Moon and Mars expeditions vs. RLV development

"Ool" wrote in message
...
"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message
...
"Ool" wrote in message
...

Think of Hubble! Was in worth using the Shuttle to repair the thing?
Maybe... But should the Shuttle have been the only means available
for shooting it up into orbit in the first place? Definitely not! If
a rocket existed that could launch something of Hubble-size into orbit
we could launch five space observatories for the price of one!

Sorry, but we did have something capable of launching it (at least
mass-wise, vibration was another matter).

Like what? (Okay, eleven tons is feasible. I think the current EELV
limit is around twenty tons. Depends on how much fuel you need for
the final destination, I suppose...)


Look up Titan IV and look up the types of payloads it launched (hint,
similar in shape and function to the Hubble, but pointing the other way.)



That launcher cost MORE than the shuttle.

How so, with all that dead weight you have to lift along with it in
the form of the Shuttle? What was it that made the Shuttle cheaper?

Bureaucracy. You're focusing on the wrong metrics. Dead weight to orbit
ultimately isn't a great metric.

Take a look at Sea Dragon. HUGE rocket, very heavy, ideally very cheap to
build and launch.



Are there any details available on those cost estimates?

www.google.com





--
__ "A good leader knows when it's best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture." '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiii :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

On 22 Jan 2004 04:41:46 -0800, in a place far, far away,
(Tom Merkle) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

(Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..

But there's no experience (yet) of an economical RLV. In the absence
of proof either way, the only rational thing is to leave the answer up
to the free market.

Which is difficult to do when the "experts" at NASA claim that it's
not possible.

You sure are easy to discourage.

I'm not the one who's discouraged. The investors are.

Luckily, the average tech investor is not quite so chicken****.

It has nothing to do with being chicken****. It has to do with being
unknowledgable about space technology.

You're fighting the war after the Berlin wall
came down.

The wall doesn't come down until O'Keefe and NASA center directors
stop saying that we don't have the technology for reusable vehicles.
This continues to happen.

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 07:15:31 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Gary W. Swearingen) made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

(Rand Simberg) writes:

Regardless, the difference is qualitative, not quantitative.

Oh, come on; give it up. You were wrong and Michael was correct.

I continue to disagree.

Sure the difference is qualitative, but it is also (even more) clearly
quantitative: namely, the Mach number quantity is different.

Which is irrelevant.

But I don't know why the subject was even raised as the Sonic Cruiser
was to be subsonic. If you'd have just said that it's hard to design
a plane to fly cheaply near Mach 1, you probably wouldn't have got any
disagreement.

That's not the point. The poster claimed that Sonic Cruiser was a
step toward supersonic flight. It is not.

Tom Merkle wrote:

h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:21:30 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Terrell
Miller" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

it's irresponsible to finally admit that RLVs aren't economical?

Yes, based on very little data, other than that a bloated government
agency with very little interest in making them happen failed a
program to build them.

So the solution is to force the government to make yet another attempt
at developing an affordable RLV? (In case you haven't been paying
attention, that's what the original poster was suggesting.) True, the
experience of shuttle may not prove that RLVs have to be uneconomical.

The Shuttle is not an RLV, so it's hard to see how it could. Throwing
away a $60 million External Tank on every flight is not how to build an
RLV, and it certainly cannot lead to low costs, so the Shuttle proves
nothing.

But there's no experience (yet) of an economical RLV. In the absence
of proof either way, the only rational thing is to leave the answer up
to the free market.

Building a true RLV of significant size is going to require billions of
dollars, and it will require a much larger market than any that now
exist to provide a return on an investment of that magnitude. Much
larger markets require much lower costs, and until there is a
demonstration that an RLV will achieve much lower costs, I don't expect
to see much interest from traditional capital sources. Depending on
"divine intervention" (an angel) may or may not work, but the
experiences of the past 25 years don't leave me with much confidence.

This is exactly the Bush plan, by keeping government money as far away
from 'developing RLVs' as possible, and focusing on getting max return
for government money WRT government goals (i.e. developing a
sustainable space infastructure at the cheapest possible cost.) This
even goes so far as to suggest using Soyuz in the interim, a bigger
step than most American space buffs thought any administration would
take. We'll see if Congress follows through.

I haven't seen enough details to know if that's Bush's plan or not.
Nothing I've seen so far would rule out the CEV and/or it's launcher
being reusable.

Tom Merkle

"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message ...
"Ool" wrote in message
...
"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message
...
"Ool" wrote in message
...

That launcher cost MORE than the shuttle.

How so, with all that dead weight you have to lift along with it in
the form of the Shuttle? What was it that made the Shuttle cheaper?

Bureaucracy. You're focusing on the wrong metrics. Dead weight to orbit
ultimately isn't a great metric.

It is if fuel is expensive. But that's not the American Way of think-
ing, is it?


Was it because the Shuttle was there and maintenance, infrastructure,
and the standing crew would have cost billions anyway, whether the
Shuttle launched something or stayed on the ground? Is that the rea-
son why it could compete in price? That's the only way I can imagine
it happening...

Because if that is the case then getting rid of the thing is still the
best choice they can make right now. And not building a new one until
there's a *lot* of stuff in space worth launching towards...


They really did it all wrong--building a shuttle with nothing to shut-
tle to, and then not being able to build anything to shuttle to be-
cause the shuttle cost them too much.

Well, I might have made the same mistakes if I had been them, bright-
eyed, naive nerd with a cool-hardware fetish that I used to be--even
more so in my youth...

I hope this time around they can get it right. And then, when they
have something worth going to they can think of devising something
*really* reusable, if at all...



--
__ “A good leader knows when it’s best to ignore the __
('__` screams for help and focus on the bigger picture.� '__`)
//6(6; ©OOL mmiv :^)^\\
`\_-/ http://home.t-online.de/home/ulrich....lmann/redbaron \-_/'

h (Rand Simberg) writes:

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 07:15:31 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Gary W. Swearingen) made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:
[...]

But I don't know why the subject was even raised as the Sonic Cruiser
was to be subsonic. If you'd have just said that it's hard to design
a plane to fly cheaply near Mach 1, you probably wouldn't have got any
disagreement.

That's not the point. The poster claimed that Sonic Cruiser was a
step toward supersonic flight. It is not.

Nobody said that (though it certainly is that, in the same way that
my step toward the door is a step towards the porch on the other
side).

Let's review. First, "vthokie" said:

I would have at least liked to see Boeing follow through with its
"Sonic Cruiser" concept. It would have been a small step in the
right direction. If Cessna can design the Citation X business jet
to fly at Mach 0.95 economically, surely the technology exists to
design a commercial airliner that can do the same!

See anything there about supersonic flight? I don't.

Then you quoted his first two sentences and changed the subject:

Not really. There's a qualitative difference between subsonic and
supersonic, not a quantitative one.

Michael then jumped on the preposterous claim at the end of that.
After some bickering, you changed the subject again (above) by
mis-paraphrasing the OP.


The difference between subsonic and supersonic is a quantitiative
one almost by definition, and if you can't see that, we probably
can't help you. But I'll try:

Supersonic Mach number - Subsonic Mach number 0.0

That's the quantitative difference people mean when they talk about
the difference between subsonic and supersonic. (Don't tell me nobody
mentioned Mach number, because nobody mentioned the things that make
for a quantitative difference, either. We'd be left with only
typographical differences.)

Something is quantitative if it can be measured. Look it up. And
the differeence between subsonic and supersonic is something that can
be measured.

If you still disagree, be good enough to provide us with some examples
of some quantitative differences. If you think only numbers can be
quantitative, you ought to consult a dictionary.

(vthokie) wrote in message . com...
Rather than developing a new Apollo-style capsule to be launched on an
expendable rocket, I think the United States should develop a fully
reusable human-rated launch system that will significantly lower the
cost and risk associated with spaceflight. Anything else seems
fiscally irresponsible. Perhaps the goals stated during the ill-fated
X-33/VentureStar program were overly ambitious (reducing launch costs
by a factor of 10), but it seems to me that we should certainly be
able to do better than what's currently being proposed.

It'd be great if NASA could develop a low cost
RLV. But the simple, sad fact is that they
*cannot* do it and very likely cannot be *made*
to do it. If directed to do it they would more
than likely both fail and hobble commercial
development in that area. It's very difficult
to compete profitably with an organization
which does not need to make a profit. It is
similarly difficult to obtain funding from
investors expecting a decent rate of return
when there is little hope of profit due to said
destructive competition. NASA has, to date,
tried to reinvent orbital launch with *several*
times, spending anywhere from a mere billion to
tens of billions of dollars at each try. And
always it has failed. X-33 is only the most
recent failure. The most dramatic is perhaps
the Shuttle itself, which was supposed to be
somewhere between ten to a hundred times cheaper
than it turned out to be (i.e. one of the most
expensive launch vehicles ever made).

Directing NASA's activities *away* from launch
vehicle development is a very, very good thing.
It's a feature, not a bug.

Dick Morris wrote:

The Shuttle is not an RLV, so it's hard to see how it could. Throwing
away a $60 million External Tank on every flight is not how to build an
RLV, and it certainly cannot lead to low costs, so the Shuttle proves
nothing.

Even if the ETs were free, the shuttle launches would not be significantly
cheaper. The cost is from the standing army of workers and low flight rate,
which ultimately comes back to complexity and tight engineering margins.

Paul

"Christopher M. Jones" wrote:

(vthokie) wrote in message . com...
Rather than developing a new Apollo-style capsule to be launched on an
expendable rocket, I think the United States should develop a fully
reusable human-rated launch system that will significantly lower the
cost and risk associated with spaceflight. Anything else seems
fiscally irresponsible. Perhaps the goals stated during the ill-fated
X-33/VentureStar program were overly ambitious (reducing launch costs
by a factor of 10), but it seems to me that we should certainly be
able to do better than what's currently being proposed.

It'd be great if NASA could develop a low cost
RLV. But the simple, sad fact is that they
*cannot* do it and very likely cannot be *made*
to do it.

NASA *can* develop an RLV if Congress tells them to. But only the
private sector can turn it into a *low* cost RLV. That requires
developing some substantial markets, which NASA cannot do.

If directed to do it they would more
than likely both fail and hobble commercial
development in that area. It's very difficult
to compete profitably with an organization
which does not need to make a profit. It is
similarly difficult to obtain funding from
investors expecting a decent rate of return
when there is little hope of profit due to said
destructive competition. NASA has, to date,
tried to reinvent orbital launch *several*
times, spending anywhere from a mere billion to
tens of billions of dollars at each try. And
always it has failed. X-33 is only the most
recent failure. The most dramatic is perhaps
the Shuttle itself, which was supposed to be
somewhere between ten to a hundred times cheaper
than it turned out to be (i.e. one of the most
expensive launch vehicles ever made).

The Shuttle failed to become a low cost RLV because it was turned into a
Partly Expendable LV. NASP and X-33 failed to become low cost RLV's
because the single-stage designs turned out to be beyond the state of
the art. Those blunders are easily correctable, if we chose to correct
them instead of just giving up.

Directing NASA's activities *away* from launch
vehicle development is a very, very good thing.
It's a feature, not a bug.

The private sector hasn't done much better.

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:16:51 +0100, in a place far, far away, "Ool"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message ...
"Ool" wrote in message
...
"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message
...
"Ool" wrote in message
...

That launcher cost MORE than the shuttle.

How so, with all that dead weight you have to lift along with it in
the form of the Shuttle? What was it that made the Shuttle cheaper?

Bureaucracy. You're focusing on the wrong metrics. Dead weight to orbit
ultimately isn't a great metric.

It is if fuel is expensive.

It's not.