Back to the Moon on what? Saturn V, Magnum, Ares launcher, Shuttle Z

jeff findley wrote in message ...

The middle class in the US is in great danger of being eroded.

Jeff

Chaos and disorder! The middle class of the United States has never
faced a greater threat than ______ (fill in the blank dependent on
time)!

80's Japanese corporations

90's Mexican labor enabled by NAFTA

00's Indian outsourcing

Yawn.
Been there, done that. Who cares? As long as the US allows relatively
open and unsubsidized markets, American middle class will continue to
create higher paying niches. Do you think General Steel would have
been able to create its internationally profitable prefab huge
building if it'd had to compete with a heavily subsidized American
Bethlehem Steel unchanged since 1930?

Tom Merkle

You're missing the point. You're only better off doing these things
with bigger rockets if the overall program costs are cheaper. The
devil is in the details. If a smaller Proton sized (or smaller)
launcher provides you with a cheaper ($ per kg to LEO) launch, you've
got to justify the additional spending on the larger launch vehicle.

Certain technologies might not readily scale down to proton-sized payloads.
Also why rely on an undemocratic country that patronizes dictators in the
Mid-East for our space program. Putin has monopolized the Russian media.
Russians are always messing up their democratic revolutions and becoming our
adversary later.

Larger nuclear reactors and propulsion systems are more efficient than smaller
ones. If you want a small launcher, why not use the Pegasus and put together
spaceships in tiny little chunks. On the otherhand larger rockets use more fuel
than smaller rockets, but smaller rockets use more engines when the lift the
same payload mass as large rockets. Engines cost more than fuel. Large rocket
engines are larger, and are made of more material, but if the material is
cheap, this doesn't say much about the actual fabrication costs of these larger
rockets. You basically need a bigger factory floor, larger launch pad, (But we
have that already). I don't thing an engine thats twices as big will
nessesarily require 8 times as many workers to build simply because its mass is
8 times that of the smaller rocket. This being the case, larger rockets are
more efficient at launching large payloads than smaller rockets are of
launching those same payloads in pieces.

Now you going to add that the current commercial launch markets aren't enough
to support Saturn V class rockets, aren't you.

This assumes that there will be a few trips to the Moon and that's it. If you
plan for the cowardly withdrawl from Space afterwords, then your right, smaller
rockets would make sense. However if you are planning ongoing lunar missions
into the indefinite future, then larger rockets make more sense.

Tom

Chaos and disorder! The middle class of the United States has never
faced a greater threat than technology (fill in the blank dependent on
time)!

Oh quite right. Technology will eventually replace all human labor. The only
income left then will be from investments, not employment as employment will
henceforth be unavailable.

Perhaps, your going to say that machines don't have souls so therefore can
replace all humans in the workforce.

Perhaps you don't feel threatened by this so long as you have a job.

No doubt about it, some people will lose their jobs to technological obsolesece
before others. The most talented will keep their jobs for a little while
longer, but their time will come too. They may look down their noses at the
less talented who can't keep their jobs while they still have theirs. But I'm
less confident about the future, the transition to human level intelligence AI
will be messy, it could free the burden of work from the entire human race, but
in the short run it will disemploy a large number of people, and it will shrink
the middle class, transfering wealth from the working class to the investor
class.

Tom

Andy Cooke wrote:

Andy Cooke wrote:
Mike Rhino wrote:

"Andy Cooke" wrote in
message
[deleted]

I've done a quick attempt to put some figures to this (and the delta v
cost for going from ISS is HUGE - I knew it was big, but until I put
some figures to it, I didn't realise just how big. I may have used the
wrong equation; it's been several years since I did anything like this -
is it: Delta v= 2*tan (theta/2)*V ? where theta is the angle of the
plane change and V is the orbital velocity of the station)

A plane change maneuver is not required to get to the Moon from ISS.
The Moon passes through the plane of ISS's orbit twice a month.

[deleted]

"jeff findley" wrote in message
...
(Henry Spencer) writes:

Management's explanation? "It's a no brainer." My interpretation,
"Management has no brains". They're ignoring all of the overhead, the
higher Indian turnover rate, the lack of experience, communication
problems, demoralization of the US workforce (our jobs are now
constantly at risk), and etc. and they wonder why they don't get 3X
the work for the same price. :-P

thing is, if the economy's headed south and you *know* there will be less
business for your firm the next few years...then you don't really care
whether you get 3X the work for the same price, because there's not 3X the
work that needs doing. You just know damn well that you can get roughly 1X
the work for 1/3 the price...

--
Terrell Miller


People do not over-react. They react, by definition, appropriately to the
meaning a situation has for them. People have "over-meanings," not
"over-reactions."
- Martin L. Kutscher

"TKalbfus" wrote in message
...

Since their are more Indians than Americans, its
likely that the smartest one of them will

....have paid a hell of a lot more attention in grammar class than Tom ever
did

--
Terrell Miller


People do not over-react. They react, by definition, appropriately to the
meaning a situation has for them. People have "over-meanings," not
"over-reactions."
- Martin L. Kutscher

"TKalbfus" wrote in message
...

I can think of a few things:

A landing transponder sent out ahead of the manned expedition for the
manned
lander to home it on. (It would save fuel that would otherwise goto
hovering
while looking for a suitable place to land.

unless the LM has trouble acquiring the transponder, or unless the unmanned
probe that sets the transponder down crashes or can't figure out that it's
put the transponder in a bad spot...

A Lunar GPS system would be nice too.

yeah, but you don't need an unmanned mission to put a GPS into lunar orbit,
you just pop out a few from teh CM as it's orbiting itself. I doubt they'd
have to be very large satellites, lunar orbit is a lot lower and smaller
curcimference than earth orbit, and you don't need as much maneuvering fuel
in 1/6 g.

--
Terrell Miller


People do not over-react. They react, by definition, appropriately to the
meaning a situation has for them. People have "over-meanings," not
"over-reactions."
- Martin L. Kutscher

In article ,
TKalbfus wrote:
A landing transponder sent out ahead of the manned expedition for the manned
lander to home it on. (It would save fuel that would otherwise goto hovering
while looking for a suitable place to land.

No Apollo landing after the first used significant amounts of fuel
hovering, or had to search around for a suitable location. Starting with
Apollo 12, they all made precision landings at preselected spots.

Apollo 11 had problems with this because they *didn't* come down where
intended -- they significantly overshot. That was a combination of the
computer problems distracting Armstrong at a time when he should have been
watching where the landing approach was going, and the navigation people
not having realized that they needed a last-minute update to allow for
mascons affecting the orbit. Both problems were corrected for the next
landing.

A Lunar GPS system would be nice too.

Nice but not really very important. As the later Apollos demonstrated,
dead-reckoning navigation (gyrocompass and odometers) with occasional
updates from landmarks works quite well.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

T Kalbfus writes:

This assumes that there will be a few trips to the Moon and that's it. If you
plan for the cowardly withdrawl from Space afterwords, then your right,
smaller
rockets would make sense. However if you are planning ongoing lunar missions
into the indefinite future, then larger rockets make more sense.


Only if you need a lot of them.

You could do some pretty useful science putting two men onto the moon for three
weeks once a year indefinitely. For that, two Saturn Vs a year is overkill, and
that's not really enough to keep the production line open.

Better to do the job with Delta IVs and Atlas Vs.

Will McLean

"Terrell Miller" wrote in
:

"TKalbfus" wrote in message
...

A Lunar GPS system would be nice too.

yeah, but you don't need an unmanned mission to put a GPS into lunar
orbit, you just pop out a few from teh CM as it's orbiting itself. I
doubt they'd have to be very large satellites, lunar orbit is a lot
lower and smaller curcimference than earth orbit, and you don't need
as much maneuvering fuel in 1/6 g.

Nope. Actually, you'd need more fuel, because the moon's gravity field is
very "lumpy" due to mass concentrations (mascons) under the moon's surface.
The mascons perturb the orbits of low-orbiting spacecraft, eventually
(within months) either ejecting them from lunar orbit or (more likely)
crashing them into the surface. The latter was the fate of both Apollo LM
ascent stages (11 and 16) left in low lunar orbit.

Low lunar orbit is therefore a bad place for a lunar GPS. As Henry said,
you really don't *need* one, but if you want one, a better place to put it
would be halo orbits around the Earth-Moon L1/L2 points.


--
JRF

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