CEV PDQ

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
Stuff and nonsense.

Been reading your own posts, then.

"Michael P. Walsh" wrote in message
news

Personally I believe the big problem with Armadillo
was attempting to their own engine development from
scratch. Something they are still doing.

It would not surprise me if their lack of high purity hydrogen peroxide,
(regulatory reasons?), cost them a year. Switching to LOX earlier might
have been another way around this.

Buying in engines would have been quicker, but excepting the unforseen
delays, not cheaper, I expect it would have also constrained them
designwise. They can make and develop the less sophisticated type of
engines they need much cheaper and faster than anyone else, including
XCor.

Personally I think they are doing it exactly right. This is the type of
integrated incremental design and build typical of serious low cost
development in other fields. The one off design mentality more typical
in this industry has very high costs and achieves very low levels of
refinement, though it is very appropriate within the fixed contract,
waste everything but time context.


Pete.

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 17 May 2005 23:13:29 GMT, in a place far, far away, Chuck
Stewart made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

On Tue, 17 May 2005 22:59:43 +0000, Alan Anderson wrote:

So we "unreasonable" folk are increasingly frustrated at your inability
to
let go of the "EVA is hard, and expensive, and rare, and undesirable

Because currently it is just that.

But not because of any laws of physics--it's because of flawed
decisions made in the past.

And *not one person* has ever said otherwise. Another handwave on your part.

What you apparently want Herb to do is speculate on the future.

No, what we want Herb to do is to recognize that there were not just
technological and physical forces driving that decision, but political
ones,

*None* of which changes the *fact* that no money is being spent on improve
EVA capabilities, so *Herb is right* when he says it's poor design to design
something that requires an EVA capability that *will not exist* because no
effort is being spent on developing it.

If you want to cross a chasm, don't blindfold yourself and start walking
towards the cliff *hoping* that someone will build a bridge. You start
walking when it looks like the bridge is almost finished.

Because you're "special", Rand, I'll explain the analogy: "walking" is a
euphemism for "designing a spaceship and/or spacestation", the "chasm" is
the spaceship/space station being designed, and the "bridge" is EVA
capability. "Building the bridge" is a euphemism for "designing improved EVA
capability".

No doubt you'll wave your hands again, instead of providing any real
research.

Pete Lynn wrote:
"Michael P. Walsh" wrote:
Personally I believe the big problem with Armadillo
was attempting to their own engine development from
scratch. Something they are still doing.

It would not surprise me if their lack of high purity hydrogen peroxide,
(regulatory reasons?), cost them a year. Switching to LOX earlier might
have been another way around this.

If they had a sufficient supplier of high concentration peroxide,
their monoprop engine work was plenty successful and would have
gotten them to X-prize performance regimes.

The supply failure was due to one vendor exiting the business
and then the big one (FMC) refusing to sell to Armadillo,
as I understand it, not due to legal / regulatory ones.

The regulatory issues are unrelated to that.


-george william herbert
/

Michael P. Walsh wrote:
Rand committed:
Armadillo was nowhere near flying any kind of manned vehicle by
the time Scaled Composites won the X-Prize and had just suffered
a failure that resulted in much lost time.

Partly because they'd backed off on their rush to do so, because they
knew that they wouldn't be able to get a site license for their
vehicle.

This is not backed up by anything I read on the Armadillo
web site. Do you have a source for your claim, perhaps
something I missed on the Armadillo test site?

John has said stuff at Space Access conference presentations,
private conversations, and in email lists and such which has
more info on some topics than is on the website.

I'm not sure how much of what details are ok for general public
consumption, but Rand's summary is completely in line with all
of what I recall having heard directly from John Carmack.
The licensing issues with White Sands were the proximate cause
of them giving up on the prize chase.


-george william herbert

Scott Hedrick wrote:
"Rand Simberg" committed:
What evidence is there that Allen
would have invested absent the prize?

What evidence do you have that the prize was the sole or even primary
reason
for Allen's investment, considering that even the estimates were that
the
attempt would (and did) cost more than the prize?

Statements by Rutan and Allen. They wanted the prestige of the prize,
which was largely the point.

Then why do you keep going on about money?

??

Because the money wouldn't have appeared without the prize, and
without the money, the vehicle wouldn't have been developed.

Except that *the prize money wasn't spent* on development, so the money came
from somewhere *before* the prize money was awarded.

Someone decided to spend money *before* receiving a prize, and the amount
they spent was a multiple of the prize. So the money was available all
along, *without* a prize.

No; what we're saying is that the combination of the prize money
and prize prestige causes people to be willing to spend money
up to several times the actual prize value in order to win it.

This has consistently been true in aviation and now the X-prize
prize competitions. People will attempt projects that would
not get funded absent the prize, even if the prize will not
pay back the whole project costs.


-george william herbert
/

Herb Schaltegger wrote:
Rand committed:
No, that's not the subject. That's the strawman that opponents of
orbital assembly have proclaimed the subject. The subject is whether
or not it's better to develop the techologies to make EVA routine, and
then use it to save money in development costs for systems that can be
assembled using minimal or zero EVA, or whether we should simply
assume that EVA will always be hard and use that as a design
assumption now and forever.

Bull****. Bull****. And still more bull****.

The subject was exactly what it was: a comment by me to Reed
Snellenberger vis a vis EVA assembly for a present-day design CEV
architecture.

Herb, the subject has evolved considerably,
and part of the ongoing argument now is over
what the discussion is actually about.

You and the rest of the ass-in-the-clouds dreamers seem incapable of
grasping that certain things cannot be done now and planning for them
to somehow happen in this context is absurd.

I have spent more than my fair share of time tangled up
in EVA hardware myself, though I can't claim any flight
program direct experience.

I am dissapointed by how this argument has driven you
to the extremist position "cannot be done now".

EVA is really hard, granted.

Orbital assembly for deep space spacecraft is not proven,
but is not necessarily, as a complete problem, as hard as EVA is.


-george william herbert
/

Scott Hedrick wrote:
How does the promise of money offered as a prize for completion of a task
mean that actual money is being allocated to accomplish that task?

It is a reasonable and demonstrable historical observation
that the promise offered by a prize has repeatedly and
consistently generated sources of funding for actual
money of projects to win the prize.


-george william herbert
/

Rand Simberg wrote:
Yep. The problem is there's no money being allocated for improved EVA
capabilities right now

Not true. I think that one of the Millenium Challenge prizes is the
development of a vastly improved high-pressure glove.

As a point of information, as I recall it's on the list
of things that that Brant Sponberg has stated he wants
the prizes project to do, and was on the list of
things that the advisory conference came up with,
but hasn't moved from theoretical to actualized
prize yet.

Only the two prizes for tether related stuff,
which NASA subcontracted to Spaceward to run,
are in play at this time, as I understand it.



-george william herbert
/

Rand Simberg wrote:
Tell that to Burt Rutan.

Tell Burt to get back to us when he's designing an orbital-capable
spacecraft with planned vacuum/micro-g EVA assembly, which is the
topic
you keep evading, Mr. Strawman.

Actually, I'd be surprised if he isn't at least working on the former.
I know of some working on the latter.

Name them, and provide verifiable references.

Why?

To support your claims, of course.

Oh, I just realized that you were perhaps referring to the second part
of the statement. I'll let him speak for himself, but I was under the
impression that George Herbert has an interest in that subject. I
can't mention others due to confidentiality, but George has discussed
this here in the past.

Venturer Aerospace is working on orbital manned spacecraft,
but micro-G EVA assembly is not on our short term requirements list.
We're designing and getting ready to build test components for
a manned orbital capsule, which is either free flying or
a transfer vehicle to/from a station or another vehicle.

I expect that once we are in business doing orbital operations
we are going to want to develop micro-G EVA capability.
But that's a long ways away right now.

Several previous Retro Aerospace projects have involved
EVA at some point in the cycle, but none of them is
moving forwards actively right now.


-george william herbert
/