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Lockheed Martin To Demo Air Force Reusable Booster System
In article , bthorn64
@suddenlink.net says... On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:08:23 -0500, Jeff Findley wrote: This is a cool idea, but the chance of it seeing the light of day from our incompetent Air Force in the upcoming years of drastic budgets cuts is about nil. Apples and oranges. You're giving examples of programs which are intended to become operational, but this project is clearly R&D along the lines of X-37B. Too bad the budget for the X-37B is classified. Okay, but if they can't pull off the high-profile programs, what makes you think they'll pull off a relatively low-profile program? Different management styles by different branches for different purposes. X-37B seems to be doing quite well as an R&D program. Now, if you were arguing that the Air Force can't base an "operational" vehicle on X-37B technology, you'd have a better argument. And they picked up X-37B from NASA, so they don't even really get credit for *that*. But NASA didn't actually fly it, did they? NASA's lack of actual flying R&D programs is pathetic. The fact is that the politicians don't care. They only care about "saving jobs", which really means billions of dollars of pork for SLS. Also, DC-X was a shining example of a successful non-NASA R&D program which was done on a budget far less than NASA cost models predicted. It proved several things that nay-sayers of the time said were not possible, or would be too expensive to even try. Anyway, I hope this bucks the trend. I'm not sure I see "the trend", but I do hope this R&D program produces useful results. 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 |
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Lockheed Martin To Demo Air Force Reusable Booster System
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