what if the Shuttle had never been built?

jeff findley wrote:

Robert Kitzm=FCller writes:
I'll do a stab however: Skylab was a lot bigger than Salyut, and its=

follow-ons would propably been bigger than than Salyut too, at least=

as long as NASA had the capability to launch Saturn V (and NASA woul=
d
not reconfigure 39B in this timeline...)
=20
Congress and the administration stopped production of Saturns back in=

the 60's. The capability was there to restart production in the 70's=
,
but it was made clear to NASA that it was considered too expensive an=
d
they'd have to develop cheaper launch vehicles.

NASA had two unused Saturn V, which could have been used to launch
two successors of Skylab.

Apollo could have been launched on Titan 3, or the production line of
Saturn IB could have been kept open, or *gasp* a cheaper expendable
in this class could have been developed.

Also: The soviet leaders of the time tried to copy US hardware and
acomplishments, so I would think MIR would have been developed soone=
r
to get a station the same size as Skylab the nth.
=20
Sort of. They completely abandoned a manned lunar mission and were
the first to orbit a space station (followed by a seemingly endless
list of space station related firsts). Their space station programs
didn't copy much, if anything, from the US.

Should they have developed a heavy launcher (after N1 exploding four=20=

times...) to launch a single red-painted Skylab?
To continue with the Salyuts was more sensible.

However, they did copy the US shuttle. The difference? The US
shuttle was perceived by the Soviets to have significant military
value and therefore *had* to be copied.

I think they would have copied anything they thought achievable and of=20=

significant propaganda value.

In article ,
Robert =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Kitzm=FCller?= wrote:
Actually, the magic word here is "competition".

I do not consider "competition" likely in a program of NASA.

Neither do I, to be honest...

The USAF has done it, where it came to a vital capability, but NASA?

NASA has done it once or twice, usually as an afterthought when there
seemed to be a real chance that the originally-chosen contractor would be
unable to deliver at all. In particular, the Apollo LM Descent Engine
came from the backup contractor, who'd been added to the program because
the original contractor's throttling scheme was persistently not working
and NASA had lost confidence that the problems would be solved.

However, the idea that it *saves money* to have two suppliers rather than
one is really hard to sell to the government.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On 05 Feb 2004 13:59:41 -0500, jeff findley
wrote:

The production of Saturns stopped in the 60's (too expensive). I'm
not sure what the US would have done without the shuttle or Saturns.

Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) springs to mind, laucnhed on Titan 3s
and using Gemini capsules.

Can you launch an Apollo CSM on a Titan 3 or 4? That's another
possibilty.




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I think if the result of the shuttle not having been built would have been
the end of the manned space program. There was a lot of hostility towards
Apollo among the politically correct/new left crowd which took control of
the media and the democratic party. (Wally "plug nickel" Mondale meet Bella
"vote form I' gay and wear ugly hats" Asburg.) Nixon disliked it because it
was Kennedy's program, and NASA's leadership under Thomas O Pain considered
itself engineers who were above the nasty political game playing needed to
keep Apollo alive.

Nixon, not wanting to loose all the jobs generated by Apollo or be
remembered as the man who closed the final frontier settled on a vastly
reduced shuttle program as a republican alternative to Apollo. This
decision was made after looking at a number of alternatives including a
revived Gemini program. All of these programs were based on sound
engineering and could have done as well or better as the shuttle program.
Sadly, none of the supporters of these options were willing to engage in the
brass knuckled, take no quarter political infighting needed to win. leaving
the shuttle to become the post apollo project that would keep manned space
flight and NASA alive until the public once again warmed to space travel.

Once the shuttle got the go ahead it became target number one for the
partisan democrats who came with in one vote of canceling the shuttle (this
was after the decision to terminate Apollo had been made, leaving the US
with no manned space flight capability) Failing to kill the program
outright the not so loyal opposition waged war on the shuttle's development
budget, constantly reducing an already absurdly small development budget.
The result was a flawed shuttle A shuttle program that could not correct
those flaws, and a template for producing equally flawed results in the
development of the space station, SEI, OSP and other programs.


"Jason Donahue" wrote in message
...

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...
Jason Donahue wrote:

How would the space program have evolved? Not much, really.

Development of US expendable launchers would not have been
put on hold, so launch costs would probably be lower now --
possibly much lower, if 'Big Dumb Boosters' had been pursued
and that concept validated.


While that's certainly a possibility, I think we'd have found that these
boosters would've primarily been driving the commercial market, putting
things up like communications satellites, GPS, etc. I sincerely doubt
we'd
have seen those big space stations, lunar bases, etc. that we kept being
told about, or, for that matter, any non-military manned spaceflight, and
people would've come to accept that as the norm, eventually.

--Jason

(Henry Spencer) wrote in
:

Fixed-price contracts are not, in themselves, a solution: in past
years, aerospace contractors have shown considerable skill in finding
ways to force renegotiation of such contracts (up to, and including,
threatening to file bankruptcy papers).

Threatening to nationalize the contractor's assets would put a stop to
those kind of antics pretty quickly.

--
Coridon Henshaw - http://www3.telus.net/csbh - "I have sadly come to the
conclusion that the Bush administration will go to any lengths to deny
reality." -- Charley Reese

Coridon Henshaw ) wrote in
:

(Henry Spencer) wrote in
:

Fixed-price contracts are not, in themselves, a solution: in past
years, aerospace contractors have shown considerable skill in finding
ways to force renegotiation of such contracts (up to, and including,
threatening to file bankruptcy papers).

Threatening to nationalize the contractor's assets would put a stop to
those kind of antics pretty quickly.

You'll have a rather hard time finding companies to bid on fixed-price
contracts after that.


--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Coridon Henshaw (chenshawREMOVE wrote:
(Henry Spencer) wrote:
Fixed-price contracts are not, in themselves, a solution: in past
years, aerospace contractors have shown considerable skill in finding
ways to force renegotiation of such contracts (up to, and including,
threatening to file bankruptcy papers).

Threatening to nationalize the contractor's assets would put a stop to
those kind of antics pretty quickly.

This is not a discussion regarding the space policy
of socialist command economy space programs.
Such things are not done in the US.
If the contractor declares bankrupcy and
work stops, work stops, unless it's a
national emergency and then the system
works via normal legal and financial
systems (.


-george william herbert

Without any civilian space work, the various defense contractors would have
wooed the USAF and CIA/ NSA with all new black-budget sub-orbital and orbital
manned spaceplane programs and more sophisticated recon sats, and perhaps, most
dangerously, space weapon platforms.

MSu1049321 wrote:

Without any civilian space work, the various defense contractors would
have
wooed the USAF and CIA/ NSA with all new black-budget sub-orbital and
orbital manned spaceplane programs and more sophisticated recon sats,
and perhaps, most dangerously, space weapon platforms.

That happened anyway, as far as I can see...

(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...
In article ,
Coridon Henshaw (chenshawREMOVE wrote:
The result of this is predictable: NASA will choose a vendor, who will
*not* deliver, then demand lots of money, then still not deliver...
Private is *no* magic word.

Indeed. The magic words here are 'fixed cost contract.' Handing out cost-
plus contracts to vendors who have a proven inability to build anything on-
time or on budget is foolhardy at best to fraudulant at worst.

Actually, the magic word here is "competition".

Fixed-price contracts are not, in themselves, a solution: in past years,
aerospace contractors have shown considerable skill in finding ways to
force renegotiation of such contracts (up to, and including, threatening
to file bankruptcy papers).

Depends how novel / risky a solution you're looking for. Fixed price
is fine for 12 launches of a tested rocket over 2 years. It doesn't
work for building something completely new and untested.

(Government doesn't always understand this - you can find parts of
government wanting a fixed price on PCs for the next ten years!)

In any situation where you really need something and only one company is
building it, that company has you by the short hairs in any discussion
about price. The only fix is not to get into that situation in the first
place: insist on multiple suppliers.