lingered". Most changes were relatively minor - new upper stages,
changed engines - whilst the bulk of the hardware remained the same, so
the old production lines were still usable. Whilst there would be little
reason to introduce such capital-intensive automation *today*, were you
constructing the manufacturing facilities from scratch, it was a lot
more sensible in the 1960s. Of course, the Atlas and Delta construction
facilities are mostly new, and as such...

--
-Andrew Gray

On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 23:45:41 -0600, Kevin Willoughby made the sensational claim that:
Admittedly a lot of NASA current budget goes into ISS/Shuttle, which
does very little if any exploring beyond what was done with Skylab and
MIR.

Only about a third.
--
This is a siggy | To E-mail, do note | Just because something
It's properly formatted | who you mean to reply-to | is possible, doesn't
No person, none, care | and it will reach me | mean it can happen

On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 19:05:48 -0600, Derek Lyons made the sensational claim that:
99% percent of the taxpayers, and the same percentage of s.s.* posters
wouldn't recognize space exploration if it bit them on the butt. They
confuse the stunts NASA has contrived to date with exploring. (Hint:
NASA has done very, very little exploring.)

What sort of bizarro world definition of "exploration" do you subscribe to?
This smells like "let's define 'exploration' as something NASA doesn't do,
because this is how I think it should be" NASA bashing horse**** to me.
"Stunt" and "Exploration" are not mutually exclusive.
--
This is a siggy | To E-mail, do note | Just because something
It's properly formatted | who you mean to reply-to | is possible, doesn't
No person, none, care | and it will reach me | mean it can happen

(Derek Lyons) wrote:

:"Fred J. McCall" wrote:
:
::Uh, no, practically none of the new launch systems which were actually
::*carried through to operational status* made any such promise. (The
::EELVs made far less ambitious promises of very modest cost reductions.)
::"You can't win if you don't play."
:
:Well, not by the time they actually built operational hardware they
:didn't. However, one of the big reasons why Shuttle got built was the
:original contention that it would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
:That was before the compromises started and we got the current system,
:of course.
:
:Reading Jenkins, I'm not convinced that an 'uncompromised' design
:would have resulted in launch costs being any cheaper. The
:'uncompromised' designs involved building something larger than a 747
:that could perform in the subsonic, transonic, and hypersonic regimes,
:a tall order indeed.

I'm not convinced it would have, either, but that was certainly the
marketing claim to sell the original program.

:It seems to me that this is a 'chicken and egg' sort of problem.
:Payloads are expensive because launchers are expensive and if you're
:going to spend that kind of money to get your payload up, that payload
:better be engineered to death to maximize life span and such.
:
:That's utter bull****.

Well, THAT is certainly a convincing argument, logically and factually
supported.

:Launchers stay expensive because nobody wants to put their expensive
:payload up on a cheap rocket for fear that the rocket will fail. So
:the rockets don't get changed much, either.
:
:Launchers are expensive because there is virtually zero economic
:incentive to make them less expensive. The mammals are staking their
:future on the speculative belief that if they build it, payloads will
:come.

This seems to fly directly in the face of economics. Your position is
apparently that competition and market forces don't apply to the
market for space launch.

Tell me, if you had a payload to put up and, of two equal launchers,
one launcher was 25% cheaper than the other, is your claim that the
price difference would not enter into your decision as to which
launcher you would place your business with?

:In other words, when taxpayer pockets are available price of the
:payload is no object? This philosophy is what has hurt planetary
:science so badly, just by the way. The era of the 'giant probes'
:meant that there couldn't be very many of them in the pipeline because
:the budget for billion dollar probe programs just wasn't large enough
:to sustain that.
:
:However very little of the billion dollars was the result of high
:launch prices. Even if the launch were free, the probe still has to
:endure extreme environments for years or decades and still function
:with extreme reliability.

Please post what you think the launch cost of such a probe is. I
think use of the phrase 'very little' grossly understates the case.

:The overwhelming majority of taxpayers like space exploration. What
:they don't like is PAYING for space exploration at the expense of
:something else. When it comes to ranking the budget, where does space
:exploration fall in the list?
:
:99% percent of the taxpayers, and the same percentage of s.s.* posters
:wouldn't recognize space exploration if it bit them on the butt. They
:confuse the stunts NASA has contrived to date with exploring. (Hint:
:NASA has done very, very little exploring.)

Hint: Only YOU can see the truth?

::Very few of the arctic expeditions promised any sort of economic return
::at all. Private funding doesn't have to mean profit-making ventures
:although it does help -- profitable projects can easily get up into
::the billions, while non-profit private funding tends to top out in the
::low hundreds of millions, last I heard).
:
:And that sort of private funding simply isn't available for
:'speculative' things like space exploration.
:
:The real question - why was it available for Artic and African
:exploration, but not space exploration?

What Arctic or African exploration team cost in the "low hundreds of
millions"? Given current launch costs, that amount of money won't
even get you to LEO. Given that, why would some 'non-profit' dump all
their money into a project that can't go anywhere?

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

:Fred J. McCall wrote:
:
: I remember original Shuttle promises of prices in the range of $100/lb
: to orbit. Then they started compromising.
:
:Even without compromises it wouldn't have reached $100/lb, or anywhere
:close to that. The whole idea was just junk, which is why NASA is not
:being tasked with developing a replacement.

Oh, I don't think it would have, either. That is what was being
promised, though, and it would have come a lot closer if they hadn't
knowingly opted for a design that required huge maintenance and
operating costs in order to try to keep the initial capital costs
down.

--
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
-- Charles Pinckney

"Fred J. McCall" wrote:

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

:Fred J. McCall wrote:
: I remember original Shuttle promises of prices in the range of $100/lb
: to orbit. Then they started compromising.
:
:Even without compromises it wouldn't have reached $100/lb, or anywhere
:close to that. The whole idea was just junk, which is why NASA is not
:being tasked with developing a replacement.

Oh, I don't think it would have, either. That is what was being
promised, though, and it would have come a lot closer if they hadn't
knowingly opted for a design that required huge maintenance and
operating costs in order to try to keep the initial capital costs
down.

It's highly unlikely it would have come down much even with one of the
original designs - which would have shared many of the same
maintenance and operating costs, and would have been even more more
expensive to research, develop, and build.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Derek Lyons wrote:

It's highly unlikely it would have come down much even with one of the
original designs - which would have shared many of the same
maintenance and operating costs, and would have been even more more
expensive to research, develop, and build.

What's more, if the development cost had been much higher, NASA could
not have maintained even the pretense that the shuttle would have
had a positive return on investment, even if it *had* reduced
launch costs. The required flight rate to 'earn back' the development
cost would have been too obviously beyond what future congresses
would have funded.

Paul