Shuttle lift-off footage

"David Spain" wrote in message
...

On Friday, July 25, 2014 10:20:32 AM UTC-4, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

I don't want them to build SLS.



I agree but, the money's been already spent. Shutting SLS down (still a
good thing IMHO) will only prevent throwing good money after bad. But the
bad money, money that could have been used for much more productive uses,
is gone.

Oh granted, can't get BACK that money, but let's stop throwing more down
that rat-hole.


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

"JF Mezei" wrote in message
web.com...

On 14-07-24 13:27, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

If Southwest can get an extra flight out of a 737 a day, they don't look
at
the total cost of the 737, just the incremental costs of the additional
fuel, crew costs, ramp costs, etc.

Southwest pays fixed monthy leasing (or bank loan) costs per aircraft.
Those costs don't vary depending on how much you use aircraft.
Increasting aircraft utilisation efficiency means an aircraft can have
more revenue generating flighst per day which is good. And when
increased efficiency allows you to lease one fewer aircraft to carry the
same number of passengers, then you save a whole bunch of money.


Exactly.


Boeing looks at aircraft devel;opment cost spread over the first X units
(the payback before aircraft becomes profitable). Once aircraft is sold,
they don't care how much the aircraft is used. Boeing gets the same
money if aircraft flies or stays parked at airport.


In the case of the Shuttle, it is different because NASA paid for the
development of the Shuttle, spreads those on number of flights flown.
So the accounting philosophy is quite different.

Actually no, it doesn't. The money spent on development in 1976 didn't get
added to the cost of the flights in 1996.

This is part of the problem with the "cost" of shuttle flights. You can
make it pretty much what you want depending on how you count it.


NASA should have gone out and stated that the Shuttle development costs
would have been paid for with first 100 flights (or whatever number) and
after that, no longer factor development costs for each additional flights.


Except that's not how it works. Again, the costs spent in past years don't
impact NASA at all. If anything, this is to NASA's advantage.
Where as Southwest may spread the cost of acquiring a 737 over a decade,
including interest, NASA only paid for the years it was built in. They
don't care about interest at all. That's Congress's problem.

Another big difference is that for Boeing, major updates to the 737
resulted in a new model, and only new aircraft got to pay back these
development costs. the 737-200s were not retrofitted and the accounting
for profit of 737-200 did not factor the R&D to develop subsequent models.


That's actually not quite true. Southwest has retrofitted some features
(such as winglets) on some of their older craft.

For NASA, they spent money upgrading existing vehicles intead of
building new ones with improvements. So it makes it harder to have a
clean separation for accounting.

In Hindsight, it is possible to look at all the money Congress sent to
NASA for R&D, building, maintaining, upgrading and operating the shuttle
over the lifetime of the project and derive a per/flight cost.

It's possible, but not necessarily meaningful.
BTW, you're focusing on R&D. This is pretty easy to ignore actually (for the
reasons given above, basically once spent, you can't spend it in the future,
or split it into future flights that may or may not happen).

The real issue was fixed costs. You needed to pay a fixed crew of people
regardless of the number of flights (0 or 10).

This is more like building Kennedy Airport and simply flying 6 747 flights a
year to Europe.



But at the time the Shuttle was being built, there were no
metrics/experience to know how much the Shuttle would end up costing on
a per flight basis.

No, but the folks in the know, knew they weren't going to fly 52 flights a
year in any scenario.


In contrast, companies like Boeiong/Airbus have very good grasp on
costing of aircraft that is to be delelopped since they have to pitch
the increased fuel efficiecy, reduce aircraft weight etc to potential
launch customers ahead of first flight. This is possible because
Boeing/Airbus have a good grasp of what aircraft development costs are
(but still underestimate problems, as was case with A380 and 787)



Yes, and this is the mistake NASA made. While they often compared the
shuttle to the DC-3, it was more like leaping from say a DC-1 to a 707 with
nothing in between.









Ultimately, this goes to Musk's (and others) business plan: You have to
fly
often.

While this helps, you also have to look to have reasonable initial
development costs.

In the case of disposable aicraft, because you need to build new units
for each flight, there is less of an advantage per flight. (but an
advantage nevertheless).

For the Shuttle, prior to going into operation, it was very hard to know
what the maintenance/turn around costs would really be. A vehicle such
as that had never been built before.

Yes and no. Again, the folks in the know already knew the presented numbers
were bogus.


Ideally, 1 prototype built, run it for a few years, then update designs
to incorporate improvements, build another one, and do so every 5 years.
(retiring oldest vehicles once your fleet is large enough).

Unfortunately, this isn't the way NASA or Congress works.


The problem is an industrial one: you can't build an assembly line with
all the tooling and only use it once every 5 years.

Perhaps the industrial model should have been to assemble the shuttles
on-site in a special maintenance bay at KSC. NASA could then afford to
keep the tooling and rigs in usable condition to build new orbiters at a
very low rate.


Imagine if NASA had made improvement to Shuttle that were far more
significant than the ones they were able to make over the years. They
may have been able to lower the costs of running the shuttle enough to
make the program more attractive.

(for political purposes, perhaps 1 new orbiter every 4 years, with NASA
showing a "new and improved" model everuy 4 years to show the progress.

The problem with this (and NASA was offered this after Endeavour) is you now
have a fleet of 4 different vehicles, which gets costly.






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

In article om,
says...

On 14-07-27 22:22, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

The problem with this (and NASA was offered this after Endeavour) is you now
have a fleet of 4 different vehicles, which gets costly.



However, in a realistic scenario where the vehicle is still in
development (as opposed to decloaring the beta "Shuttle" in production),
you want to evolve the vehicle until you get something you are generally
happy with.

If Shuttle #4 has significant improvements over Shuttle #1 which result
in Shuttle #4 costing far less to operate, it may compensate for the
added costs of not having commonality within all 4 vehicles.

Not evolving the shuttle and building them all the same is fine of paper
when you have a vehicle ready for production. But doesn't work well for
a vehicle that is still in development.

Consider airraft, the roughly 5 prototypes built for the test flights
have significant differences in them, and as the test flights progress,
they are retrofitted with improvements, and once they are happy with the
design, they can then build production aircraft with all the
enhancements they learned from during the test phase.

Shiuttle should have worked the same way.

Columbia was essentially the orbital prototype, which is why its
structure massed more than later orbiters. The big visible differences
between it and later orbiters were the "scars" for ejection seats, the
"pod" on top of the vertical stabilizer (contained cameras for test
flights), and some TPS differences.

Also, for quite some time, Columbia also contained lots of extra wiring
which was used on the initial flights to collect data. Later orbiters
lacked that as well.

When Challenger was lost, there was a proposal to build two new orbiters
with updated structures and other systems. NASA turned the proposal
down for the reasons Greg mentions.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer