Dyna-Soar/Atlas-Centaur

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
Man-hours.

A fairly Marxist concept of labor, when you come right down to it, and
entirely independent of costs in a monetary sense.

Many years ago, Florida decided to tax services, including construction. The
state simply decided that 1/4 of the cost of a house was labor, and taxed
appropriately. On the other hand, because my dad pretty much stuck to one of
two models with limited changes and so could could almost make kits (less
than 10% of the lumber needed to be cut on site), his actual labor cost was
less than 17%. He almost had to go to court to get the court to stop
overcharging his customers. The state refused to believe he could sell
houses so inexpensively that they sent an inspector to see how he was
cheating. The inspector bought a house, and the tax was eventually dropped.

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...


Scott Hedrick wrote:
I'm not a skydiver (a minister once told my brother, who had expressed an
interest in being a paratrooper, that only two things fall out of the
sky- bird**** and idiots), but I suspect the spectators would enjoy a
brief shower of yellow rain from me and my buddy in that case...

You do realize that due to total mass and density versus air-drag on the
falling body, that the skydiver is going to hit the ground first,
_followed_ by the urine?

Not if I get the damned reserve chute open. And if I don't, I'm not likely
to care what hit first.

Yellow water, yellow water, is put in the can.
Seal it tightly, keep it sprightly, for the beer men once again.

Looks like someone watched Waterworld.

Let's face it- the correct answer to this subject line is: anyway you can,
as fast as you can, that won't kill you faster.

On Fri, 11 May 2007 16:31:12 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Greg D.
Moore \(Strider\)" made the phosphor
on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Rand Simberg wrote:
When you see all of the ways that the LAS can cause a bad day to a
nominal mission, I would seriously question its value on Orion.


We've never had a fatal accident to a crew caused by one, and one Soyuz
launch where it saved a crew.

The sample space is far too small to draw many conclusions from that.

Hmm. Define 'far to small'. My understanding is that statistically
anything over 100 samples is "reasonable" and we have what, about 150?

No, not for our vehicles. Only if you include the Soviets/Russians.
I interpreted Pat's "we" to mean the US. The Russians have a
different design, and I can't say what kind of failure modes it has.

Yeah, I was counting the Soviet/Russian design.

Of course actually one could argue we have over 250 samples if you include
systems without a LES. And most likely in at least one of those it would
have saved the crew.

I wasn't making a generic comment about LES. I was talking
specifically about Orion and its launcher. It's questionable whether
the LAS adds, or removes risk from the system, when it has so many
failure modes that can occur on a nominal day, and when it's been a
long time since we had a failure of a modern launcher that would have
required it. Remember, as designed, it's really only needed to get
away from a suddenly exploding launch vehicle, or for a pad abort, not
for a lack of thrust, or loss of control, which is the predominant
failure mode for launchers. It seems like an exceedingly unlikely
failure scenario for the Porklauncher.

I think that it's simply politically incorrect to not have one. No
one at NASA wants to take the slightest chance of having to explain to
Congress why we lost a crew because we once again left out an escape
system. But I'm not sure that they realize that they may have just as
great, or greater a chance of having to explain to Congress why the
(heavy and expensive, every flight) escape system killed the crew on
an otherwise nominal mission.

I wrote:
...they were in fact quite cautious with their cosmonauts. The US took
chances that the Russians would never have dreamed of, e.g. manning the
third Saturn V after multiple serious problems on the second. (Korolev's
rule was no manned flights until there were two clean, safe, successful
unmanned tests in a row.)

In fact, that third Saturn V, and the race to be the first to fly around
the Moon, is a good example of the difference in attitudes. (The race to
the lunar surface was never very close, but *this* one was neck and neck
pretty much until the final turn.)

The US, seeing the Soviet program fuzzily from a distance, concluded from
the Zond tests that a Soviet manned lunar flyby was imminent. Okay, time
to Roll The Big Dice: put a crew on the third Saturn V despite major
problems on the second, *and* put a crew in lunar orbit without an LM as
backup return propulsion. A bit risky, but oh, what a payoff in pride and
prestige if it works...

Whereas the Soviets could see that the US was contemplating rewriting the
Apollo flight sequence to beat Zond. But those Zond tests hadn't been
nearly as successful as they appeared from afar, so by the "two successful
tests" rule, a manned Zond to beat the US was out of the question. Some
of the cosmonauts favored risking it, but upper management flatly refused
to even consider it. Too risky.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

On May 11, 6:34 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:

I don't think I like that kind of redundancy. At our skydiving club,
there
once were two guys who opened their chutes too close to one another.
The chutes got tangled together. Fortunetly their reserve chutes
worked
fine.

What if you get a streamer on your main chute, and open your reserve
chute without first jettisoning the main chute, so they become entangled?
That's happened fatally more than once due to panic by skydivers.

I don't think it happens much anymore. I know it did happen a long
time
ago. But nowadays you have a single cord to pull for both jettisoning
the main and deploying the reserve. If you pull the cord only half way
the main is jettisoned but the reserve isn't deployed, I don't
recommend
doing that.


Alain Fournier

On May 11, 7:22 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:

One is left wondering what the Soviet military effort would look like
using the same 'fair' criteria for measuring it. Pretty small, I
would bet...

Man-hours.
Total man-hours used on the whole thing; right from mining up the
materials used to make the metals that build the rockets and payloads,
through man-hours spent in designing them, manufacturing them, launching
them, and supporting their missions.
A fairly Marxist concept of labor, when you come right down to it, and
entirely independent of costs in a monetary sense.
You could bias this by total population potential man-hours of work for
the two countries.
In that case, it might have come out fairly even.

I've got a friend who went to work on a water treatment plant project
in Africa a few years ago. His company had a contract for engineering
and supervision, but they were not to do any construction work, that
was to be done completely by locals. One day they told the Africans
that they had to dig a trench about 1km long and 2m deep where a
pipe was to be laid. The Africans had two mechanical diggers (I don't
know if that is the proper term in English, could someone please
tell me how those tractors with big shovels are called) so my friend
thought they would need a week or two to do the job. But the next
day the two mechanical diggers did not move an inch. On the other
hand a few hundred men came each with a spade and did the job
in two days. My friend was told that it was better to be a little less
efficient and have more men receiving a salary than to use the
mechanical diggers and have a few hundred extra men on the
unemployment roll.

Do you think that counting the man-hours of work on that water
trearment
plant would be a fair way to evaluate the cost?


Alain Fournier

Rand Simberg wrote:
It seems like an exceedingly unlikely
failure scenario for the Porklauncher.


I think the Porklauncher itself is an extremely unlikely prospect; I
doubt this thing ever gets built in any form.

Pat

Scott Hedrick wrote:

Many years ago, Florida decided to tax services, including construction. The
state simply decided that 1/4 of the cost of a house was labor, and taxed
appropriately. On the other hand, because my dad pretty much stuck to one of
two models with limited changes and so could could almost make kits (less
than 10% of the lumber needed to be cut on site), his actual labor cost was
less than 17%. He almost had to go to court to get the court to stop
overcharging his customers. The state refused to believe he could sell
houses so inexpensively that they sent an inspector to see how he was
cheating. The inspector bought a house, and the tax was eventually dropped.

H.G. Wells cameup with the "Air Dollar" in his book "The Shape of Things
to Come".
This was based on the concept of how much it cost Wings Over The World
to move one hundred pounds of cargo one hundred miles by air, IIRC.
Which sounds nifty, except when some technological advance suddenly
causes the effort to do that suddenly drop.
(Like when the turboprops arrive)
Britain once had the brilliant idea of locking the copper penny into the
actual price of copper...which works great until you hit copper ore
deposits in your empire that cause the price of copper to go clean
through the floorboards.
A copper twopence coin under George III could serve as either a
paperweight or throwing weapon.
http://www.24carat.co.uk/twopencestoryframe.html
You put a Pound's worth of those pence in your pocket, and you're going
to limp. :-D


Pat

Scott Hedrick wrote:
Looks like someone watched Waterworld.


No one ever watched Waterworld, the same way that no one ever watched
The Postman.
Even Grease II could beat those twin terrors... but there was only one
Grease, and I a compelled to send the newsgroup this Grease Valentine's
Day card, because Olivia Newton-John could say "Tell me about
it...stud..." in a more sexy way than any girl that I've ever run into:
http://www.onlyolivia.com/visual/gre...valentine.html
Me..I'm still nuts for Diana Manoff's Marty.
I want to be the man on Manoff:
http://www.celebritymoviearchive.com...movie.php/5376
Knockers city! ;-)

Pat