Could Dragon have been built 20 years sooner?

In article ,
Robert Clark wrote:
On May 25, 3:33=A0pm, bob haller wrote:
was the breakthru just a awesome idea? or breakthus in materials
engines etc that made it possible?

Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

They're made out of high-end aluminium-lithium alloys of a kind not
developed until the nineties, assembled using friction stir welding
(because they're otherwise unweldable), a technology which wasn't
invented until 1992.

Tom

In article ,
Jeff Findley wrote:

In the 70's, you'd have been crazy to try. NASA's planned "commercial"
flights on the space shuttle meant an end to competition for launch
services in the US. As proof, one only has to look at how the US
subsidized those "commercial" launches. You'd have to be a bit crazy to
want to directly compete with the US government.

So, you're saying this wasn't realistic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1

--
Chris Mack "If we show any weakness, the monsters will get cocky!"
'Invid Fan' - 'Yokai Monsters Along With Ghosts'

In article ,
says...

In article ,
Robert Clark wrote:
On May 25, 3:33=A0pm, bob haller wrote:
was the breakthru just a awesome idea? or breakthus in materials
engines etc that made it possible?

Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

They're made out of high-end aluminium-lithium alloys of a kind not
developed until the nineties, assembled using friction stir welding
(because they're otherwise unweldable), a technology which wasn't
invented until 1992.

In the 70's, you'd use an existing aluminum alloy and existing
manufacturing techniques. Certainly Al-Li is better, but not so much so
that it's an enabling technology.

Jeff
--
" Ares 1 is a prime example of the fact that NASA just can't get it
up anymore... and when they can, it doesn't stay up long. "
- tinker

On Tue, 29 May 2012 08:52:43 -0400, Jeff Findley
wrote:


In the 70's, you'd have been crazy to try. NASA's planned "commercial"
flights on the space shuttle meant an end to competition for launch
services in the US.

There was no competition for launch services before Shuttle, either.
There was Scout for small payloads, Delta for medium payloads, and
Atlas-Centaur for the largest commercial payloads.

Strangely enough, it was the Shuttle that gave the commercial
operators the opportunity they needed. Before Shuttle's promise of
low-cost launches, the commercial market was much too thin to support
an independent commercial launch service by itself, and there was
absolutely no chance the military or NASA/NOAA would use them. (The
military *still* has no interest in SpaceX's Falcon 9, and Congress
absolutely hates the loss of pork SpaceX represents for NASA
launches.) If you were Intelsat in 1973, who would you believe would
offer the best route to lowering launch costs... NASA, which had just
gone from zero to man on the moon in less than a decade, or some rich
guy promising he could do it cheaper and faster with zero aerospace
experience? Clearly, NASA was by far the safer bet and a commercial
upstart in the 1970s was an extremely tough sell.

Shuttle initiated a massive upswing in commercial payloads requiring
rides to orbit, and that created its own little competition between
two pseudo-commercial, heavily-subsidized launch services... Shuttle
and Ariane. A true commercial operator like SpaceX had no chance
against Shuttle and Ariane. But once Shuttle was out of the picture
post-1986, the commercial startups stopped being snicker-worthy.
Ariane exploded in popularity, and a true commercial competitor was at
least feasible. Companies like Space Services tried and failed in this
period with Conestoga (largely because Conestoga was an absolutely
awful rocket design.) Could a company with deeper pockets like SpaceX
have succeeded? Probably, but they'd have faced stiff competition from
Delta II, which was amazingly cost-competitive when purchased in bulk,
which DoD did for GPS/Navstar and NASA piggy-backed on for most of the
1990s. Lockheed tried and failed with LLV/Athena. Beal was as full of
bluster as SpaceX would be a decade later, but quietly faded away.
There just wasn't room for a commercial upstart in the 1990s.

SpaceX actually arrived at the perfect moment: Shuttle was given an
end-date due to the loss of Columbia, Delta II was on its way out due
to the completion of the GPS constellation and the too-heavy-for-it
successor constellation, and the two EELVs had proven a commercial
market failure through DoD idiocy and poor decisions by Lockheed
(Russian engine) and Boeing (stolen Lockheed data). The time was
right, and SpaceX filled the void.

Today, they announced Falcon-Heavy has its first customer: Intelsat.

Brian

On May 25, 12:33*pm, bob haller wrote:
was the breakthru just a awesome idea? or breakthus in materials
engines etc that made it possible?

It could have been done 40 years ago, though somewhat problematic and
certainly not as anything man rated.

http://groups.google.com/groups/search
http://translate.google.com/#
Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG, Guth Usenet/Guth Venus

Jeff Findley scribbled something on Tuesday the 5/29/2012:
In article ,
says...

In article
, Robert
Clark wrote:
On May 25, 3:33=A0pm, bob haller wrote:
was the breakthru just a awesome idea? or breakthus in materials
engines etc that made it possible?

Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

They're made out of high-end aluminium-lithium alloys of a kind not
developed until the nineties, assembled using friction stir welding
(because they're otherwise unweldable), a technology which wasn't
invented until 1992.

In the 70's, you'd use an existing aluminum alloy and existing
manufacturing techniques. Certainly Al-Li is better, but not so much so
that it's an enabling technology.

Well, that's just one of a *number* of small advances that contribute
to the technology, but I bet the real enabler is more like the
workstation sitting on your desk.

/dps

--
Who, me? And what lacuna?

On May 29, 8:39*am, Robert Clark wrote:
On May 25, 3:33*pm, bob haller wrote:

was the breakthru just a awesome idea? or breakthus in materials
engines etc that made it possible?

*Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

* *Bob Clark

That's not the relevant question. The *actual* question is that of
whether and how regulations concerning airflight and the passage
through airspace suborbital and orbital flight could have been passed
20 years ago. The actions on extending the FAA authority in the US
were only starting up in the late 1990's, as far as I'm aware. The
first suborbital licenses were granted some time in the early 2000's
or maybe late 1990's. The whole private industry was starting to take
off alongside this starting in the 1990's (e.g. that famous rotor
rocket c. 1999) and it's been going on unabated since. It's already
getting on 20 years ago now.

In article mn.f3b77dc5fbeb7f54.127094@snitoo,
says...

Jeff Findley scribbled something on Tuesday the 5/29/2012:
In article ,
says...

In article
, Robert
Clark wrote:
On May 25, 3:33=A0pm, bob haller wrote:
was the breakthru just a awesome idea? or breakthus in materials
engines etc that made it possible?

Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

They're made out of high-end aluminium-lithium alloys of a kind not
developed until the nineties, assembled using friction stir welding
(because they're otherwise unweldable), a technology which wasn't
invented until 1992.

In the 70's, you'd use an existing aluminum alloy and existing
manufacturing techniques. Certainly Al-Li is better, but not so much so
that it's an enabling technology.

Well, that's just one of a *number* of small advances that contribute
to the technology, but I bet the real enabler is more like the
workstation sitting on your desk.

It can be an enabler, in the right hands, with the right inputs. I
write CAE code for a living (been doing it for more than 20 years), so I
know what I'm talking about when I say that any engineering software is
only as good as the (user) inputs. As we've said for decades in the my
industry, "Garbage in, garbage out".

Of course there is no real substitute for building and testing hardware.
Most importantly, IMHO, test data is critical as input to your CAE
program for your next design iteration. Without building and testing
hardware (which includes instrumenting the test hardware), all of the
simulations in the world don't help much, because you'll never know for
sure how closely they model reality.

SpaceX did *a lot* of real world testing during the development of the
Merlin engine. It was a critical part of the success of their engine
development program (again, IMHO).

Jeff
--
" Ares 1 is a prime example of the fact that NASA just can't get it
up anymore... and when they can, it doesn't stay up long. "
- tinker

*Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

* *Bob Clark


I have sked that question some time ago yet I am still yearning for
your opinions: Do you believe that Falcon Heavy will be as potent and
as cheap to make a breakthrough? And what about other claims of Mr.
Musk ,especially concerning Mars Landing using Dragon
spacecrafts.....Are they reliable?

On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 05:20:15 -0700 (PDT), trident
wrote:



*Yes, the Falcon 9 and Dragon could have been built even 30 years ago.
There is nothing particularly innovative about their engines or
stages. They both use methods known about since the 1970's.

* *Bob Clark


I have sked that question some time ago yet I am still yearning for
your opinions: Do you believe that Falcon Heavy will be as potent and
as cheap to make a breakthrough? And what about other claims of Mr.
Musk ,especially concerning Mars Landing using Dragon
spacecrafts.....Are they reliable?

I could well have been built 30 years later, or not at all,
nobody would miss it.

w.